Talk:Conference management system

Removal of external links

WP:EL has clear guidelines on what should or should not be included. These external links all fail the criteria for linking. In particular:

• "Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article ..."

• "Sites with other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article"

• "Sites which fail to meet criteria for reliable sources yet still contain information about the subject of the article from knowledgeable sources".

In other words these links don't enhance the article, can't be integrated into it, aren't independent and informative.

On the other hand they meet the following criteria for not linking:

• "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article"

• "Links to sites that primarily exist to sell products or services"

andy (talk) 12:59, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I most strongly disagree:

• I can find nothing in this stub page that violates a pragmatic interpretation of WP:EL, at least not in the sense that this page has any form of spam problem
• I believe that WP:EL is badly phrased as it could be interpreted to contain unrealistic demands that are fortunately commonly ignored by editors for good reasons, and I start to wonder whether I will have to spend time with injecting some realism into that (comparatively little known and obscure) guideline
• There are plenty of very useful pages on Wikipedia that discuss and compare software and provide links to these, e.g. List of video editing software and Comparison of video editing software, and I very much hope that this article evolves in a comparable fashion.
• As someone who is regularly involved in organizing scientific conferences, and therefore have used some of the linked systems and recommended them to colleagues, I am most interested in the topic and – like in many other areas of specialized software (e.g., video editing) – I find that Wikipedia is an excellent forum for compiling knowledge and references on such specialist interest topics.
• There is nothing to be gained from deleting this material – harddisk space is cheap.
• The page is already the result of merging more specialized single-product pages such as Open Conference Systems, so please understand that the cleanup that you are so eager to perform has already happened in a more pragmatic form and you are only destroying the result!

I'm therefore reverting your edits and ask you not to delete this useful material again unless you can demonstrate that this is a wide consensus and not just your personal view. I very much hope that you are not going to extend your war against links to software products to the hundreds of comparable and very useful articles that Wikipedia contains. If you simply think that Wikipedia must not contain links to commercial software, why not start at Windows Vista? In other words, unless you have a specific interest in the topic (demonstrated by constructive contributions to the page), please go away. There is no need for your eager policing services here otherwise. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with any of the owners of the sites linked and just practically interested in the topic. Markus Kuhn (talk) 15:13, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

More about external links

Simply crippling the links like this doesn't help. In fact it makes things worse because the links no longer work.

Not only does this list fail WP:EL but it now also fails WP:LIST and in particular WP:EMBED.

andy (talk) 15:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Merge proposal

This article is primarily an overview of typical software functionality required to support abstract submission and reviewing. There's already a well established article at Abstract management that gives a broader view of the process but only makes a passing reference to software. andy (talk) 16:21, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I've written a new section for Abstract management based on this article and some other stuff. andy (talk) 18:50, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The title of the article Abstract management is too restrictive: in many fields, it is not customary to peer review just abstracts, but only full papers for conferences. So if you want to merge the content of this article in, please also consider broadening and renaming Abstract management into something more appropriate, e.g. Conference program committee or Conference submission management. After that, I would be happy with a merger. Markus Kuhn (talk) 20:05, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The push to combine this to Abstract management specifically fails to address the other components of conference management in a meaningful way: conference organization, session scheduling, publishing of not only proceedings but other ephemra. 71.96.130.61 (talk) 17:47, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Quite. That Idea is a year old so I've removed it. andy (talk) 22:51, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

List of systems that can be used to manage conferences

I have listed a few systems that can be used to manage academic conferences online, especially the work-flow of collection and review of papers and sending of notifications to authors. Please help in expanding this list. Nikhil Wason (talk | contribs) 10:23, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

• I've removed the section per the discussion earlier on this page about external links andy (talk) 10:25, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
• Ok. I just read that discussion. By the way, how about creating a new page with a comprehensive list of such systems? Do you recommend that? Nikhil Wason (talk | contribs) 10:33, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

• Such things usually get deleted - see WP:NOTDIRECTORY, particularly the comment that "an article is a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject". andy (talk) 10:40, 6 June 2010 (UTC)