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how-tos (which contrast quite markedly with this), but instead you are clinging to a previously formed conclusion in despite of such things. And it's not even as if you truly believe that language-specific articles whose content can also be found in reference manuals shouldn't exist, as evident from
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Well within scope, as a general introduction to the subject. The material cannot be presented without some degree of technical detail. It's unusual for us to have such thorough sourcing for an article like this, but its good when someone is prepared to take the trouble. (Uncle G, I think you are
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point 4. On the face of it, the subject matter has the multiple non-trivial references satisfying notability. The article presents as information rather than as "textbooks, with leading questions and systematic problem solutions as examples" and so good argument can be made that it satisfies the
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This is a HOWTO. It has no encyclopedic content beyond a straight reproduction of the language reference manual. There is no context outside the MS VB family, no discussion of how undef, Null or NaN are evaluated by comparable tests in other languages. The scope is unencyclopedically narrow,
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and its ilk. Your taking the holding of a previously considered conclusion at AFD to be more important than the actual betterment of the encyclopaedia, with content about a subject that it didn't heretofore cover anywhere, is rather disappointing, I have to say. It's certainly not what
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doesn't say that articles should be deleted because they don't happen to cover quite unrelated subjects in the same field, or because they are about specific computer language families, or even because (Oh, the very idea!) an encyclopaedia article
463:, may be appropriate for inclusion in a Knowledge (XXG) article", the quality of the subject article, and the fact that it discusses the function in the context of a range of platforms. I suspect, however, that other non-microsoft platforms have
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NOTHOWTO advice. And though I can kinda see reasons for not wanting to dissect in minute detail on wikipedia every software platform, I'm persuaded by NOTHOWTO's "Other kinds of examples, specifically those intended to
551:: When I first saw this, my eyes glazed over. There are just 11 or 12 concepts for the whole article. But there are 27 citations, 15 sources, 7 further readings, and a 6 by 6 summary table. This brings to mind
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of the latter point.) I was hoping that you'd notice that you were talking about an article that had changed at the very time that you wrote your rationale, with a simple nudge and a pointer to things that
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perhaps excessively optimistic about the care that people closing discussions will always take; and we have no way of determining which arguments are good except by seeing the consensus on them.)
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that "Other kinds of examples, specifically those intended to inform rather than to instruct, may be appropriate for inclusion in a
Knowledge (XXG) article." This rationale was applicable when
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have, that isn't in the article before us, is instructional content telling someone step-by-step how to do something. Policy is quite clear that what it is talking about is
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focussing only on how to achieve one task, on one platfrom. Fortunately it's not as uselessly patronising as the MSDN article, but that's just MSDN for you.
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content has been substantially improved from what I saw but it still is essential a HOWTO and just a rehash of information already available from MSDN.
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the others elsewhere. And, funnily enough, there's not a peep raised there about the idea that discussion of sets of standard library functions, in
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650:) firmly places the article in the category of informing. Though some sentences in the article instruct, this can be addressed through editing.
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somehow. It could be saved by having a purpose: more depth, better context, or some contrast to something related. It is effectively one big
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Don't bend the policy out of shape to prevent changing an AFD rationale. That's putting the cart entirely before the horse. One thing that
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families of computer programming languages, is a "how-to". That's because the whole "It's a how-to." idea is pretty much a red herring.
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This is a discussion, not a vote. It's the actual rationales that count, not how many times someone happens to use boldface.
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and thus that we're seeing only a subset of the information one might expect to inhabit the is function namespace. --
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Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a
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Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a
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issues, which seems unlikely from the discussion, they can be dealt with through the normal editing process.
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and does not violate any policies or guidelines. Proponents of deletion primarily cite the policy
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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below.
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Excellent. You are allowed to vote keep, should you wish, Uncle G. --
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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate.
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tells the reader what can be found in another reference work
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Knowledge (XXG) is not a software instruction manual.
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474:22:00, 19 January 2011 (UTC) & again at --
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310:Still
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70:(née
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