Talk:Comparison of reference management software/Archives/2020

Notabilitity (Bibliograph, Docear, Citationsy, etc...)

Hi, I am the developer of the open source online bibliographic data manager Bibliograph (Website, GitHub, Sourceforge, Demo), which would fit very well into the list. Bibliograph is in constant development since 2006 and has been used in production at the Law Department of Humboldt-University Berlin since 2010. It is free to use, change and distribute. But before I start adding the info, I need to make sure that this doesn't violate any guidelines. Do I need a separate page before? Does it meet the standards of notability? Thanks for feedback Panyasan (talk) 19:59, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

In general, adding corresponding rows in the respective tables, for the additional software, should be fine - facts are facts, a feature is supported or its not, the software has a specific license, and the homepage is what it is - there should be no contention re such comparison tables, just get in there and add the rows to the tables... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zenaan (talkcontribs) 05:59, 10 June 2017 (UTC)


Looking through the history of this page I see that many new entries to the table are quickly deleted for not being notable. It is unclear to me how notability is being judged and as a result the list is incomplete. The decisions seem to be just the personal hunch of the user deleting the entries. I am not going to undo the deletions, I don't care enough, but it is worth nothing that this as a result this list is no longer complete enough for many potential uses such a newcomer getting a wide view of the field. --Thomasf2811 (talk) 16:26, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Late response (by almost a year), but: notability for this (and other) comparison/lists tends to be established by the presence of a Wikipedia article. This means the threshold for either an article or inclusion here is the same and determined by Wikipedia:Notability. The downside of this that there may be some programs that may warrant inclusion both here and as an article, but the latter takes more time & so the list is (momentarily) incomplete. But this seems to be outweighed by the big pragmatic advantage that the article deletion process is better-exercised and fairer than other "ultimate deciders" for notability. --Karnesky (talk) 00:10, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
I reverted a recent change where a signed in user (Hugh Paterson III) added 4 items, another user GermanJoe then un-did their submission. The attribute reasons are the same reasons as are described by the discussion between Thomasf2811 and Karnesky. Zenaan above, suggests that if there is an citation manager then add it. The argument offered by Karnesky for Notability is fictitious at best. The Notability page referenced specifically applies to *persons*. Extending it to *things* is in my opinion an over application of the editorial principles. The appeal to over extended editorial practice by pseudonymized users is perceived as a non-neutral point of view, favoring the developers of certain types of software over others.
Please see WP:CSC and WP:GNG which apply to all topics, not only to list of biographical articles. Based on consensus, this approach is commonly used to prevent unsourced bloated lists of secondary or minor entries. This is really the only practical way to keep out promotional editing. Also, Wikipedia is not supposed to serve as a comprehensive product catalog - there are many other sites who already provide such information where interested readers can look for additional minor products. GermanJoe (talk) 18:35, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Yet many users expect that lists (like this one) will be fairly comprehensive. And, with 29 entries, it's hard to see why readers shouldn't expect this to be a fairly comprehensive list! The fact that this page doesn't include Sciwheel (formerly F1000Workspace (see Faculty_of_1000)) but does include obsolete products (CiteULike, Reference Manager, RefME, Sente, WizFolio) and ones that haven't been updated in more than ten years (Bebop, RefDB) strongly suggests that the decision of whether or not certain packages are included is not quite as cut-and-dried as some of the previous comments suggest. Perhaps the average Wikipedia user would be better served by eliminating many of the packages on this page and providing a list of links to some of the "many other sites who already provide such information" that GermanJoe refers to? Jvasil (talk) 22:53, 30 December 2020 (UTC)