Open Letter to Wikipedia

Note, this letter has not been sent out to Wikipedia officially. -- 29 Sep 2009

Please see WikipediaEntry for more information and discussion on creating a Wikipedia entry for Foswiki.

Hi,

My name is Michael Daum and I want to comment on the deletions of the Foswiki page.

I do understand and appreciate that you try to keep Wikipedia free from unnecessary stuff based on your notability rules.

Now let me explain why I do think that Foswiki is notable. This might not have been expressed clearly enough before.

In the past TWiki received numerous official awards and acknowledgments. That's why it is notable in the Wikipedian sense. Note, however, that this success was built by an open source community working for 10 years on this software. TWiki has been taken over by a newly founded company called Twiki, Inc. (formerly known as TWIKI.NET) that acquired the trademark rights to use it for commercial purposes. The company was unwilling to let others to continue to work on the sourcecode and forbade all former contributors access to the site, even though all pages are marked to be the property of all those contributors.

These events culminated in the creation of Foswiki -- "free and open source wiki". That's where all core developers and stakeholders continue to work under the umbrella of a nonprofit organization called Foswiki Association while TWiki.org has since become a dead place without a notable community.

TWiki's awards and acknowledgments have not been achieved by Twiki, Inc., a relatively young company, although they recast the achievements of the open source projects as theirs.

The people that made all of this happen on TWiki are all working on Foswiki now. As Foswiki is a direct continuation of TWiki's codebase being maintained by the same people that previously worked on TWiki, its success and notability very well carries over to this new project.

If notability does not carry over from TWiki to Foswiki, why should it carry over to Twiki, Inc.? This company still acts as though they are associated with the development community. They are not. Instead they are milking what the community left behind for their own profit.

I hope that these few words might help you to decide on Foswiki being notable and that we can start writing a nice article on Wikipedia about this great software very soon.

Thanks and with kind regards,

Michael Daum.

Other Community members, who support this approach

• MartinSeibert - 26 Sep 2009
• OliverKrueger - 26 Sep 2009
• RandyKramer - 26 Sep 2009
• JensHansen - 26 Sep 2009
• FilSalustri - 26 Sep 2009
• ReinhardWeh - 26 Sep 2009
• StefanPalm - 26 Sep 2009
• ColasNahaboo - 26 Sep 2009
• LarsEik - 26 Sep 2009
• IngoKappler - 27 Sep 2009
• ChYang - 27 Sep 2009
• RaymondLutz - 27 Sep 2009
• JanDreyer - 28 Sep 2009
• PadraigLennon - 28 Sep 2009
• ArthurClemens - 28 Sep 2009
• IngoWolf - 08 Dec 2009
• Add your Name please

Comments

Since Michael requested us to comment (not necessarily just to sign though I support that) please find here my comments/points.

• Word count: Foswiki = 11; TWiki = 18 (It'll be worth to reduce the number of TWiki to at least not exceed the number of Foswiki )
• I think Foswiki is a plain renaming of TWiki and then continuing the work stream. This should be more emphasized.
• I also think these references may help us http://www.ohloh.net/p/compare?metric=Contributors&project_0=TWiki&project_1=Foswiki due to the following reasons:
  • More developers on Foswiki than on TWiki
  • The code base from day one was as high as the code base from TWiki, which proves we are not a new project at all but just were forced to rename/restart

-- IngoKappler - 26 Sep 2009

Cf. my comments on the foswiki-discuss mailing list: In essence, I find it dangerous to talk about a ("plain") rebranding. I'll elaborate further on this (and translate the mail I sent to Martin earlier which contains a more detailed point of view) after today's election here in Germany

-- MarkusUeberall - 27 Sep 2009

Made some changes to the letter based on Raymond's input. Added links into the Wikipedia deletion/undeletion process important to understand before trying to re-establish the article again.

-- MichaelDaum - 28 Sep 2009

A useful link for establishing noteriety: http://www.h-online.com/open/Foswiki-NextWiki-one-year-on--/news/114327

A question for the Wikipedia admins: Why is the foswiki article treated differently than the Oddmuse article or most other open source projects that have limited articles outside of Wikipedia?

And a suggestion for Michael: Leave out the twiki.net and other open source software related ethical arguments. They hold great weight elsewhere but not at Wikipedia. These folks don't care about much outside of their own insular culture which is not the same as the OSS culture.

A simpler argument and perhaps an article that will be accepted is that Foswiki is a fork of TWiki similar to how Oddmuse is a fork of UseModWiki. Foswiki is based on TWiki 4.2.x but has added new features and patches since the fork. It is currently compatible with 4.2x compatible TWiki Extensions. Foswiki is maintained and under active development at Foswiki.org.

-- DrewStevenson - 28 Sep 2009

I have renamed Twiki.net to Twiki, Inc.

-- ArthurClemens - 28 Sep 2009

Pointing to other articles that exist is not a fruitful argument on Wikipedia. Also see arguments to avoid in deletion discussions.

-- IsaacLin - 28 Sep 2009

While I applaud the efforts to restore a Foswiki wikipedia article, I don't see this as the right way to go about it. As I perceive it:

1. TWiki is notable enough to be worthy of a Wikipedia article, due to historical press coverage
2. Foswiki is a fork of TWiki, and is not yet notable enough on it's own to be worthy of an article.

However, as observed by Michael's letter, the TWiki article is not complete with the true history of the project

1. it doesn't observe that the bulk of the dev team left the project, something that is implied but not stated through the drop in contributions.
2. it doesn't state the true status of the project viz. that it is now a commercial open source project, under an Ubuntu-like license
3. Twiki, Inc. will do, and has done, everything it can to suppress this true picture, and their edits of the TWiki page should be reviewed with this in mind.

IMHO notability for Foswiki is achieved through placements in the press, independent commentators, blogs, etc, and we should be focusing our efforts on expanding these channels, rather than beating our heads off wikipedia.

1. If an independent commentator were to blog on this, counting the people (without naming them) who no longer contribute to TWiki having once been major contributors, and noting their activities on Foswiki this would form the basis of a notable link (hint to independent commentators)
2. Other public messages, such as conference appearances (e.g. at WikiSym? ), academic papers, and press reports, are all potential sources of notability.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 29 Sep 2009

I agree. We can further help spreading this message by having a press summary ready with these points and use this as a Foswiki 101.

-- ArthurClemens - 29 Sep 2009

I have come to the conclusion that any open letter or email that does not follow the Wikipedia deletion-undeletion process is not only ignored but also will actually lower the chances that the Foswiki article will be restored permanently. That's because Wikipedia has to stick to its rules and we must accept this.

I will not send out this letter to officials. However, it is good to keep it here as a reference.

-- MichaelDaum - 29 Sep 2009

On wikipedia the discussion is reopened, following their undeletion process. However it seems to be easierer to tear down and delete than to build up.

-- IngoWolf - 08 Dec 2009