Draft talk:TSDuck

Criteria for initial article submission

Hi @Lovelyfurball

I wrote the initial draft submission. You declined it for "Submission is about a topic not yet shown to meet general notability guidelines".

May I request more specific information about how the article could become acceptable?

About notability: The subject of the article is TSDuck, an open source project that engineers (including me) have been using for years in everyday operations at most television operators. The project has 1k stars and 1700 discussions (issues and pull requests) on GitHub. The last version was downloaded 10k times (according to GitHub API). The project is mentioned in the article MPEG transport stream as the reference free and open source tools for that kind of TV transmission. For most TV broadcast and streaming engineers, TSDuck is considered as an essential production tool.

About significant coverage: The article describes the principles of operation of the software and all its input and output formats. Shall I add more details? Several open source projects on Wikipedia have articles with less details than this.

About independent and reliable secondary sources: The article mentions 3 technical magazines about television, well-known in that field: IEEE Broadcast, DVB Scene, French CST Letter. Each referenced issue of these magazines has a full article on TSDuck or experiences with it. There is also one technical article from Cisco, and two references on Web sites of other TV protocols (SRT and RIST) which describe how to be used with TSDuck.

The original submission linked to 3 articles on the TSDuck website. I assumed that they are primary sources which cannot be accepted. Since they were the only source I found about the history of the project, I removed the "History" section and those links.

Could you please provide some guidance on how to proceed? Amaillard (talk) 16:33, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

@Amaillard: Of course. First of all, make sure to follow all guidelines at WP:COI if you have any personal connection to the topic. The main issue is demonstrating notability. All articles must meet WP:GNG and this specific topic would need to meet WP:NPRODUCT. Essentially, these two guidelines require an article's topic to have received sustained and significant coverage in reliable, independent sources. The primary sources which were used for the history section actually can be used for uncontroversial statements of fact, they just don't count towards proving notability.

To demonstrate notability, this draft needs to include a couple more references which 1. cover the topic in depth (as in, at least a few paragraphs analyzing/reviewing/discussing TSDuck) and 2. are from independent sources (coverage in more mainstream publications is preferable to industry-specific publications). Lovelyfurball (talk) 18:10, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Another thing to note: while other articles already created may have less detail or sourcing than this, they could also be eligible for deletion. We unfortunately have a large number of articles which we really shouldn't have. The detail of this Wikipedia article itself isn't what's holding it back, demonstrating notability is the issue. Lovelyfurball (talk) 18:14, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

@Lovelyfurball, thank you for the detailed explanation. I will try to address each topic.

Concerning WP:COI, I am not related to the TSDuck project. I am not a contributor of the project. I assume that this can be verified on GitHub. I am not a developer. I am a user of the TSDuck open source project. For that kind of technical topic, I think that you must have got some familiarity with its usage to understand it and write about it. Therefore, being an experienced user seems a basic requirement. I assume that this is not a conflict of interest.

I have no specific interest in this project, except that I find it essential to my daily operations as a TV operator. Colleagues from other similar TV operators have the same feeling and we were surprised by the absence of Wikipedia article on the subject, while all other major open source projects that we use have one. Such projects, which work with TSDuck are now mentioned in the article. They include FFmpeg, InfluxDB, Grafana, and others.

The template, structure, and style of this article are based on the FFmpeg article, another open source project which is extremely popular in the TV and video community and which shares technical similarities with TSDuck (command line tool, use of chains of processing filters/plugins, etc.)

Concerning WP:GNG, well, I don't know what "significant coverage" means. It is highly subjective. On the other hand, there is no doubt about "reliable sources that are independent of the subject". The article mentions published articles in respected technical journals from IEEE and ETSI (DVB). They are publications of official international standard bodies. These articles describe TSDuck and user experiences with it. I can only recommend to read those articles to check. There are also references to online information from renown companies or organizations such as Cisco, SRT Alliance, or RIST Forum, all describing applications of TSDuck.

You mentioned "coverage in more mainstream publications is preferable to industry-specific publications". Humm. This kind of technical topics are rarely discussed in The Guardian or The New York Times. The vast majority of encyclopedic topics are not discussed in mainstream media (that is the idea of an encyclopedia). I often read excellent mathematical articles on Wikipedia and none of these topics are discussed outside mathematical publications.

You mentioned "The primary sources which were used for the history section actually can be used for uncontroversial statements of fact, they just don't count towards proving notability." I have reintroduced the History section if the references are acceptable "uncontroversial statements of fact".

Concerning WP:NPRODUCT, TSDuck is not a commercial product. There is no company behind it, just a few volunteers who apparently work for free on this project. Unlike other well-known open source product, I haven't seen any company offering commercial support or services, at least in the web site or after a basic Google search.

As a last topic, "other articles already created may have less detail or sourcing than this, they could also be eligible for deletion". I understand the idea. We all know that some articles are better than others. Crappy, controversial or commercial-oriented articles should probably be deleted. However, a medium quality article is still better than no article at all. In an era of AI, Wikipedia needs to be richer than ever to remain attractive. Shrinking it would probably endanger it.

I have added a few descriptive sections about TSDuck to enrich the article but I haven't resubmitted it yet.

I hope that I have answered all your concerns. Before resubmitting it, could you please tell if the article is now in an acceptable state or if it should be enhanced again? Amaillard (talk) 18:25, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

One concern is that the "usages" and "principles of operation" sections don't appear to have inline citations. Being a user of the tool isn't a COI so I wouldn't worry about that issue, but those two sections need to have sources. Writing them from personal knowledge is considered original research. I would say that notability is borderline with the sources the draft has now, but a few more good sources with significant coverage (this has a specific definition on Wikipedia, it basically only means the given source discusses the topic in more than a passing reference) could push it over the line. I won't re-review it, but there's a decent chance the draft could be accepted with a couple more good, reliable sources. Thank you for taking the time to write this draft. Lovelyfurball (talk) 22:15, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

Second submission of draft

I have done my best efforts to integrate and implement all recommendations from @Lovelyfurball after the submission of the first draft. I hope this version can be accepted. Amaillard (talk) 09:42, 29 April 2026 (UTC)