Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Trusted time

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. ♠PMC(talk) 22:18, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Trusted time (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Article does not have any references since 2007. I've tried to find some, and "Trusted Time" does not seem to be a widely used technical term. You see it appearing in phrases like "a trusted time stamp", meaning a time stamp that is trusted. The only place I have seen "Trusted Time" used as a phrase directly, is in an English translation of a Chinese document. (I also know something about the technical topic of NTP mentioned on the page, and the text about NTP does not really seem to make sense.) David Malone (talk) 15:01, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • I found an encyclopaedia with a "trusted time" entry: ISBN 9781599043869 page 700. However, that encyclopaedia doesn't match the load of old hooey in this article, including the risible nonsense about the Freedom of Information Act and time sources. That encyclopaedia article cites doi:10.4018/978-1-59140-553-5.ch054 as its source and István Mezgar's original article matches it pretty much word-for-word. But no-one else independently documents (rather than just plain copies, as the IGI encyclopaedia, from an author with a PhD in business administration, does) Mezgar's concept. So this article as it stands is unverifiable, and a wholly rewritten article based upon Mezgar would not be an idea that has actually escaped Mezgar and been adopted by other people. This fails both the verifiability and the no original research policies. Delete. Uncle G (talk) 23:06, 15 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Trusted time is an important issue and is disussed in numerous sources in relation to networks (for example [1]), cryptography (for example [2]), and navigation (for example [3]). I don't know whether Uncle G is right about the sentence on Freedom of Information Act and liability, but it is certainly true that there are regulatory issues surrounding trusted time in some jurisdictions (see [4]) and the sentence is easy enough to remove if we don't like it. Deletion is not cleanup. SpinningSpark 08:18, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • The first paper by Daryl only uses the phrase "Trusted Time" in the title to mean time that is trusted, rather than a specific term. The word trusted only appears once in the actual body paper, in a generic sense. The second paper by the FAA only uses the phrase "trusted time" one in the paper, again not to mean any specific technical term, but again, time which is trusted. The book only seems to use the phrase "trusted time stamp", in a general sense, rather than a specific technical term. (When the book talks about standard technical phrases, it seems to uses caps, like Trusted Computing Module or Trusted Third Parties). So, I don't think any of these show it is a standard concept worth documenting. David Malone (talk) 10:59, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I knew that someone would do the phrase search without looking at the following word. For shame! One of your sources is actually about Position, Navigation, and Timing (which is in its title, no less!) and happens to use the phrase "trusted time synchronization" once in the entire document. Another says "trusted time server", i.e. an NTP server that is trusted. Ironically, one only has to read as far as the second section of your "regulatory issues" paper, past the background section on Coordinated Universal Time and International Atomic Time, to find that it is about "Digital time stamps", i.e. trusted timestamps. And the one that only matches the "Toward Trusted Time" title of the paper is in fact about the error rates of NTP stratum 0 servers, which is of course grist for the mill in Network Time Protocol#Clock strata. Uncle G (talk) 11:06, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • This article is about trusted time sources. The Cao and Veitch paper examines whether NTP Stratum 1 timeservers are reliable. How is that not about this topic? David Malone, I don't care how many times the paper uses the phrase and a strict technical definition of a topic is not necessary for a Wikipedia article. The essential requirement is that the paper is about the topic which I would argue it is. I don't know what FAA source you are referring to; my second source is the The Kang et al. source. This makes it clear that trusted time is key to their methodology and they repeatedly discuss trusted time servers. Which are trusted time sources. Uncle G, I don't understand why I should be ashamed of offering a paper with "Position, Navigation, and Timing" in its title. The full title is "Time Source Options for Alternate Positioning Navigation and Timing". That's exactly what I said the paper was about; the importance of time sources in navigation. SpinningSpark 11:49, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        • The paper I referred to as FAA is "Time Source Options for Alternate Positioning Navigation and Timing (APNT)" - it's on the FAA website, and is your third reference. Sorry for not being clearer. Personally, I am not convinced these papers make a good case for the existence of this article. There are already pages on NTP and Time Servers and the timescales that they measure agains such as UTC and TAI. There are also pages on protocols that issue trusted timestamps and define exactly what a trusted timestamp means in this sense. You could propose a notion of trusted time that combined all these notions, but that would seem to count as original research. David Malone (talk)
          • The need for a trusted source of absolute time in navigation is nothing new. It goes all the way back to the story of longitude and chronometers – three centuries back. This is a subject whole libraries of stuff have been written about. Timing over internet is one solution discussed in the paper I provided, so there is at least some sourced overlap of the navigation and network time topics. So no, I don't agree that it is OR to treat them in the same article. SpinningSpark 17:41, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
          • I've never heard that called trusted time - that's UT0, UT1, UTC and their relationship to earth orientation. The issue there is mainly the accuracy of the time source, clock and time transfer, not trust. I have quite a number of books on the topic! I think we'll have to agree to differ and get some other opinions. David Malone (talk) 18:48, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete There don't seem to be any (significant) sources for this concept. The closest perhaps is the Cao and Veitch article, and although there are numerous controlled and uncontrolled keywords and subjects that have been assigned to that article, "trusted time" is not among them. It looks to me like the article on ANSI ASC X9.95 Standard covers this nicely, and that we don't have sources for a stand-alone article. Lamona (talk) 03:27, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 22:03, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 23:24, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete. This page has been tagged for NO SOURCES for a dozen years. There's a discussion above about sources, none of which have been applied to the page. None of the sources discussed seem to directly detail the subject. A reasonable search finds nothing substantive. This article may be about a notable subject but we have no sources from which to determine this. Failing ANY sourcing, delete. BusterD (talk) 19:41, 8 March 2022 (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.