Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Yannis's Law


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. The fundamental problem here is the lack of reliable sources. There are some reasonable arguments made for moving this to Yannis Smaragdakis and expanding it, but there's no consensus to do so. If anybody would like to work on that, ping me and I'll be happy to undelete and userfy the current article for you, so the edit history gets preserved. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:03, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Yannis's Law

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has only one primary source and a mention in a blog article ( therefore it is not academically acknowledge law) Avono♂ (talk) 13:54, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep. I've tried to understand how much this half-serious statement is known or cited among programmers and within fields related to project management and productivity. Doing a quick search I've found that, over many years, a few web pages have cited this "law" . Most of these posts are written by people working in the software development field, one citation/critic is by a professor. The authors of these articles comment or criticize this "law" and maybe there is enough material to expand the Wikipedia article. Overall, the statement is far from being popular as Murphy's law but the fact that it is still cited today, more than ten years after it was proposed, makes be believe that it was interesting enough to resist the passage of time. It seems to me that it is known within a small niche of professionals. LowLevel73(talk) 19:26, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions.  Jinkinson   talk to me  14:25, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Greece-related deletion discussions.  Jinkinson   talk to me  14:25, 2 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete - article is sourced only from the primary source which provides the only citation. Self published. --Star Log, Lfrankblam, Kirk Out (talk) 22:09, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete. The article itself does nothing to demonstrate notability. has made a good effort to help ferret out evidence of notability; I found nothing of greater import. However, the specified sources are blogs or single person web pages; such sites do not provide evidence of notability. --Larry/Traveling_Man (talk) 17:54, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  → Call me  Hahc  21  20:17, 9 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete - all of the references cited are self-published or are otherwise unreliable sources. Bearian (talk) 16:07, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Weak Keep- There is precedent for this sort of thing: Brooks's Law is something similar - also self-published, but more fully expressed in the publication of a book. I'm erring on delete in its current form, but the work that LowLevel73 has done shows it has been important enough to create debate among some software developers.Mediavalia (talk) 12:28, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Repurpose to an article on the inventor of the law. It seems he has done a substantial body of work, and it would make more sense to have the article on him.  DGG ( talk ) 04:32, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete OK. I had a go at this and followed all of LowLevel73's links to see if I could get something more meaningful, but on reflection, I think it should be deleted as it's just a hypothesis that he never himself tested and that one other programmer has shown to be orders of magnitude out. The 'doubling' element of the so-called law is therefore irrelevant. He's obviously published some stuff over quite wide areas in computing, but nothing that informs the so-called law any further. Thoughts? Mediavalia (talk) 13:53, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment - I've found many other pages that cite the "law", but it's more of the same stuff They are mainly blog posts or Reddit threads. This statement never became popular among the educational/academic field (see here) but it is sometimes cited and discussed by computer scientists and software developers. Usually it is cited in a humorous way or to mock its creator. Searching for citations, I've found also an interesting (for me) blog post that lists other non-serious programming "laws", but in full honesty I can't say that this statement matches very well the Wikipedia definition of "notable", so consider my "Weak keep" a "very weak keep". Writing an article about its creator could be interesting, I'll check whether he passes the notability test for academics. ► LowLevel (talk) 17:46, 17 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Refactor to Yannis Smaragdakis per DGG. Smaragdakis meets WP:PROF based on h-index (est. 31), and I will volunteer to "make it so", including fleshing out at least a partial bibliography and academic history, with a redirect from this title to the biography, if a consensus so permits. I could write something from scratch, but formally doing it from this would preserve article history. --j⚛e deckertalk 18:01, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment - I've worked in the IT industry for 16 years and I've never heard of the so-called law or its author. It does smack a bit of inherited notability by association to Moore's Law that everyone knows about. It is not a law, it's a hypothesis and one which the originator did not even test, so it's irrelevant. I still say delete.Mediavalia (talk) 10:35, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.