Talk:Terry A. Davis

"Created and designed an entire OS by himself"

This keeps getting taken out of the opening sentence so I'm just going to quote guidelines from MOS:LEAD, WP:PEACOCK, and WP:EXPLAINLEAD:

• The first sentence should tell the nonspecialist reader what, or who, the subject is ... For topics notable for only one reason, this reason should usually be given in the first sentence. For example: "Amalie Emmy Noether [ˈnøːtɐ] (23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was a German mathematician known for her groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and her contributions to theoretical physics."

• Just the facts: "Dylan was included in Time's 100: The Most Important People of the Century, in which he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation". By the mid-1970s, his songs had been covered by hundreds of other artists."

• The lead of the article should tell a general reader the field of study of the topic, the place the topic holds in its field of study, what (if anything) the topic is good for, and what needs to be learned first in order to understand the article.

The significance of Davis designing the entire OS alone is discussed in a number of the sources.

• Cecil said she “didn’t appreciate what his accomplishment was until this guy from Australia called — John McColl. He likened it to one person building a skyscraper by themselves. That was a way for me as a layperson to appreciate his accomplishment… (source)

• He said it was “kind of hard for a lay person to understand what a phenomenal achievement” it is to write an entire operating system singlehandedly. “It actually boggles my mind that one man wrote all that.” He compared it to construction, saying a man could build a house by himself, but this was “like building a skyscraper by yourself.” (source)

Ilovetopaint (talk) 13:33, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm seeing the same name pop up in both sources -- John McColl, but I can't find anything about him on google. For that reason, the "one computer engineer" sentence and wording like "entire X by himself" stuff seems like undue weight. The second thing that worries me is that I'm not seeing other sources that have acknowledged specifically how hard it is to create your own OS. If we look away from those two articles, do any of the others talk about the significance of him building it alone? The article "God's lonely programmer" mentions how many lines of code and the time he's worked on it, but other than comparing the number of lines of code to what's in Windows 7, it doesn't seem to touch on how or why him creating it all by himself is notable. Eik Corell (talk) 15:05, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Would "an American programmer who created and designed the TempleOS operating system by himself" be an acceptable compromise for the first sentence? — Newslinger talk 19:38, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Certainly better, but I think the same thing could be said without putting too much weight on the email mentioned in the Dallas Chronicle article. My suggestion would be "an American programmer who created and designed the TempleOS operating system". That way, his central role in development is still underscored, but without the seemingly unwarranted focus on the significance of him actually being the sole developer. Eik Corell (talk) 18:09, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

These edits miss the point. Readers cannot infer from those wordings that he built the OS from scratch. As in, every single component including the coding language. Most laymen would assume that the OS was "designed" by Davis, sure, but by plundering some of its components from elsewhere. He didn't, as far as I know, and that's what's unique about his accomplishment. I'm not an expert so I can't say for sure if Davis really "built a skyscraper". But if he did, then for the sake of nonspecialists such as myself, the extraordinary quality of this undertaking must be explained clearly from the get-go. Ilovetopaint (talk) 12:10, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm a little concerned about the stability of the article (which is a good article criterion), and I've temporarily withdrawn the good article nomination until this is definitively resolved. Would any editors here be interested in a request for comment or dispute resolution noticeboard case to determine how Davis's role in TempleOS should be described in the lead section? — Newslinger talk 00:41, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

• I've reworded so that it's simply described as a "complex and unusual undertaking for one person". ILTP (talk) 00:14, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

  If the others are okay with it, then it looks fine to me. The image copyright issues are also holding me back from renominating, but I am not familiar enough with the TempleOS website archive to be of much use there. — Newslinger talk 13:22, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Is it correct to give this guy any wikipedia attention for being a schizophrenic who wrote a long but useless spaghetti code of a program, even if he died prematurely at a young age? I know others who have done far more and without any recognition on this website. I don't mean to fully discredit his computer program or his skills or motive, others can do that, what I do mean is: can we use this as precedent to start writing wikipedia articles for anyone who thinks his github project is important ... or should we only include those who did it during a mental breakdown while living with mom and dad on the government dime? My sarcasm is intentional and not personal, but is this really the forum? A793b4 (talk) 19:12, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

That's not relevant here. Regardless of what you think, Davis and his operating system have been covered by an extensive amount of sources, and both him and the OS are notable enough to be covered by Wikipedia. If you think there are other people that are more notable, feel free to create an article about them. The difference between this and some unknown GitHub project is that TempleOS has a legitimate impact, just like Windows or MacOS. PeterPrettyCool (talk) 00:16, 4 December 2021 (UTC)