Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/AskEd! Automatic Multilingual Question Answering System

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 of the debate was delete. Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:00, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] AskEd! Automatic Multilingual Question Answering System

While this could be a fascinating site, it has no alexa rank [1], little google coverage, no media coverage (that I can find) and does not seem notable based on that. Current article also seems to be an ad, though I can't tell that the site is a commercial site. Also, article was added by creator of the website in question, apparently. W.marsh 23:03, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

• Delete per nom --Rogerd 04:34, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

• Response from creator of the askEd wikipedia entry: Everything W. Marsh wrote is essentially correct. However, the demo which the entry refers to is a bona-fide working system which is non-commercial and is the result of university research that attempts a very different approach to automatic question answering. The system was also a participant this year in the annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Question Answering evaluation. It differentiates itself from other systems in 2 fundamental ways: (1) by offering input in English, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Swedish which no other system does, and (2) by providing short answers to questions, not sentences or text snippets as other systems do. In that sense I believe it is of interest to anyone researching question answering systems or the field in general. Moreover, the demo itself serves the additional purpose of data collection for furthering the field of automatic question answering as a whole and for providing a comparison of the state-of-the-art with other systems. I tried to facilitate such comparisons by including links to other demos of similar systems on the web (including commercial systems) and for some of which there are also existing Wikipedia entries. (Presumably those entries are not suggested for deletion because they are already reasonably well-established sites, I don't know.) Incidentally, no one has so far objected to a link to the demo placed on the main Wikipedia question answering page (a much higher profile page) so would you also argue for the deletion of that link or is it that the site itself simply does not warrant an entry at this stage? Would the proponents for deletion consider an argument for moving the page or expanding it rather than deleting it? Is there anything in particular they would like to see about the system's workings to justify the entry's existence? Do they have a stronger argument for deletion other than that there is little other media coverage? Because while W. Marsh's observations about the site's low profile are correct there is a somewhat vicious circle here in that because the site is new, Google does not give the main site a high ranking so correspondingly the traffic to the site is also low. If there is a Wikipedia policy for deleting entries that nobody knows about then I guess I have to concur. But in that case, it would be nice to see a larger number of people arguing for deletion with an explanation so that one can judge at which point a site does warrant a Wikiedia entry. I think contributors both for and against should also state their credentials to argue for and against deletion since their decisions necessarily affect many other people.

Lastly, I have had a fair number of readers of the Wikipedia entry go on to try the system and while I realise this is not an argument for the entry in the first place I believe it is an argument for the site's relevance to the question answering community and therefore to Wikipedia. Ed Whittaker

Please feel free to comment on my comments as I'm obviously interested to understand your objections better to see if they can be resolved without deleting the Wikipedia entry. 12 November 2005

• Delete per nom -- ( drini's _vandalproof page ☎ ) 06:34, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

• Come on you guys! I don't know whether you're paranoid about spam pages or what but I am genuinely trying to understand what the issue is here and you're not helping. I am relatively new to Wikipedia so my request is genuine. Drini has clearly edited many pages according to his website but these "delete per nom" comments smack of arrogance. If you delete the page fair enough but please try to justify your decision with a few more words. Besides if you write a bit more you can try to convince other people that you are right can't you? Ed whittaker 12:43, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

• I give up. This isn't a discussion. This is a battle of my long-winded requests for clarification as a new user against unhelpful busybodys' "delete per nom" statements. A waste of everyone's time so delete the entry and delete these [[2]] [[3]] too. Ed whittaker 06:26, 15 November 2005 (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.