[AstroPy] volunteers sought for astropy wikipedia entry

[Perry Greenfield]

On Nov 4, 2013, at 1:47 PM, Ries, Paul A (3265-Affiliate) wrote:

> And unfortunately, after a mere 12 minutes of existence, the astropy wikipedia article has been nominated for deletion by a new page patroller:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Astropy
> 
> 
> 
> For better or for worse, the key to a page surviving its first few days on wikipedia is establishing notability.  So the key to getting the page kept is adding references that establish notability.  
> 
> The "official" guideline for notability:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GNG#General_notability_guideline
> 
> An essay (i.e. less official, but still useful) regarding notability for software:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(software)
> 
> I think that pretty much the best way to achieve inclusion on wiki would be to establish that it's widely used in the astronomical community.  The best way I can think of is if there exist course pages from universities about using the software for astronomical purposes.  Those should be added as references.  Without those, though or something like them, it's likely the article will be deleted.... basically, the sources have to be independent of the astropy project pages and major contributors.  If you can find such sources, they can be added to the article using <ref>[http://www.university.edu/the/page.html]</ref>....  
> 
> Source: experienced wiki editor with votes in over 80 deletion discussions
> 
> ----Paul

I can think of the following things that could be added:

- reference to the A&A paper
- a couple blog references (astrobetter, astrocompute, though I don't know how much these count)
- references to pyfits (since it is now in astropy), many of these could be obtained, but they are probably not direct references to astropy.io.fits, though we should have this added to the FITS listing of modules as the recommended reference.
- that it is part of some linux distributions

Or is your sense that it is premature at this point until more sites reference astropy?

While IRAF obviously has much wider use, it's wikipedia page is lacks much in the way of references (and as far as links go, the only one is to STScI as it turns out.)

Perry