Talk:Michael Meeks (software developer)

Another bio target

I just reverted the picture Michaelmeeks.jpg from the version uploaded by single contribution editor User:Praisethelord5. Shenme (talk) 10:27, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Christian?

Why is it so important to note that Michael Meeks is a Christian? Heck, it's the only sourced statement of the article! --DanielPharos (talk) 16:10, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Proposed Deletion

I removed the WP:PROD tag added by User:Risker as this article is not suitable for casual deletion. As a general reader on FOSS, Meeks seems clearly notable to me, having been involved in GNOME, a key developer at OpenOffice.org, a founder of The Document Foundation and now the head of an open source development company, Collabora Productivity, employing several LibreOffice deveopers. The fact none of this is reflected in the article is a reflection on the lack of effort editing it rather than on his lack of notability. If editors would like to improve the article, I'd suggest searching lwn.net for references to Meeks as a first start. ClareTheSharer (talk) 04:31, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

See now, I looked at lwn.net and was pretty sure it wasn't a reliable source; it looks like user-contributed content without significant editorial oversight. There's very little out there that even substantiates what's in the article now, let alone adding anything to it. I mean...it's cool that he's an open source developer, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of open source developers (including a pile who work for the WMF itself, let alone its volunteer developers). There needs to be some kind of actually usable reference sources that illustrate his importance. Being one of dozens of GNOME and OpenOffice developers isn't there, and I can't find anything that describes him as a "head of" or "lead developer" for either of those projects. Aside from the current executive director of The Document Foundation, Meeks is the only founder who has his own article. Collabora has its own article, and if appropriate (he's a vice president, people at that level don't normally rate their own articles) some of this information can be merged there - although that article needs lots of work too, as it's far too reliant on its own website, and completely fails to explain how the work of its employees on important open source projects benefits the company and its customers. I'll give further thought to taking this to AfD; the reason this article came to my attention was that there was major vandalism in it for months, and nobody had noticed. Risker (talk) 05:27, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi @Risker: thanks for your reply! Hope you're doing well. I can speak specifically to the question of LWN -- I recently wrote an article for them, and went through an editorial process to do so (submitted a query, revised through multiple drafts with an editor, responded to both big-picture feedback and line edits from that editor, am getting paid for the article). Here are more details on writing for LWN. Hope this helps, and best wishes! Sumana Harihareswara 13:08, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Indeed, LWN is strongly edited; don't confuse the articles (which are commissioned for-fee by editors with good subject matter experience) and the comments (which are user-contributed). I regard it as one of the most reliable sources in its subject area - more likely to be accurate than CNet, ComputerWorld et al. On the other topics I think a balanced view would regard Meeks as notable but not highly so, but I'll save that for the AfD! ClareTheSharer (talk) 23:19, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

question about additional citations

A lot of the information in this article appears to come from an interview by Richard Morris in February 2009 at this website:

https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/michael-meeks-geek-of-the-week/

Is this a good reference?Michael9422 (talk) 18:22, 20 February 2017 (UTC)