User:Real Deuce
I am a professional developer who also works on open source software in his spare time.
Possible conflicts of interest[edit]
I am one of the primary developers of Synchronet, and I have edited the article quite a bit. I think the biggest issue with my edits are over verbosity, but I'm trying to fix that.
Opinions on Notability[edit]
I use Wikipedia quite often in my day to day life and have fixed some minor issues I've noticed as I went (all anonymously.) I quite often look up trivia on Wikipedia and have come to rely on it as having something to say about everything.
On the other hand, there are a large number of articles I've ran across which I have felt had no business in an encyclopedia. Since I am not a Wikipedian, I have generally just ignored those with the expectation that they will be weeded out.
My "spare time" interests are generally focused on Bulletin Board Systems specifically, Synchronet and "Door Games." Since the BBS community has always been relatively small and is only getting smaller, many articles which cover the subject are hard to pin down as far as notability is concerned. Software which is notable in the BBS community is rarely notable according to the Wikipedia guidelines. Since the community is withering, software will become less and less notable as time goes by.
BBS Software Notability Notes[edit]
On the whole, I view any article about a piece of software as suspect. My general feeling is that software details should go in a topic rather than a separate article. For example, in the article about Microsoft Word I feel that the "File formats" and "Features and flaws" sections do not belong in Wikipedia. Since much of the BBS software entries consist only of feature lists along with how it affected the rest of the community, I think a small number of long articles documenting the evolution of various aspects of BBSs (BBS software, BBS terminals, BBS message networks, ANSI Art) would be able to replace all of the individual BBS software entries. However, I am unlikely to write them, so I accept their existence as a fragmented history of the more general subject.
For software that has had an historical impact and is still being developed, the article should only contain the historical information. Current information or, even worse, forward looking information should not be present. For new software which has not made any impact there should be no article. If someone wants to research a current piece of software, they should look at the software's website or find reviews. Wikipedia is not the place for this research.