Wikipedia:Notability (software)
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[edit] Archived Text
Software applications are products, and fall under Wikipedia:Notability (companies and corporations). This page gives rough guidelines which Wikipedia editors use to decide if certain software applications should have an article on Wikipedia.
That Wikipedia is not a primary source, nor a free wiki host is a long-established fact. Wikipedia articles are not intended to be locations where primary source documentation for software packages is hosted. Wikipedia is also not a directory of all software packages that exist or that have ever existed.
[edit] Criteria
Software is notable if it has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the software's author(s).
- This criterion includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, books, user guides, television documentaries, and full-length magazine reviews 2 except for the following:
- Media reprints of press releases, other publications where the author or manufacturer talks about the software, and advertising for the software. Newspaper stories that do not credit a reporter or a news service and simply present company news in an uncritical or positive way may be treated as press releases unless there is evidence to the contrary. 1
- Trivial coverage, such as newspaper articles that simply report version releases without comment, price listings in product catalogues, or listings on software download sites.
If some software doesn't meet or isn't known to meet the above criteria, the following criteria can be used to estimate if the software is notable:
- The software is among the core products of a notable software developer or vendor.
- The software is included in a major operating system distribution such as Debian, Fedora Core or FreeBSD, and the maintainer of the distribution is independent from the software developer. Note that some distributions, such as Debian, include a particularly large number of packages. The more packages a distribution includes, the less notability is implied by inclusion in that distribution. Statistics such as the Debian Popularity Contest help to estimate the usage of particular packages in a particular distribution.
[edit] Guidelines for writing about software
Creating an article about software you have personally developed is strongly discouraged. It is indeed easy for an author to overestimate the notability of their work. If such work is notable, someone else will eventually start an article about it.
Software that can be proved to have a consistent number of users (beside the creator(s) and their friends) but do not meet the above criteria may be merged into the article describing their main functionality (for example, an article about a random disk editor may be merged into a section of disk editor.)
[edit] Notes
- Note 1: Self-promotion and product placement are not the routes to having an encyclopaedia article. The published works must be someone else writing about the company, corporation, product, or service. (See Wikipedia:Autobiography for the verifiability and neutrality problems that affect material where the subject of the article itself is the source of the material.) The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the subject itself (or of its manufacturer, creator, or vendor) have actually considered the company, corporation, product or service notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works that focus upon it.
- Note 2: Some examples: PC Tools satisfies this criterion because it was the subject of a full-length magazine review in the October 1991 edition of Compute!. grep, awk, and sed satisfy this criterion because they have been the main subjects of entire books.
