Dan Dascalescu's Wiki
/blog/richard stallman letter help with wikipedia deletion of foss
Open letter to Richard Stallman asking for support against Wikipedia's deletion of FOSS articles
Dear Mr. Stallman,
I would like to bring to your awareness the recent debate on Wikipedia around deleting the page for the window manager dwm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dwm_(2nd_nomination)
A number of Wikipedia administrators believe dwm is not notable enough, and have proposed to delete its page. The discussion has generated a significant amount of heat, such as at reddit, but individual FOSS contributors have been largely ignored (or banned) by Wikipedia administrators under accusations of impersonation ("meat puppetry"/"sock puppetry").
I would like to ask for your help in this regard. Your dedication to FOSS confers you a great deal of authority, and we hope it might sway Wikipedia administrators to amend their criteria of notability for open source software:
- digital sources should not be discriminated against on grounds of lack of reliability, given than OSS is less likely to be featured in mainstream printed media.
- verifiability is inherently much easier to establish for FOSS than for most other topics.
I will leave at your choice the manner in which you may want to help; here is a RFC that I published on Wikipedia, but which has failed to gain consensus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability/RFC:Notability_of_free_open_source_software
Sincerely,
Dan Dascalescu,
OSS contributor