Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bill Paul

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. Kungfu Adam ^(talk) 16:57, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bill Paul

Bill Paul (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) - (View log)

Only marginally notable. Subject considers himself non-notable and requested the page be listed for deletion. juli. ^{t ?} 01:10, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete Not noteable. BSD has several hundred repeat coders.--155.144.251.120 02:49, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Comment Sorry, I just don't how Bill qualifies as a "repeat coder". He wrote almost every other Ethernet device driver that is available in FreeBSD and other *BSD systems. Check AUTHORS or HISTORY sections of manual pages returned by apropos ethernet. Bill also started Project Evil. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MureninC (talk • contribs) 20:13, 21 January 2007 (UTC).

• Delete Not noteable as above. --Dacium 07:04, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete Not notable, as mentioned. Ganfon 20:48, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per WP:BIO Mkdw^talk 21:24, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:BIO comment How so? I strongly disagree. First, it qualifies for the "The person has been the primary subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the person." rule specified in WP:BIO -- Bill wrote many Ethernet device drivers directly from hardware datasheets, and these drivers are now part of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc. Second, the article passes the Verifiability test. Third, I was the original author of the article, and I've never met Bill Paul in person, nor have I ever communicated with him online -- so it passes the Biography test as well. MureninC 20:36, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

• Delete per notability. Philippe Beaudette 23:31, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per notability. JCO312 23:54, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
• Strong Keep Bill Paul wrote almost every Ethernet device driver on FreeBSD, and is a legendary figure. MureninC 19:48, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
• Comment Whoever calculates the votes, please notice that most delete votes here are "me too" votes, and all people who voted to delete the article do not seem to have bothered to actually read it. Because if they did read it, they would have found that Bill wrote major component of the FreeBSD operating system -- namely around every other Ethernet device driver. I didn't specifically check, but I won't be surprised at all if every single device driver he wrote for FreeBSD was quickly ported to OpenBSD and NetBSD. I also added information about him having started the Project Evil to this article. Moreover, I took some time to contact him personally, and he told me that originally he did want the article to be deleted due to the "infantile humor of certain members of the FreeBSD community", but he also told me that "at this point" he doesn't "really care one way or the other". I do care, however. MureninC 17:08, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
• Weak keep. Bill Paul is widely known within the BSD communities and somewhat so in the larger FOSS community, and his contributions are large within the field of BSD Ethernet drivers (as the man pages testify). However, I can find very little other published work, and even very little general content about him (interviews, reports/articles about his work). A borderline case. NicM 12:35, 24 January 2007 (UTC).

Comment: Some people write code (Bill Paul), others give interviews (ESR), some others try to do both. People take Bill's work for granted — in fact, I'd say he created this society of people that (rightly) assume that whatever Ethernet chip they have, there is a driver for it in *BSD, and no third-party patches are necessary to make it work. And the fact that we take it for granted now, doesn't diminish Bill's accomplishments, it only amplifies them. I still honestly fail to see how this could possibly be a borderline case as far as wikipedia rules or just common sense are concerned — count the number of FreeBSD, OpenBSD etc files that bear Bill's copyright, and remember that he only contributed to FreeBSD — i.e. files in OpenBSD etc could well qualify as "articles about his work" part of the rules. And to my understanding, Bill is (practically) the only FreeBSD person that is individually acknowledged and highly respected by NetBSD co-founder and OpenBSD founder and project-leader Theo de Raadt (see Theo's 2001 kerneltrap interview). MureninC 16:03, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

You can say that, but the lack of information doesn't improve his notability. He is a borderline case because: although he has contributed a lot to it, the community in which he is well-known is relatively small; he isn't a major figure outside that community; he isn't widely read or published or written about. Nobody is taking him for granted, I have a lot of respect for Bill Paul and his work and I think he is barely notable enough, but the fact is that IMO people who are solely *BSD developers have to have to be really significant—and not just within their community—to be notable enough. Can you really come up with enough relevent material to expand the article to the length of, eg, Theo de Raadt or Linus Torvalds (I couldn't)? NicM 07:59, 25 January 2007 (UTC).

• Comment The purported Project Evil article implies that it is a version of the Linux ndiswrapper project, when it was an independent work that evolved orthogonally. I recall vague discussion that some Project Evil code made its way into one of the Linux projects, but I don't recall for sure. Bill is very, very widely respected. He has not, however, published a lot of work or written books, like other BSD hackers of similar background who have articles about them (Kirk McKusick, Sam Leffler, Poul-Henning Kamp). I don't mean to be unfair, but it seems like one person has taken to adoring Bill and thinks there should be an article about him, and has created it with minimal content. There is, in fact, little non-OR information to add beyond what is there. Bill is a private person and doesn't have a large public persona or even a publishing history from which to draw even a trivial biography. He also actively objects to this article existing, but that isn't really a good reason to delete it, in and of itself. --juli. ^{t ?} 22:08, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

I see your point. However, Bill is and was listed in the ‘Notable developers’ section of the FreeBSD article, and there are also some references to his persona from some other articles on the networking theme — he completes the picture. Moreover, consider that most articles describing programmers on wikipedia are rather small, so deleting this article only because of its size doesn't sound right, specifically as it has some relevant description of the subject's contribution to *BSD, all taken from reliable sources. MureninC 00:01, 25 January 2007 (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.