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Latest revision as of 22:53, 7 December 2024

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 keep‎. I see a consensus to Keep this article given the changes made and sources found. It sounds like additional work is called for so I hope those editors arguing to Keep can make some time to improve thi one. Liz 22:53, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Free Internet Chess Server

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Free Internet Chess Server (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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The references that are presently in the article aren't reliable sources, and I wasn't able to find significant coverage of the subject in reliable sources. I can find mentions in, for example, Nature (, "The Glicko system . It is used by Free Internet Chess Server") and in the New York Times (, "The Free Internet Chess Server (freechess.org) says that it has more than 300,000 users."), but nothing more substantial. toweli (talk) 17:24, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Games, Internet, and Websites. toweli (talk) 17:24, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
• Comment it looks like Linkrot has slain several of the URLs proposed in the prior AfD 14 years ago. Were you able to find anything for those using the Internet Archive? Jclemens (talk) 18:14, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

  Only the beginning of the New Straits Times article is visible (), where FICS hasn't been mentioned yet, and I wasn't able to find the article outside of the HighBeam website. The ChessBase article () doesn't contain significant coverage of FICS. freechess.50webs.com isn't a reliable source, and the rest of the links aren't specific, just being search results. toweli (talk) 18:28, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

• This is going to be a tough one. The subject is an internet service that started in the earliest days of the web, for which a lot of the sourcing would be web-based, but which reached peak popularity in the era most affected by linkrot. For a bit of history, first there was the Internet Chess Server. The ICS effectively split in two when someone decided to try to commercialize it, forming the subscription-based Internet Chess Club. FICS was started by ICS developers/users who wanted to commit to having a free place to play chess on the internet (this was long before chess.com, lichess, etc.). In the late 90s and early 00s, both ICC and FICS were known by basically every English-speaking internet-connected chess player, and it would be shocking if there weren't enough sourcing to meet WP:GNG, but linkrot is indeed a concern. In addition to various brief mentions, presence in lists, etc., I see it's been used for several studies e.g. dois 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008367, 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005961, and Picussa, J., Ferreira, M. V. R., García, L. S., Direne, A. I., Bueno, J., & Hallberg, G. B. (2007). A User-Interface Environment for an Online Educational Chess Server. Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on WWW/Internet, 252–257 (no DOI), which are all available through TWL. Also, I'm not sure Chess Life and other prominent chess publications have ever been fully digitized/searchable, and they would certainly have a few articles that deal with it. At the end of the day, we need notability based on extant sources but we also need enough accessible sources to write an article. While my sense of the subject leads me to !vote Keep, I'd generally add that if accessible sources can't be find, this is at least a Not delete for being an obvious candidate to merge into the Internet Chess Server article. — Rhododendrites \\ 18:38, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks. This is precisely what I was suspecting/getting at with my above questioning, although I've never been an online chess player. Jclemens (talk) 19:37, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

  Though not easily searchable, Chess Life is available on line. I haven't found a better way to search it than googling "site:uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com" + search term. Googling "site:uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com FICS" yields a few hits but also a lot of false positives. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 01:56, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

• Keep Passes WP:SIGCOV. Just a note that it is important to search in chess source by the acronym FICS as well as by the complete name to see all text referring to the Free Internet Chess Server. There is coverage in the following books (some are in snippet view but the "FOUND INSIDE" view on the search page was promising) and journals: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , etc. Best.4meter4 (talk) 00:32, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  Source 19 and the Sage journal are inaccessible in their entirety. Could you give an overview of what their contents are? Has one ever considered Magneton? Pokelego999 (talk) 03:21, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

• Keep per above. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:57, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
• Delete 4meter4's slapdash citing of trivial coverage is precisely not how AfDs are supposed to operate. Rather than saying there are WP:LOTSOFSOURCES, we should confirm which ones, if any, are significant. From that list it is not confirmable whether SIGCOV exists, and the fact that most are clearly trivial makes me lose faith in whether 4meter4 has actually checked before making that claim. People are free to recreate the page afterwards as a redirect if they add some info from a reliable source to Internet chess server, but there does not seem to be anything to merge. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 01:18, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  What about Rhodo's sources? Plus, I sampled 4 sources, and all of them had a few paragraphs of significant coverage. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:46, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  "Being used for studies" does not constitute significant coverage. Whatever the study is researching is what is being covered there, rather than the tools used to accomplish the research. As for the SIGCOV it would help if you said which specific sources, since almost everything I noted was trivial or I could not access enough to determine whether there was sufficient content. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 02:54, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  Okay, I misread Rhodo's sources, sorry about that.
  , for example. 3 paragraphs describing what it is (and in a major instructional book). It addresses the subject directly and in detail enough to extract the information without OriginalResearch, thus it is SigCov. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:51, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  So, if I want to provoke you into a delete !vote, all I have to do is cite a bunch of random trivial mentions? I'm sure that's not really the case, but it sounds like you're objecting to what you consider to be an undisciplined source search rather than the notability of the topic. Jclemens (talk) 03:11, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  If you cite 20 trivial mentions, then I'm probably not going to read through all of them and pick out what few, if any, are significant. People are not required to check every single source carefully before !voting. The admin can determine whether someone is being negligent with their vote and discount it, but frankly they're not likely to bother either because the burden is on the article creator, not them. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 01:02, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

• Update: I made several edits to the page, adding some citations, reorganizing, and removing a lot of the poorly sourced how-to material. Some of the sources aren't going to help notability, but a few are, so I'll draw your attention to (a) a recent book, The Chess Revolution, where it looks like FICS comes up on several pages. My Google Books preview is limited, but it's clear it's more than brief mentions. (b) an article in The Chicago Chess Player is exactly the sort of thing we'd see more of if this weren't in the early/pre-web era. Most chess publications at the time would've had articles on FICS, either on its own or as part of the ICS/ICC saga or in the context of internet chess more broadly. If folks have archives of Chess Life or the various regional publications, it would be worth a scan of issues from the latter half of the 90s. — Rhododendrites \\ 21:11, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  Chicago Article appears to start on page 9 Aaron Liu (talk) 21:17, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Video games-related deletion discussions. Schützenpanzer (Talk) 00:21, 28 November 2024 (UTC)
• A couple of comments:

• Chess Life is indeed available online, at . It can be painfully slow to load, for example, the issues for one year (such as 1996), but once loaded, they are easily searched. I am a subscriber, and I don't remember reading anything about FICS in it from back then, but that was a long time ago. I heard about FICS on the forums, where the drama of the split between ICC and FICS played out. I do not play online chess, but you couldn't miss that if you were on chess forums.
• This AfD looks like a follow-up to, or precursor of, the recent AfD of Free Internet Backgammon Server (FIBS), which ended in deletion. If we end up keeping this one, perhaps we should apply the same search techniques to find more substantial sources for the other one. Bruce leverett (talk) 02:31, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

This is another example of what could be called "internetism", a strain of deletionism that asserts that if something cannot be easily found on the internet then it isn't notable. FIBS was indeed a significant early backgammon site and still functioning today. Afd's such as this one only add to Misplaced Pages's inherent WP:RECENTISM bias, in which for example recent sports events are given significantly more detailed coverage than earlier ones. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 03:01, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

The article in The Chicago Chess Player includes an interview with Daniel Sleator by "Tim Krabb" , "for an article in New In Chess magazine about Internet chess (which will appear mid-May". So if anyone has access to 1996 issues of NIC, that looks like an excellent place to look Bruce leverett (talk) 04:20, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Comment while I agree there seems to be some concerns over the depth of coverage, I do have to concur with Zx that 4meter4's sources are a bit hit or miss. A large chunk just briefly mention the server as a host for something, or the fact it exists. A few sources seem promising (Such as a few of the book sources) but those I'm unable to access in their entirety, so I can't gauge their depth of coverage properly. I won't vote one way or the other just yet since I'd like to see some more research be done into some of these sources, but I do feel this discussion would benefit from a more thorough BEFORE. If nothing else springs up in the next few days, I'll take a look myself. Has one ever considered Magneton? Pokelego999 (talk) 03:25, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting, no consensus here yet.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz 22:36, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

• Keep per Rhododendrites. To be sure, this kind of early-web topic is tricky to source with sources Misplaced Pages considers reliable, but while borderline, it does appear that this is on the keepable side of the line to me. I wouldn't exactly use this AFD as precedent elsewhere but it seems like there is sufficient coverage, even if I wouldn't hold my breath for this becoming a FA. SnowFire (talk) 19:37, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

  Which sources, exactly, compelled you to !vote Keep? Given the lack of explanation from others with the same opinion, apparently taking the WP:LOTSOFSOURCES standpoint, it would be useful to know, as I might even do the same if I saw some excellent sources. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 08:46, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  Nah, I agree with you that we lack excellent sources. Just that sometimes 20 weak sources or passing references can be enough. It's not optimal, but it's workable. SnowFire (talk) 15:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  I mentioned previously that Internet chess server does exist, and information about it can easily be expanded there unless better sources are found. Given that the exact same info would likely be in both places, do you believe this to also be inadequate? ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 10:10, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

• Keep: This is a tough case but the book sources from 4meter4 and Rhododendrites appear to have enough about this subject to meet the WP:NBASIC as the coverage is just beyond trivial. At the very least some of this info should be included in Internet chess server but I think this ought to be kept as its own article. Let'srun (talk) 13:36, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

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.