Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ekahau Site Survey

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 Moved to Draft:Ekahau Site Survey, pending improvements sufficient to remedy the concerns raised in the discussion. BD2412 T 13:51, 9 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ekahau Site Survey

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Page reads like a commercial brochure. Also notability concerns. Oska (talk) 09:36, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 11:38, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

~~Delete~~ Draftify (modified as per end of this discussion) - Product only. Not notable. Could not find any WP:RS -- Sirfurboy (talk) 11:57, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

ETA I note the keep responses below, and reaffirm my view for delete. Widely known among professionals is not notability for Wikipedia. The software gets mentions, but these do not constitute coverage establishing notability of the software. I would invite those arguing for keep to present WP:THREE, that is the three best sources for establishing notability of this software. If there are three suitable sources, I would revisit my view above - but I cannot find any. -- Sirfurboy (talk) 15:47, 9 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, let me give it a try.

In this short collection: Proceedings of international conferences (Intel and others), a book published by John Wiley & Sons, an article in a popular computer magazine, a MIT magazine publication, etc.

• The Twelfth International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communications

• Modeling user movement habits for intelligent indoor tracking. In: Proc. of the 3rd Annual Intel European Research and Innovation Conference (ERIC-2010): Building a Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Society through Research and Innovation partnerships, Intel Ireland

• 9 free Windows apps that can solve Wi-Fi woes - Computerworld Magazine

• Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation, Volume 106, Issues 6-10

• Mobile Computing Deployment and Management

• Journal on Wireless Networks Communication

I hope you'll find at least some of these sources suitable enough. There are scores of other books and publications. WiFiEngineer (talk) 18:55, 9 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you WiFiEngineer. The idea of WP:THREE is to present your three best sources. If these establish notability, the matter is settled. You present six sources here, so I assumed the first three were your three best, and looked at these.

Ref 1, (Cullen et al., 2016) has: ", a survey of the indoor positioning capacity of the Wi-Fi infrastructure of the LyIT campus was undertaken. The Ekahau Site Survey (ESS) [8] application was used to complete the survey. ESS is the industry standard for designing, planning and maintaining Wi-Fi network systems". This evidences that ESS is an industry standard, but the ref is not specifically about ESS, it is about indoor positioning using cooperative techniques. ESS is used because it is an industry standard but there is no discussion of why ESS is that standard. Nevertheless there is this paragraph that points to something specific about ESS: "An interesting facet of the ESS application is its ability to configure the output to measure Wi-Fi connectivity capacity of a given area, with a given infrastructure, while at the same time measure the infrastructures capability to position devices within that same surveyed area."

All in all, I find this reference is reasonable, but does not establish notability on its own. Using the software because it is widely used and has a nice feature is not itself notability, nor is mention in a paper. It is relevant, however, that the researchers wrote the above about it.

Ref 2 is a poster presentation, "Predictive Indoor Tracking by the Probabilistic Modelling of Human Movement Habits." ESS is merely mentioned as being the software used. What the software provides is described, but this does not establish notability.

Ref 3 is a Computer world article about Heatmapper, and ESS is mentioned as being the full featured pay-for version of Heatmapper. This is a secondary source (which is good) and describes Heatmapper. By extension it provides some support to the notability of ESS, but the mention is brief, and this article is about Heatmapper, not ESS. Wikipedia has no page for Heatmapper, but it is mentioned on the ESS page. If this is one of the best three sources, I am still concerned that it is not really about ESS at all, which does not speak to its notability.

In summary, I am not convinced by these three refs that the software is notable, yet I think it does move us forward. Question: Is there a page that this page could be merged with? Perhaps Wireless site survey? -- Sirfurboy (talk) 10:53, 10 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback, Sirfurboy. Regarding "I assumed the first three were your three best", no, there was no particular order, sorry.

I'm by no means an experienced WP editor, so the logic behind ranking the references it terms of their usefulness for this particular purpose often evades me. This is why I listed more than three references, hoping that you could take a look at all of them and point me to the good ones. Would you mind looking at Ref 5 and Ref 6? As for your question about merging, I tried that many years ago, and my attempt was not received very well. Something like "WP is not a shopping directory, get out of here." Frankly, I wasn't (and I'm not now) prepared for a lengthy discussion or, heaven forbid, an edit war if I tried that again. I simply created a stand-alone page for Ekahau, as well as summarized the characteristics of the leading Wi-Fi survey tools in a table (and try to keep it up-to-date).WiFiEngineer (talk) 15:32, 10 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ref 4 is an edition of MIT's Technology Review, which would be a good source, but it is dependent on what it says. What this one tells us about is the company, Ekahau, produce an indoor site survey product, one of three listed companies providing this. Again, we have evidence here that people use the software and recommend it, but there is nothing here that makes it notable. The Symbols technology product does not get a page on Wikipedia, and although that argument is WP:OTHER, and so flawed, it does lead to another observation: Symbol technologies the company does get a page. Would a solution here be to rename the page to Ekahau the company, and have the product as a section of that? Is this the company's only product? Or is the company notable for other reasons? I have not researched the company as a whole at all, but if the company is notable, all this information fits nicely on their page.

Ref 5 is a book describing how to do site surveys and takes the reader through installation and use of Heatmapper. As above, Heatmapper is not ESS, although it is related. The book is essentially an instruction manual though. It is not showing notability so much as usefulness.

Ref 6 has some error in the URL. I cannot load it.

Again in summary, these have not established notability, yet I am not convinced we want to delete this information entirely. I think it should be merged or redirected somewhere. As the company page does not exist, we cannot merge or redirect to that, and I confess I do not know if "rename" is an appropriate AfD outcome. Instead I am going to modify my position to "draftify". In draft the page can be reworked/renamed as appropriate. Its sources can be improved or its content merged elsewhere. Information will not be lost, and writers will have more time to establish notability for the software. I hope that is a suitable compromise. -- Sirfurboy (talk) 08:18, 11 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Currently, Ekahau has only one flagship line of business, and that's site survey applications and hardware (that includes Ekahau Pro, SideKick, Heatmapper, etc). So renaming the page to Ekahau (company) and correcting the contents accordingly sounds like a good solution to me. Draftifying, i.e. effectively removing the article from the user space, appears to be an overkill. The article is not *that* bad, and I'm sure it can be improved by the community, myself included. Time permitting, I'll easily add more references confirming the notability. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WiFiEngineer (talk • contribs) 13:30, 12 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. Lightburst (talk) 14:50, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. Lightburst (talk) 14:50, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Websites-related deletion discussions. Lightburst (talk) 14:50, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Virginia-related deletion discussions. Lightburst (talk) 14:50, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - I see zero concerns regarding notability here. It is, indeed, a widely known product among Wi-Fi professionals. If you ask them to name the leading product, Ekahau will be #1 or #2. As for reliable sources, click on the Google books and Google scholar links above. This will give you hundreds of sources, most of which would be quite reliable and vendor-neutral publications and books. I believe about half of the references for this article were added by me, and as someone who added them, I can tell you that these books are on my bookshelf and they are ABCs for any wireless specialist. Also, this page gets about 25 views every day, which, I guess, is a rare situation for a page that is allegedly not notable WiFiEngineer (talk) 15:05, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep I am seeing a notable company. There are many press releases as one would expect. The nominator states: Page reads like a commercial brochure, but I think that promotional language can be cleaned up WP:NOTCLEANUP. Lightburst (talk) 15:21, 7 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Just for clarity, the article is for a software application, not a company, and so the notability question is about that application, not the company that makes it. Oska (talk) 09:10, 12 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment First, notability isn't determined by asking some "professionals" what products they like. Nor is it determined by how many pages views an article gets. Second, press leases aren't reliable sources and that's all there seems to be on Google. Also, if the promotional language is cleaned up there probably won't be much of an article left. So the argument could be made for "delete and start over", but I'm going to leave that up to others to determine. Although, I will say the more the reasoning to keep it leans towards things like "It's notable because professionals say it is", the more I'm inclined to go with delete. --Adamant1 (talk) 10:47, 8 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

*Keep, significant coverage exists.IceFishing (talk) 15:08, 8 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

GNG doesn't just require the existence of sources, it needs the right kind of sources. So what sources do you think are sufficient enough for it to be kept? --Adamant1 (talk) 23:27, 8 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Delete All the coverage is just press leases or trivial. --Adamant1 (talk) 22:45, 8 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Strong lack of WP:RS. Dorama285 03:38, 9 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I appreciate the discussion above between WiFiEngineer (article creator) and Sirfurboy over potential sources to show notability. Particularly Sirfurboy in taking the time to review sources put forward by WiFiEngineer. I agree with Sirfurboy that these sources do not make a good case for notability and maintain my position that the article should be deleted. In regards to preserving the information in the article I would like to point out that WiFiEngineer has also created the article Comparison of wireless site survey applications and most of the information about this product is repeated there in a feature table format. Any relevant information that is in this article that isn't shown in that table could be added as a text entry for the product under the table (the same could also be done for other products shown in that table).

Wireless site survey is certainly a notable topic wikipedia should cover and we do. We then also link at the bottom of that article to the aforementioned Comparison of wireless site survey applications. I think this is the appropriate place for where a product of its stature should be documented (in a product comparison article thus giving more of a neutral point of view) and, to repeat, any information that has not been captured there about this product's features can be merged into that article and then this article deleted. Oska (talk) 04:37, 12 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 09:51, 15 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:08, 26 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Comment this product has mentions in Google Books[1] and Google Scholar[2] which should be evaluated as well. KartikeyaS343 (talk) 15:57, 5 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

KartikeyaS343, come on, man, you've been here long enough to knows that WP:GHITS is a crap argument to make at AfD. Which of those mentions constitutes significant coverage? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:31, 7 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Premeditated Chaos but as you know that WP:GHITS is an essey. Anyway the article has not been improved yet with any additional sources and as RoySmith found out those sources are WP:ROUTINE so, I am leaning towards a Delete. --KartikeyaS (talk) 16:44, 8 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. I spot-checked a few of the sources; they're mostly routine coverage / product reviews in niche industry magazines, so fails WP:NCORP. The article itself has substantial copyright violations; clearing them would essentially require WP:TNT. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:27, 7 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I agree with the !delete comments above, no independent secondary sources to convince me of notability. The article itself is a mess as well, lots of the (primary) sources aren’t even about this particular product but are WP:COATRACK for other products by the same company. Cardiffbear88 (talk) 18:22, 8 March 2020 (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.