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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)

• 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)
• 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)

• Update: I made several edits to the page, including several citations. Some aren't going to help notability, but a couple are, so I'll draw your attention to a recent book, The Chess Revolution. It looks like it comes up on several pages, but ny Google Books preview is limited. It's clear it's more than brief mentions, though. Also, an article in The Chicago Chess Player is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to get lost in this 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. 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)

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