The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Overall consensus is to keep (non-admin closure) – Davey2010 ^{Merry Xmas / Happy New Year} 22:52, 21 December 2015 (UTC) reply

Illegal prime

Illegal prime (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)

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An "illegal prime" is an illegal number that happens to be a prime number; it appears that the idea is interesting to some people because you can put it on a website or something and say "hey, check out this prime number", and then the legal case against you might be weaker than if you were just publishing a random illegal number. (This is all rather theoretical, because the specific information being encoded in the examples cited, the code for the DeCSS program, has already been published in its full form by many people, in most cases with no legal repercussions.) Anyway, this concept, whether interesting or not, seems to lack notability. Of all the references here, most are to self-published websites (which probably shouldn't be getting cited at all), one is to a Wall Street Journal article that doesn't specifically mention illegal primes, and finally there's a short article in The Register which, if I'm counting correctly, spends 2 of its 6 sentences talking specifically about illegal primes. There simply does not appear to be any significant coverage of this concept. Korny O'Near ( talk) 00:42, 7 December 2015 (UTC) reply

• Keep. The Prime Pages is a respected site we often cite. The Register had a second article later. [1] Google quickly finds more sources, e.g. [2] in Math Horizons, [3] in ExtremeTech, [4] in SF Crowsnest, [5] by Rael Dornfest in O'Reilly, [6] by David S. Touretzky at Carnegie Mellon University. Disclosure: I have cooperated online with the discoverer Phil Carmody on other things but not worked on illegal primes. PrimeHunter ( talk) 01:25, 7 December 2015 (UTC) reply

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. sst✈ ^(discuss) 01:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC) reply

• Keep It seems easy to find a source demonstrating notability such as Prime Numbers: The Most Mysterious Figures in Math. It might be sensible to merge with the more general page of illegal number but that's not done by deletion. Andrew D. ( talk) 09:30, 7 December 2015 (UTC) reply
• Keep. Not a high-quality nomination - David Gerard ( talk) 13:47, 7 December 2015 (UTC) reply
• Merge with illegal number, obviously. Reyk _YO! 14:05, 7 December 2015 (UTC) reply
• Merge with illegal number. There's some notability here but the two concepts really aren't independent enough for two separate articles. — David Eppstein ( talk) 04:46, 11 December 2015 (UTC) reply

• Keep I think there is a decent claim to notability made in the article. If the sources are not adequate, the proper course of action is to tag specific claims that are unsourced or improperly sourced with an inline {{cn}} tag, or in extreme cases, place a general tag at the top of the article. We are trying to build an encyclopedia here, not tear it down. Please note, also, that the nominator previously blanked the article and redirected it to illegal number without adding any material from this article to the target. Etamni |  ✉ |  ✓  16:58, 18 December 2015 (UTC) reply
• Keep per PrimeHunter's findings. -- Rubbish computer ( Merry Christmas!: ...And a Happy New Year!) 13:41, 21 December 2015 (UTC) reply

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.