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Comment by RunSet | Hacker News Reader

> The notability standards aren't remotely as much of a problem as the inconsistent enforcement of them.

My current wikipedia pet peeve:

Session Private Messenger[0] is absent from Wikipedia's comparison of cross-platform instant messaging clients[1] because it doesn't have a wikipedia entry. Session does not have a Wikipedia entry, despite having a well-sourced draft[2] because "github, medium, app stores are not sources".

I note that github is cited throughout the Wikipedia entry for Signal messenger[3]. Furthermore, why is Session's page on the Apple App Store not a valid source for the claim that Session is available on the Apple App Store?

[0] https://getsession.org

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_i...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Session_(software)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

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Are there news articles, peer-reviewed journal or conference papers, published books, etc. discussing Session messenger? If so there should be no problem establishing notability. If not, you can wait until some future time when Session messenger either (a) gets more popular and makes enough mark on the world to be noticed outside of first-party marketing statements and blog reviews, or (b) fades into oblivion.

If Wikipedia had an article about every start up company, every product, and every software application, it would be filled with unmaintainable / uncheckable marketing spam. (To an extent it already is.) Wikipedia’s goal is to be an encyclopedia, not a software project directory.

Note that there’s a somewhat different standard between establishing notability vs. verifying particular claims in article content. Primary sources can sometimes be used for the latter. But it’s also plausible that the Signal article doesn’t establish all of its claims to the satisfaction of Wikipedia guidelines.

Are you saying peer-reviewed conference papers make something "notable" for mentioning in Wikipedia (next to historic and outdated 20 yo material on the subject)? That's not been my experience at all; what is or isn't notable seems completely arbitrary to me.

Yes, if you can find a subject mentioned (by third parties, not just people discussing their own project) in multiple peer-reviewed papers, that is better for establishing notability than blog posts, arxiv preprints, github repositories, pages in SEO content farms, web forum comments, or first-party white papers or press releases.

The criteria are that the coverage is “significant” (i.e. more than just a throwaway mention) and made in “reliable sources” that are independent of the subject of the article. This certainly includes peer-reviewed papers. For examples of reliable sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOURCETYPES

I don’t understand what you are getting at with “... next to historic and outdated 20 yo material...”

* * *

Once notability for the main topic has been established, the criteria for validating specific claims is a bit looser. For example a company’s own website could be used to demonstrate the current version number of a piece of software, a press release (or even a tweet) could be quoted to describe the company’s first-party response to some event, an arxiv preprint from a tenured scientist or mathematician could be used to support some mathematical formula, a blog post by a living person could be used to validate their birthday or the name of their spouse, and the like.

most academic peer review is at this point is a joke though. i know everyone wants to hold onto it as some kind of high standard but it really isn't all what it used to be, it functions almost identical to SEO for academics at this point. this dated mentality combined with wikipedia's culture of inconsistent topical gatekeeping is the source of much strife.

If you take a reductive point of view, everything in life – school applications, job interviews, business deals, legal battles, courtship, .... – involves some amount of self promotion and every form of social proof can be gamed/hacked to some degree.

(For example, in 2005 Google made up a brand new prize to award to Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson expressly for the purpose of padding out his O-1 visa application to move to the USA. Does that mean the O-1 visa requirements/criteria are bullshit? Maybe.)

(a) Wikipedia notability guidelines can certainly be gamed to some extent by motivated self-promoters who are willing to jump through hoops to place their pet topics in newspaper articles, research papers, published books, etc.

(b) Sometimes Wikipedia ends up rejecting topics that should be included based on a lack of sufficient third-party write-ups in secondary sources.

But Wikipedia still has to have some kind of guideline to prevent itself from being flooded with self-promotion spam, and the current notability guidelines and reliable source guidelines work better than many suggested alternatives.

> Furthermore, why is Session's page on the Apple App Store not a valid source for the claim that Session is available on the Apple App Store?

you're conflating two different things. the sources required to establish notability are different than those than can be used to say something more mundane, like when something was released. it's a higher bar. a product's own website can be a source for basic things, but it can't be a source to establish that it's notable.

To be fair so did the person who rejected their article

> Comment: github, medium, app stores are not sources. Not seeing any indication of notabilty, just an ad [Slywriter]

I think Sylwriter reached the right conclusion but for the wrong reasons. I also think it would have been polite to write a more substantive message considering the amount of work that clearly went into the draft.

Edit: I read the article more careful and I now think Sylwriter was wrong and didn't read the article carefully.

The article cites to articles published in NDTV Gadgets 360, itsfoss, MUO, Fossbytes, TWN Plugged, RestorePrivacy, and Cointelegraph. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia policy enough to say whether in this context these sources count. However, Sylwriter should obviously have addressed them. They're not "GitHub, medium", they're secondary sources in publications that are okay by the standards of software reviews and poor by the standards of something like the New York Times.

I'm sure Slywriter knew the difference, and probably meant "... are not sources that establish notability". You're right though, a more polite and detailed message would have been more appropriate. It is difficult to do that in every case, considering the sheer volume of drafts and the low number of reviewers.

Edit: Sorry. I wrote this thinking you were replying to my edit but on more careful though I realized you might have been replying to my original comment. If this isn't a reply to the edit please disregard all of this:

Saying the article fails due to only primary sources when it has secondary sources is flat wrong, though. Simply reading the list of references would have cleared this up. Despite volume I find that inexcusable. I'd expect a reviewer to at a minimum read the first few hundred words and then skip to the generated references list and skim for source type.

> Furthermore, why is Session's page on the Apple App Store not a valid source for the claim that Session is available on the Apple App Store?

Because that’s a primary source which Wikipedia tries to avoid. Obviously this can get quite weird, but good luck arguing with a wiki rules lawyer fixated on that. People are often more reasonable than that though.

There are a lot of details that don't seem to get covered in secondary sources that a snapshot of a primary source would be better for anyways.

If I'm writing an article about you from scratch then I'd want to look for sources, to see if you're notable - etc. But if I was updating an existing article and just trying to find a source for your address it would seem easier to take it from your website than wait for a third party to write about it. At some point ideological purity gets in the way of practicality. And there's no need, you could easily tag first-party data so it could be audited and replaced.

I'm surprised that page on Session even exists. The only articles are news outlets (itsfoss, Fossbytes, etc.) that are all about showcasing various small projects. Also some random blog post as reference? Really? Compare with Signal that has been covered on big newspapers and mentioned by big organizations. (Let alone having countries block them.)

I would say the apples-to-apples comparison is with the original version of the Signal wikipedia entry, and that comparison is favorable to the draft page for Session:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Signal_(software)...

From what I can tell, Session does not have any Wired or TechCrunch articles written about it. Signal does have such articles in the original wikipedia entry.

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