Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zoo (file format)


 * 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   keep. Tone 14:45, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Zoo (file format)

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Delete. This is just an obscure compression format which has never received non-trivial coverage from reliable third parties and probably never will. 'Til then... JBsupreme (talk) 07:46, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions.   -- • Gene93k (talk) 11:06, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete - lacks notability.  Pyrrhus  16 ''' 11:43, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep -- In the late 1980's / early 1990's, after the foofaraw surrounding the announcement that the ARC file format was retroactively declared to be closed and proprietary, and before ZIP managed to gain commanding market share with the "Deflate" algorithm, there was a plethora of competing compression archive file formats and programs, including LHA, ARJ, PAK, among others -- and ZOO was right in there with all the rest (and was available for Unix and VAX-VMS as well as MS-DOS). ZOO in fact received a fair amount of coverage in the trade press or computer magazines of the day, in various articles or reviews comparing and contrasting the different archivers, though it has certainly fallen by the wayside in the last 15 years... AnonMoos (talk) 13:17, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * One thing that could be improved about the article, is that the only date mentioned is "mid-1980s", while the program's maximum popularity was probably ca. 1990. AnonMoos (talk) 13:24, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep. @Nominator: "has never received non-trivial coverage from reliable third parties" - a Google query for zoo compression format delivers 24k+ results. They can't be all trivial or from unreliable third parties.Jimmy Fleischer (talk) 13:56, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes they can. Google search does not equate to notability in the encyclopedic sense.  Don't aimlessly point at "24k+ results", show two or three examples of reliable coverage as required.   JBsupreme (talk) 14:48, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Of course they can; but the point is that it's extremely unlikely that they do. Considering the sheer number of mentions all over the internet, the testimonies of others, and last but not least my own personal judgement, I'd consider sifting through these a waste of time. Jimmy Fleischer (talk) 19:19, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep Per, , and a bunch more. Sufficiently notable IMHO. Collect (talk) 15:06, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * These are both highly trivial mentions, nothing actually documenting the format at all. JBsupreme (talk) 15:09, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems your definition of "highly trivial" differs from everyone else's. Jimmy Fleischer (talk) 19:19, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep This format was heavily involved in the compression format competition of the mid 80's - early 90's. The article needs to be sourced better, not deleted.  Google searches mentioned above show that there are reliable sources to be found.  Amazinglarry (talk) 16:01, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep This was a major format. Personal experience with this format during the early 1990s showed that it was used on most software distribution BBS systems and was as common as PKware, though not as common as ARJ. It had corporate backing, was heavily used on VAX/OpenVMS and is still available as a package in most Linux distributions! RedHat, Debian and Gentoo all still offer zoo compressor/uncompressors in their package trees. It is a historic format and a record of it should be kept. 11:34, 23 January 2009 (EST) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sumdog (talk • contribs)


 * Keep - aside from personally encountering it, there are references to it in this guide to shareware, identified as a popular archive format in this book, identified as common on Amiga systems in this book, listed as a common file type in this book, and also listed in this book. -- Whpq (talk) 18:11, 23 January 2009 (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.