Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Advanced Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator

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. El Beeblerino if you're not into the whole brevity thing 23:43, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Advanced Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator

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Advanced Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Fails WP: GNG. I found one short paragraph in a book, but otherwise I couldn't find anything that could be used to establish notability. HyperAccelerated (talk) 22:26, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 22:32, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. This is a well-established technical standard from one of the largest computer networks of the 1980s and 1990s. Further evidence of notability will likely be found in contemporaneous digital sources (nowadays hard to find) than in books. The FidoNews archive (not indexed by Google and other search engines due to its antiquated compression format) and terminal/BBS software manuals would be good places to start. —Psychonaut (talk) 23:11, 6 December 2024 (UTC) — Note to closing admin: Psychonaut (talk • contribs) is the creator of the page that is the subject of this AfD. [reply]
    Horrible reasoning. Vaguely gesturing to an archive of 4000 zip files and saying "it's probably in here" is not a valid argument. If this is such a well-known standard, you should have no issue finding sources that provide in-depth coverage to back up what you're saying. Are you seriously asking me to download thousands of zip files written by a stranger on the Internet onto my own computer? HyperAccelerated (talk) 23:31, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm saying that the topic is likely notable and have provided pointers to anyone who has both the time and interest to help find sources that further support this notability. I have the interest but unfortunately no time at the moment, particularly given that any reliable sources that do exist probably aren't readily available on the Web. (Case in point: the documents you have balked at examining were not written "on the Internet"; they simply happen to be archived there.) If you do want to help, you might provide details of the book you found. —Psychonaut (talk) 14:10, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I do not care whether they were initially published in a print format. I would like to see specific quotations from source material that show significant coverage. If you are not going to do that, I have nothing to discuss with you. No WP: SIGCOV, no article. HyperAccelerated (talk) 15:46, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    It belatedly occurs to me that the two sources already cited in the article probably already meet WP:GNG in that they are reliable (both having been adopted as FidoNet standards), have significant coverage of the topic (one of which describes in detail the protocol and an independent implementation of it, and the other of which describes an extension to the original protocol), and are independent of the subject (since they were written by someone who was uninvolved in the design or initial implementation of the protocol, other than having suggested a name for it). Having freed up some time this evening, I found a few further sources with more than trivial mentions of AVATAR:
    • PC Interrupts: A Programmer's Reference Guide to BIOS, DOS, and Third-party Calls by Ralf Brown and Jim Kyle (Addison-Wesley, 1993) has a paragraph about the serial dispatcher of the AVATAR driver in Chapter 7 and several pages' worth of API documentation for the AVATAR driver in Chapter 36.
    • "ANSI-TERM 4", an article about the eponymous terminal software by its author Richard VanHouten, appears in the September 1992 issue of Computer News 80 (Vol. 5, № 9), and includes a short paragraph discussing AVATAR and which terminals support it. (Similar information is recapitulated elsewhere in the issue in an independent review of ANSI-TERM 4 by Gary W. Shanafelt, though this one may be too brief to count.)
    • The Opus Technical Reference Manual by Trev Roydhouse (2nd edition, 1991) has a comprehensive description of all AVATAR commands in §4.4.2. (This source may or may not be fully independent; although Opus and AVATAR were designed by Wynn Wagner III, the manual was not written by him.)
    —Psychonaut (talk) 03:37, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    No, absolutely not. In one of the sources, the author describes making a phone call to the developer of AVATAR. This would not realistically happen unless the two were already in close contact with one another. (Note: there's two sources on the article currently, both written by George Stanislav.)
    You also propose that these sources are independent of the subject "they were written by someone who was uninvolved in the design or initial implementation of the protocol, other than having suggested a name for it". This, of course, is unreasonable. Under this interpretation of independence, it would okay for my friend to write a Wikipedia article about my high school programming assignment because they never looked at the code before the project was completed.
    You need to provide specific quotations from the other sources not in the article. Technical documentation usually does not qualify as significant coverage, because most documentation is authored by someone participating in the development process. At this point, you have done nothing to show that any source provides significant coverage. HyperAccelerated (talk) 06:14, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm afraid you are mistaken. There is no such rule here about technical documentation, no one is under any obligation to quote third-party sources (which, as I've indicated, total many pages of material on the topic), and with the probable exception of Roydhouse, the authors we are discussing (Stanislav, Brown, Kyle, VanHouten, and Shanafelt) had no prior relationship with AVATAR's creator and were all documenting something that they had, at their time of writing, no involvement in developing. We do not discount sources simply because the author may have telephoned someone connected with the subject in order to gather information, a practice that is routine in journalism and not uncommon in scientific and technical writing. —Psychonaut (talk) 15:27, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    You're missing the point. Stanislav is not an independent source. They are a software developer that works in close collaboration with the author of AVATAR, Wynn Wagner. The sources are technical documents about the software:
    Even if you know absolutely nothing about software development, you obviously know that this is not written for the New York Times. These are two software developers working in close collaboration to decide how a piece of software should be implemented. Their relationship is not journalistic. The fact that Stanislav came up with the name of AVATAR further establishes that their relationship was not journalistic.
    I also found this page written by Wynn Wagner that states "The last version of Opus that I wrote was v1.03. ... George Stanislav took over Opus development when I finally turned off my PC. He completed several utilities." It's not just about a single phone call: it's about a standing collaboration. HyperAccelerated (talk) 17:53, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Oh, and if you don't want to give us quotations from those other sources, the article will be deleted. The onus is on you to show significant coverage, and you haven't done that. If you don't want to complete your argument, I'm not going to stop you. You told users to download thousands of zip files onto their computer for fun, and you wrongly claimed that George Stanislav, a close collaborator of the author of AVATAR, was an independent journalist. Nobody here should trust what you're saying. HyperAccelerated (talk) 17:58, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete I can find a few articles in scholar that mention it, and amazingly the tech description (and/or code) can be found online, mostly at thebbs.org. As I recall there were BBS-specific magazines and a fair amount of BBS discussion in things like PC Magazine. But content from that era will be very hard to find. I'd be happy to !vote keep if something can be found. Lamona (talk) 16:39, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The PC Interrupts book has nearly a full page with technical specs and a small amount of explanation. It doesn't seem enough to create a stand-alone article, and doesn't cover some of the unreferenced statements in the article. I'm wondering if we can find a merge target, something like Bulletin board system or ANSI_escape_codes or Advanced Video Coding (or anything else appropriate). To User:HyperAccelerated: having a phone call or even working with someone does not mean that the source cannot be independent. Journalists interact with the subjects of their writings, sometimes intensely, and can still write independent stories. Knowing someone does not erase independence. Also, please be civil; at no time did User:Psychonaut tell anyone "to download thousands of zip files onto their computer for fun." WP:AGF, right? Lamona (talk) 23:48, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm fine with any of those merge targets. I have also yet to see convincing evidence that Stanislav is a journalist. The literature I have found suggests that they are a close collaborator of the author of AVATAR. HyperAccelerated (talk) 04:42, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Just Step Sideways (talk) 23:21, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting as there is still no consensus. There is some support for a Merge but it would help if a single Merge target article was identified and agreed upon.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 23:38, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete — soft — I don't outright disagree with Psychonaut's contentions. However, I do find HyperAccelerated's arguments more compelling. Additionally, I agree that Stanislav might not qualify as an independent source, but I would want to see other arguments regarding him before I made-up my mind. Assuming Stanislav is indeed independent, for now, I do not see how two technical documents from 1989 equates to "extensive coverage." Furthermore, is FTSC.org a RS? It matters not if Stanlisav is or is not; if FTSC.org isn't, we shouldn't be utilizing it. If there are more sources — which, in all fairness, there does appear to be — they should be properly (and quickly) added. Despite potentially being on the chopping block, this article has not been edited since AfD nomination, despite no less than two re-lists. However, as-written, it's a delete, for me. I would support a merge to ANSI escape codes, given how AVATAR is described as "Its basic level was designed explicitly as a compression of the much longer ANSI escape codes." The article, as-is, makes several entirely unsourced assertions. (As an aside, I would also contend that this article may be skirting the bounds of being too technical, though this is not necessarily grounds for deletion)MWFwiki (talk) 03:01, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete due to lack of reliable independent sources having been provided so far. There are only two sources cited, both of which are technical documents written from a personal perspective rather than an independent perspective: "I took over the coding of the part of Opus handling the video codes. I realized the codes were offering us much more power than just translating them to ANSI escape sequences. I proposed to call the codes AVATAR, the Advanced Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator." [1] "Both Joaquim and Jason have assured me they would put the new commands in their programs, thus nothing will be broken. With that assurance in mind, I feel confident no chaos will result from adding these new commands." [2] FTSC.org has some documents labeled "Fidonet Technical Standards", but the two cited here are not among that group; see http://ftsc.org/docs/ where they are assigned to the "Fidonet Reference Library" section instead. Maybe there are independent sources (particularly secondary sources; see WP:SCHOLARSHIP) about this protocol, but it's the responsibility of the article's supporters to find them and cite them in the article. If User:Psychonaut or someone else wants additional time to look for sources, the article can be userfied instead. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:01, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  1. PC Interrupts: A Programmer's Reference Guide to BIOS, DOS, and Third-party Calls by Brown & Kyle is not available online (that I can find), so I can't assess it. I'm well aware per WP:SOURCEACCESS that online availability or the lack thereof does not affect the quality of a source; I'm just saying that I can't assess it.
  2. I found the issue of Computer News 80 you mentioned at the Internet Archive. The coverage of AVATAR there is insignificant. Page 9 says that ANSI-Term 4 uses the hi-res graphics screen to do such things as "Control the screen using AVATAR control sequences. AVATAR (Advanced Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator) is a set of control codes designed to be faster than ANSI codes are, and is in use by some BBS's. To the best of my knowledge, ANSI-Term 4 is the ONLY TRS-80 terminal program to support AVATAR." Page 20 says regarding ANSI-Term 4, "In addition to supporting the major ANSI codes (no, you can't get a color display with it!) it also supports the similar AVATAR standard." Those are the only mentions of AVATAR in the issue.
  3. I'm just going to provide a link to the Internet Archive version of The Opus Technical Reference Manual because I don't understand it well enough to comment on it.
I'm not being Randy from Boise here, despite my lack of expertise in this topic; I can see that most of the content of this article is uncited. Nor, as far as I can tell, could Computer News 80 or The Opus Technical Reference Manual be used to source most of the current content. Basically, I'm looking for citations in the article itself, not a list in the AfD discussion of sources that might possibly be used which may or may not have anything to do with the current content of the article. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 07:28, 24 December 2024 (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.
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