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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Symbian platform

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 no consensus on whether to keep or merge, but further discussion can take place on the involved talk pages. Regards, Arbitrarily0 (talk) 14:44, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Symbian_platform

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Symbian_platform (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
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Content fork of Symbian OS.

I think merging Symbian OS with Symbian Platform and creating a list of devices running Symbian would be a better multi-page structure. The devices in the Symbian OS page are distracting from understanding anything in that page. Err, ok that is exactly what you said. I think that is a good plan of action. Bpringlemeir (talk) 00:54, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Can you expand on the development practices? Do you just mean that development is open source or is there some support of agile development or something like that? Bpringlemeir (talk) 21:15, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that this is a major change. Symbian OS was a proprietary, commercial product while Symbian Platform is a community product. The transition from closed source to FSF approved open source is probably the most significant change that a mature software project can undergo.
  • Delete. Merge with Symbian OS. Just like the software itself has just one website, so should we. All companies that produce operating systems all want to call their products 'platforms', but that's just marketing. Google called its Android (operating system) a platform, but we call it an operating system. You can't separate the two. Two articles splits the one subject, and causes confusion.--Lester 06:28, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Merge and then? The article will become very long. Andries (talk) 07:42, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. The original Symbian OS website was www.symbian.com while Symbian Platform uses www.symbian.org. As I stated on my previous comment Symbian OS does no longer exists. All its code has been transferred to Symbian Foundation and became an open-source system. This marks a significant change in so many aspects that, in my opinion, clearly differentiate the product and make it worthy of a different article. Pxtreme75 (talk) 19:49, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • If Symbian.com (please click on it) no longer exists, then why are we differentiating it with 2 separate pages, when the vendor puts it all in one website? With 2 separate articles, we are making it more difficult for Wikipedia readers to find the information about Symbian.--Lester 20:57, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • DeleteMerge. I am the originator of this AfD. By having separate pages some of the history is missing. History is often important to readers of an Encyclopedia. The kernel (EKA2) which stands for EPOC kernel architechure 2, EPOC is supposedly superseded by Symbian OS, which is now superseded by Symbian platform. The original EPOC was part of some hand held organizers that were developed by the UK firm Psion. New redirects to the generic Symbian are now to the Symbian platform page. I think some history of the software collection is missing and bound to get lost with a multiple pages. Currently it looks like Symbian originated in the cell phone industry. Bpringlemeir (talk) 03:59, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Why is it not acceptable to clearly link to the Symbian OS page and the EPOC/Psion pages at the appropriate point in this article? apparently User:Justinchudgar
Not sure who I am replying to. Anyways, that is one solution. That would be fine if Symbian platform is sufficiently distinct from the kernel which proceeded. However, the redirect for just Symbian points to the Symbain platform page. Multiple readers and editors have been confused by the current state of affairs. Some people concluded that Symbian OS and Symbian platform are un-related things; at least that is the connotation I get in the Symbian platform talk pages. I don't think conversion to open source development warrants a completely new page (my opinion). It seems that Symbian OS is a mess and instead of fixing it, a new page was started. Judicious linking is one solution, merging is another. The question is does Symbian platform warrant it's own page and will the information be significantly different than Symbian OS. I think there will be a lot of duplication. But that is definitely why I thought this discussion might be worthwhile. My vote should read merge. I never meant to say the Symbian platform page doesn't have good content, just the separate page is confusing and counter-productive to producing a better article on Symbian. Bpringlemeir (talk) 00:46, 5 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Just to clarify that I get it right: when people talk about "Symbian", they generally mean Symbian OS - an operating system -, which nowadays has become the open-source Symbian platform. In addition, they can mean Symbian Ltd. I definitely agree with the prior editors that we should have one, unified, big article that deals with the concept of the Symbian operating system, and delivers for the readers that seek information about the history and technical aspects of this world's most used mobile phone operating system. We should deal with all the incarnations of the system in one article, as the operating system forms one continuous technical entity spanning over three decades from the mid-1990s' Psion devices to the modern-day Symbian^Ns. There are also a good reasons why the whole Symbian thing is nowadays called Symbian platform, but this article would, if properly expanded, just mostly overlap with Symbian OS. On these ground I suggest each of the following actions be taken:
    Merge any non-overlapping content from this article to Symbian OS for example under the pre-existing subsection Released as Free and Open Source Software.
    Delete this article.
    Move Symbian OS to Symbian platform, keeping redirect Symbian -> Symbian platform in place and adding a disambiguation header to Symbian Ltd. to the top of this article.
    --hydrox (talk) 06:48, 1 June 2010 (UTC) (ed. 16:35, 1 June 2010 (UTC))[reply]
Well said in the intro. Also, there is Symbian Foundation. Technically, this is a progress of a kernel/API with different umbrella organizations taking care of it (possibly with the same developers) and various marketing spins. Symbian platform does include Qt which is a significant piece of software, but is already documented elsewhere. I believe the kernel has not been re-written and backwards compatibility is still possible afaik. Bpringlemeir (talk) 21:11, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Highly notable platform, from the world's largest smartphone producer. I'm somewhat confused by this AfD, in that the nominator and most of the so-called "delete" votes are actually arguing for a merge, and not a delete. Surely a merge is something that can be discussed on the talk page. Is anyone actually asking for a delete - i.e., where the article name and content would be deleted? Mdwh (talk) 02:51, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The word "platform" is being focused on at the expense of the conceptual change. It appears that the change in name from OS to Platform was designed to clearly indicate that the nature of the project has changed. Since there are a limited selection of synonyms for "operating system", the use of a different term indicates the change in project license and ownership not a change in purpose.
  • Keep I think the best thing would be to have Symbian page have a normal "disambiguation" page, one for the original "Symbian_OS and it's history, and then a second one for the "Symbian_platform" which is the Open/Crowd Sourced version of the Software maintained by the Foundation. It is part of the evolution of the system. I see no problem having it broken up into multiple articles the way it is now for ease of information sharing, this is done for many other topics as well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by WildWikiGuy (talk • contribs) 04:48, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • A disambiguation page would confuse the issue, because we're talking about one product. There should be one umbrella article that explains everything about Symbian.--Lester 02:00, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
To me, that seems like saying that Microsoft_Windows is one product and that everything from Windows_3.x through Windows_7 should be in one umbrella article. There is, for good reason, an umbrella article; but, there are also detailed articles about significant versions of Windows. The same pattern is appropriate for an OS that is more widely deployed than Windows.
I did not even know that there were two pages on the same subject until I saw the AFD. Talk about confusion. Andries (talk) 22:27, 4 June 2010 (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.