Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Poppler (software)

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 redirect to Xpdf. Fritzpoll (talk) 20:46, 11 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Poppler (software)

No third-party references to show notability. PROD contested. Stifle (talk) 13:03, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. -- I'^mperator 14:09, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy Keep Xpdf (from which poppler is a fork) is probably the oldest free pdf software and used by a lot of software; poppler is increasingly used instead.--Oneiros (talk) 14:58, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep or possibly merge (probably to xpdf, but with mention in evince and okular too), but that seems less than ideal. This is a backend to multiple notable products & is a fork of another notable product that has become more popular and better supported. I don't know whether this can be speedied: Stifle's claim that this lacks sources is legitimate. But the article should be kept and improved. There are hits on google scholar and news (no links; as I can't figure out, off-hand, how to include spaces in URLs--HTML-encoding changes results & tinyurl is blacklisted. Please search for "poppler xpdf OR evince OR okular OR vindaloo OR ePDFView"). There are incidental mentions of it in multiple books. The news hits do include a few exclusive articles in sources such as the german Linux Magazin, but most are mixed coverage of multiple free pdf tools and/or libraries. As an aside: libraries are unsexy in general & even more widespread libraries such as DirectSound have sources that are far from exclusive. I therefore would err on the side of thinking that many of the above links are more than trivial. --Karnesky (talk) 15:14, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Xpdf. I can't support keeping an unsourced article, and it does appear to be unsourced and unsourceable. And I can't support a merge because there's no sourceable content to merge.—S Marshall ^Talk/_Cont 17:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I don't know why Karnesky can't paste search results, but the google news search he describes gets no hits, and, of the hits on google scholar, most are - as Karnesky himself points out - incidental mentions only; they do little more than verify that a library of this name exists and that it has something to do with rendering pdfs. These are exactly the sort of non-sources the "significant coverage" requirement of the general notability guideline excludes. In particular, just because someone forks notable software, that doesn't make his fork notable.
Only two hits, http://is.muni.cz/th/143058/fi_b/bakalarska_prace.pdf and http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/~jw209508/papers/thesis/thesis.pdf, seem to mention it in any detail at all, and as I speak neither Czech nor Polish (and machine translation is worthless for papers such as these), I can't properly assess them.
Should not be redirected; disambiguated redirects usually have very little use. I'd say to just mention it on the Poppler disambig instead, but if Poppler (software) goes away, it should itself turn back into a redirect (to The Problem with Popplers, I suppose, as the original target's been deleted, but that's a matter for Talk:Poppler). —Korath (Talk) 07:48, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just a minor point, but that google news search you used only shows results from the last month. If you search all time periods you get 41 hits. However those are mostly comments on a handful of source articles, and the mentions of poppler are fairly incidental. Bazzargh (talk) 09:42, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've added an external source and asked on the librarie's list; the response from the maintainer sums up my response to these discussions: "Not that I care much if Wikipedia decides the leading free software for rendering PDF is notable, it's their loss, not ours."--Oneiros (talk) 19:09, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is really the opposite of WP:INHERIT. Multiple PDF programs are notable & they all use poppler for the actual rendering of the PDF. Does that make poppler notable? Thanks for adding the search: I had URLs with spaces & forgot I can change them to pluses. --Karnesky (talk) 20:38, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note that WP:N recognizes not only sources as evidence of notability, but also "published peer recognition and the other factors listed in the subject specific guidelines." Unfortunately, Wikipedia:Notability (software) never gained consensus. It'd certainly meet it: popcon shows that poppler is installed on over half of Debian-based systems that run that tool. It is a core library of many default PDF viewers in various distributions of Linux. I don't think we need exclusive coverage of a subject in order to keep any article. The sources for this one, in particular, might be borderline. But they seem reasonable enough in the context of other software libraries we have chosen to accept in WP. --Karnesky (talk) 21:31, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep as per Oneiros. RP459 (talk) 00:55, 8 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

clean up

I made the article readable and added sources to quite a few things, can someone make a check to see if this needs more cleaning?

if more cleaning is required can you tell me what exactly is required for this page to be kept. Please leave a notice on my talk page if you respond --Gnepets (talk) 05:11, 11 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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.