Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/OpenBSD/Archive1

OpenBSD[edit]

It's been a while since the peer review; references, images and further expansion of the content took place during that run. Now that it has been completed the next step is to attempt to obtain feature status for the article. All of the work within it seems to be factual and the article has reached a fairly stable and presentable state. I think it needs some outsider opinion, but otherwise seems comparable to previously featured articles. Janizary 04:51, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Peer review request here. LordViD 05:56, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Object. It seems to me there are too many subheadings with only one parragraph of text in them. Is there any way the article could be re-oraginsed to reduce the number of these headings? Also I can't see anywhere in the article where it establishes the notability of the operating system. What sort of install base does it have? Especially how does it compare to other BSDs and Linux? --Martyman-(talk) 05:06, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Also the last half of the article seems list heavy. Is the large list of developers needed? Maybe it be spun off into another article and replaced with prose describing the major developers and their contributions. --Martyman-(talk) 06:17, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I thought the article covered it's security focus fairly well; that is what makes it a notable operating system. I could not say what kind of an installation base OpenBSD has, because noone keeps tabs on that - noone can say. Also comparing OpenBSD to Fedora Core or DragonFly BSD isn't the point of the article, why would it be comparing OpenBSD to other systems in an article about OpenBSD? The Gentoo Linux article doesn't compare it to Mac OS X and Windows XP. With the lists, the Developer list sort of spiraled out of it's original intent of being a small list of the really noteworthy developers into being more of a larger contributors list, in part because of developers prodding - Nick Holland insisted that a lot of the people were more important than him. Janizary 06:28, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A comparison with other operating systems would help readers not familiar with OpenBSD better understand it. Without any sort of comparison or usage info how do we know if this is a OS that no-one but the developers use, or is it a widespread desktop operating system or driving a large percentage of web servers, etc... The Gentoo article is not up for featured article status. --Martyman-(talk) 10:49, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've tried to address some of your and other's issues. I'm thinking about how to address your question of where OpenBSD fits into the scheme of things. There are a lot of anecdotes and not that many statistics on usage, and it's also hard to do a direct comparison (it's a wide area, and much of it is hard not to be POV :-) - but I'll have a go at some point. Aside from this point, if you (or anyone else) have any further comments now, they would be appreciated. NicM 12:54, 9 December 2005 (UTC).[reply]

I think most of my objections have been resonably resolved. I don't have the time at the moment to go through to whole article and get a proper idea of whether anything else needs doing, but I have withdrawn my object to it becoming featured. --Martyman-(talk) 04:48, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Object. The Table of Contents is very messy, I would suggest on cutting down on the subsections and merging sections together. There are some inline html references which need to be converted to inline citations (See Wikipedia:Footnote). I don't think the Screenshots should be confined to their own gallery at the bottom, they should be used beside the context in the main sections of the article. There are quite a few lists in this article too, which I think should be converted to prose. The lead didn't strike me as very impressive. — Wackymacs 08:28, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Issues that have been mentioned have been fixed, looks good now.— Wackymacs 10:43, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Object – 1. Too many subheadings. Please reduce it. 2. Page size is on the higherside, please reduce the size by rewriting it in summary style. 3. =Developers=; =Hackathons= etc should be removed. 4. Screenshots should be spread out across the page. 5. Please use footnotes instead of inline external links. =Nichalp «Talk»= 08:31, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Nichalp, there is a discussion here about styles of referencing. In-line citations are infact required, see FA criteria. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't see anything wrong with the current system. Raven4x4x 06:14, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - Footnotes are inline citations, they are just much better style than adding direct links from within articles. The article is already using footnotes for the references. I believe Nichalp was refering to the direct links from within the text which aren't actually refernces (eg. Chuck Cranor). --Martyman-(talk) 06:58, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    - I think he was probably referring to the mixture of inline references and footnotes which I modified yesterday so that they are all footnotes. NicM 08:53, 10 December 2005 (UTC).[reply]
- I know about the styles, but having direct links is not only ugly, it creates a bit of a reading mess in the print and aural versions of the page. =Nichalp «Talk»= 04:40, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - Just to get this straight, you think that non-reference links, such as Chuck Cranor and ProPolice, should appear as footnotes instead? Yes? NicM 08:37, 12 December 2005 (UTC).[reply]
    - Yes, you got what I'm saying. If they are notable enough, create a wikipedia article and link to the site from that article. =Nichalp «Talk»= 04:19, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      - Done. NicM 08:05, 13 December 2005 (UTC).[reply]
Comment: Didn't the projects only vulnerability happen because Theo ran an unsecure IRC client as root on the projects CVS servers [1], seeing as this one even is pretty important in the history of the project more details on how it came about would be nice. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:36, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- I can't find any collaborating source for the IRC client comment, but I'll add a few more details of the OpenSSH vulnerability to the article. NicM 11:02, 17 December 2005 (UTC).[reply]
  - The IRC client thing (although I haven't find anything else yet giving that as a reason) is probably this. NicM 11:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC).[reply]
    - Details are a little thin on the ground on how this happened but it appears it was on the OpenBSD FTP server, which was (and still is) run by the University of Alberta on Solaris (rather than the CVS server, which is run by Theo). I (think I) saw one mention that it may have been an unpatched OpenSSL exploit, but I haven't seen any other evidence. The trojan was fairly primitive and didn't have much effect; I'm not sure whether or not it's worth mentioning this in the article. NicM 12:09, 17 December 2005 (UTC).[reply]