Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Task-Focused Interface Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Task-Focused_Interface
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.
Delete. Only a handful of the Google Scholar results appear to be about this non-consumer software product. It's hard to determine whether any of the ones that also mention "Mylyn" are substantially about this product, but even so, whatever this is, it ain't going to be a household name anytime soon. The relevant ones would also appear to be couched in "information science" bafflegab; while this is a fairly extensive walled garden, it's still a walled garden of dubious articles written in unreadable prose. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:35, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral. This certainly reads much, much better than the original article, now that the inventor has given it some attention. This, of course, raises further conflict of interest issues, which themselves do not require deletion: it obviously did help in this case for the article to get attention from someone who knows the subject well. I am not yet convinced that this particular software or technology is of abiding historical or wide general interest outside the realm of software developers and managers, or whether it might be profitably merged into another article about similar technologies.
To address the concern of the historical and general relevance, I will take another pass at the page and link it within related articles on software technologies, project management and human-computer interaction. To address the conflict issue, after I've filled out the critical points and grounding, I will invite others involved with creation and application of the technology to elaborate on the entry. This is a relatively new technology, but by most accounts of technology dissemination, it has recently reached critical mass in terms of significance. Regarding the title, it does appear that the author made a mistake in capitalization. I think it's best not to rename to "Mylyn task focused interface", since there are significant implementations of the technology that are unrelated to the Mylyn project, but to use your other option of Task-focused interface, similar to Object-oriented programming? Mik Kersten (talk) 17:38, 14 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Note that I'm considered the inventor of this technology, but did not update this article until today, when I was informed of it being marked for deletion. I agree that when marked for deletion, the article did not demonstrate the relevance of the technology. However, this technology is in daily use by a very large portion of software developers, a rapidly increasing number of software managers, and the "task-focused interface" term is a very important and well reckognized term for the 5-10 million who have downloaded it (For real-time download stats in the past 2 months see the Eclipse Download page and do a Find for "Mylyn"). To address the feedback, I have edited the task-focued interface article in a way that I hope addresses all of the key issues raised. Regarding the other specific points:
Neologism coined by the founders of Tasktop Technologies Inc.. Not notable, no significant coverage in secondary sources.
The technology predates Tasktop Technologies by 2 years and the impact reaches far beyond the one company. I hope that my updates to the History section make this clear, but let me know if not and I can add additional references and elaborate on the history.
Only a handful of the Google Scholar results appear to be about this non-consumer software product.
It seems the problem there is with your Google Scholar search terms? To get a decent set of results, start browsing Google Scholar with the research term for the technology, "task context", and my last name "kersten" and fan out from that. You should end up with hundreds of citations stating the impact of the "task-focused interface" and the "task context" and "degree-of-interest" model that underlies it.
while this is a fairly extensive walled garden, it's still a walled garden of dubious articles written in unreadable prose
If the above answers provide enough evidence of the importance of this article, I am happy to address this "walled garden" problem and improve the description of the technology, which I have not yet touched, and improve its linking and categorization. Beatmik (talk) 04:05, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Quote: 'the "task-focused interface" term is a very important and well reckognized term for the 5-10 million who have downloaded it' - that is an unfounded statement. Most users download the whole Eclipse package and are not aware of each of its components. For example, my colleagues (several dozen) and I use Eclipse a lot, but we don't use Mylyn, let alone the term "task-focused interface". I also doubt that it is used by 'a very large portion of software developers'. What percentage? Are there independent sources for that claim? Chrisahn (talk) 23:04, 14 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Fair point, I should have substantiated this claim. Eclipse downloads, counted as unique requests to the Eclipse Download page, trend around 1M per month (see page 10 on Eclipse Galileo report). Mylyn has been download 15-20 million times as part of Eclipse (it's in over 70% of the downloads by count from server logs, can derive a similar approximation from the counts on the current download page, it's contained all but "Eclipse Classic"). I was dividing that number in two to get the 5-10 million. That provides a rough estimate of downloads, but the main argument that follows addresses your point of awareness and relevance of the term "task-focused interface". Given that the Eclipse Downloads page is by far most popular page on Eclipse (see Google ranks, web logs confirm this), we can assume it is an accurate representation of Eclipse users' understanding of Eclipse. The term "Mylyn" is the most common term/technology on the Eclipse Download page and is explicitly included in the summary of the majority of Eclipse downloads. Assuming that a user reads the 1-2 sentence description of what they're downloading, they are aware of the term Mylyn (do a "Find" for "Mylyn" on Eclipse Downloads page to verify). It follows that Eclipse users are aware of the term Mylyn, and either they know what it means or do not. "Mylyn" is defined as a "task-focused interface". There are 1,250 exact matches for "mylyn is a task-focused interface" returned by Google, almost all outside of eclipse.org. There are 81,500 matches of mylyn+"task focused interface" returned by Google. Given that the Eclipse download page determines the relevance of terms to Eclipse users, that "task-focused interface" defines the term Mylyn, and that the definition of what people are downloading is relevant to them whether they already know what it means is or not, it follows that the term Mylyn and its definition is relevant to Eclipse users. By any estimates, the number of Eclipse users is in the millions, as such the term "task-focused interface" is relevant to millions. In addition, as the article now indicates, over the past year the relevance of the term has reached well beyond Eclipse (43,100 matches for "task-focused interface" -eclipse, ie, matches not containing the term "eclipse"). Browsing the Google hits linked should demonstrate the broad need for a standard definition and article on the Task-focused interface, which needs to stand alone from the Mylyn article which is only relevant to the subset of readers interested in the Eclipse-specific implementation. Mik Kersten (talk) 04:46, 15 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The relevance of the term has not reached beyond Mylyn and Cube°n (a NetBeans plugin now at version 1.0.3). There are 347 Google matches for "task-focused interface" -Mylyn -Tasktop -Cube (matches not containing the terms Mylyn, Tasktop or Cube), and most of these pages use the term "task-focused interface" for very different concepts. For example: "Employs Task-Focused User Interface. Inference Studio’s graphical user interface and associated operating characteristics are modeled on the mature and familiar operating paradigms present in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Office."[1]Chrisahn (talk) 00:21, 16 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. As a software developer who has done a significant amount of development, and as an editor who has spent a few years writing about software development innovation at InfoQ.com, the introduction of the task-focused interface in the form of Mylyn, which is free and open source as a part of the Eclipse project, was a truly revolutionary change in how software development was done. It has been covered and extended a lot, and this article focuses on the concept which Mylyn and other conceptually similar user interfaces are driven by. It's not some run-of-the-mill over-marketed term that some ad agency came up - it's a meaningful concept in the software development field. -=Straxus=- (talk) 18:14, 12 September 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.