Talk:Floppy disk
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Revert or Retitle Article
Locke Cole has made a massive change to this article which has changed its content from covering all "Floppy Disk" art to just covering "Standard Floppy Disk" art, i.e., in his opinion the "most popular (and commercially available)
" art, which gives us the alternative of renaming the article or reverting the changes, which IMO amount to disruptive editing. This comes from an ongoing discussion as to what qualifies as a "floppy disk" which never reached consensus. Cole believes the term is limited to the high-volume standardized ones but there is no question that are floppy disks other than the so-called "standard" include ones such as the frequently called super floppies that were popular and in high volume. The article now reflect his opinion; to cite a few contradictory reliable sources:
- "The Zip Drive and its high-capacity floppy disks never really replaced the standard floppy, but of the many “superfloppy” products that tried, only Iomega’s came close." (PC Magazine, 2022)!
- "SuperDisk is a type of high-capacity floppy disk that provides increased storage compared to traditional floppy disks " (Lenovo, 2025)
- Jim Porter, a market analyst and storage historian, for at least 8 years (1992-1999) published a series of market analysis reports that categorized as high capacity floppy disk drives the ZIP, SuperDisk and all of the other drives collectively known as super floppy disk drives
- There is no dispute that ZIP was commercially available and very popular while some of the FDs remaining were not very popular
- (Laser Servo-120) A high-capacity floppy disk from 3M, Compaq, Panasonic and O.R. Technology that was introduced in 1996, but never caught on. (PC Magazine, current)
This seems to me to be sufficient to establish that such drives and disks belong in an article entitled "Floppy disk." FWIW, Cole denigrated Porter as dead wood, the challenge in finding RSs is that this is about dead products one has to go back to dead wood for RSs. My experience suggests there will be lots of RSing in the in contemporaneous product literature and market analyses but IMO the above is sufficient. So if there is agreement we can revert the Tendentious edits or we should retitle the article and include at least statement that there were other sizes and capacities. Comments? Tom94022 (talk) 19:44, 15 July 2025 (UTC)
- Restore – Locke Cole is trying to push their somewhat strange conviction that only those formats commonly known as "8-inch", "5.25-inch", and "3.5-inch" are proper floppy disks, apparently even requiring a Shugart interface on their drive. They totally ignore the 3-inch floppies used by Amstrad computers during the 1980s, SuperDisks in the exact same jacket as "3.5-inch", and also 3.5-inch-sized Zip disks. Drives were or still are available with Shugart, SCSI, PATA or USB interfaces, without somehow making the disks anything else than 'floppies'. That newly introduced distinction is entirely arbitrary and artificial. Floppy disks are flexible disks in a thin jacket, period. The name points out their physical distinction in contrast to hard disks. --Zac67 (talk) 20:10, 15 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Zac67 You can see my analysis of the sources Tom provided below. But suffice it to say, they seem to support the notion that these other formats are not "floppy disks". We also won't be !voting away sitewide policy, so you can skip the bolded !vote. It means nothing without evidence to support it. —Locke Cole • t • c 14:34, 16 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole: I still cannot comprehend why a high-capacity floppy disk shouldn't be a floppy disk. A green house is a house, isn't it? And a racing car a car? --Zac67 (talk) 10:38, 17 July 2025 (UTC)
- Recalling that WP:NOR is a thing, what do our reliable sources say? The sources provided by Tom (provided above, discussed at length below) carefully qualify "high-capacity floppy disks" from "floppy disks" (sometimes qualified as "traditional" or "standard" where the term may be ambiguous, but otherwise, just "floppy disk"). The first source in this article is Encyclopedia Britannica, which really only discusses "traditional" or "standard" floppy disks, explicitly making this statement:
They were made of flexible plastic coated with a magnetic material and enclosed in a hard square plastic case. The first floppy disks were 8 inches (20 cm) across. In the late 1970s, floppy disks became smaller, with the arrival of 5.25-inch (13.3-cm) models, and the final floppy disks, which debuted in the 1980s, were 3.5 inches (9 cm) in diameter.
No talk of LS-120/SuperDisk, Zip Disk, Jaz Disk, or any other minor format. And Britannica explicitly says 3.5" floppies were thefinal floppy disks
. You can disagree with the sources here on the talk page, but we don't get to use WP:SYNTH or WP:OR to inject what we personally believe into our articles. —Locke Cole • t • c 14:45, 17 July 2025 (UTC)- Sorry, but you're completely ignoring the fact that ED, SuperDisk and ZIP are 3.5-inch floppies. Still, 3-inch floppies are also a thing which you try to exclude here – for what exact reason? They are of low capacity and their drives use the Shugart interface. Your definition for floppy disk is still very hazy. Please use less wording and more precision. --Zac67 (talk) 06:25, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- FWIW, Mee's 1998 book states in a chapter entitled "Data Storage on Floppy Disks" that "From 1971 to 1991, flexible disk capacity increased by a factor of 17.5. ... Today's most popular flexible disk sector servo drive is the 3.5-inch Iomega ZIPTM drive, having a user capacity of 100 MB. ... Forecasts indicated that only 10% of the total number of flexible disk drives marketed in 1997 would be of the high-capacity or superfloppy type." [1]. Not quite a dead tree since it is likely behind a paywall but this should put an end to Cole's tortured use of English to somehow exclude high-capacity floppy disks, like the cited ZIP disk, from this article. I suggest the WP:BURDEN is now on Cole to find RS's to support is POV that high-capacity FDs are not FDs! Tom94022 (talk) 17:08, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- ZIP is not a 3.5" floppy. SuperDisk is a similar shape, and drives are backwards compatible, but they are still different. 3" floppies were a thing, but not to our WP:RS which don't consider them alongside the more widely known 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks that were widely available and commercially successful. —Locke Cole • t • c 03:07, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- Cole is entitled to his POV that somehow ZIP disks are not floppy disks, but this is the Mee, cited above! Mee includes ZIP in his history of Data Storage on Floppy Disks and that should be dispositive. Jim Porter doesn't yet get a Wikipedia article, but this storage industry recognized analyst and historian who published the DISK/TREND Report – Flexible Disk Drives from 1977 to 1994 and was widely cited by manufacturers and institutions makes a similar statement. There couldn't be two more reliable sources. Coles's continues editing of two articles in pursuit of his POV for an extended time without support of other editors is the definition of tendentious editing. Tom94022 (talk) 01:19, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
Cole is entitled to his POV that somehow ZIP disks are not floppy disks
It's also the opinion of most of the sources you've shown so far that are at least accessible.but this is the Mee, cited above! Mee includes ZIP in his history of Data Storage on Floppy Disks and that should be dispositive.
The link you provide above goes to a PDF that is $35. But from the abstract, I can see a chapter titled "High-Capacity Designs". Now I'm not regularly a betting man, but my gut says the discussion of Zip and similar "floppy disks" occurs within that section/chapter. Regardless, it's a source from 1999, and one source, at that. Meanwhile, all three of the sources you provided at the start of this discussion refer to such disks as "high-capacity floppy disks", and only refer to the classic 8", 5.25" and 3.5" as "floppy disks" with no further qualifier. Your DISK/TREND partial examples provided below likewise utilize the qualifier "high capacity" and lack enough context to be convincing. And one source, who stopped publishing in the late 1990's is not as convincing as more recent sources such as two you provided: "The Zip Drive and its high-capacity floppy disks never really replaced the standard floppy, but of the many “superfloppy” products that tried, only Iomega’s came close." (PC Magazine, 2022) and (Laser Servo-120) A high-capacity floppy disk from 3M, Compaq, Panasonic and O.R. Technology that was introduced in 1996, but never caught on. (PC Magazine, current). There's also the Britannica source which lists 8", 5.25" and says the format ended with 3.5" disks. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:11, 21 July 2025 (UTC)- "HIGH-CAPACITY DESIGNS" is not a chapter in Mee's book, it is a section of a chapter entitled, "Data Storage on Floppy Disks," There are no separate sections devoted to physical size or capacity. It seems clear that Mee considers high-capacity FDs and FDDs a sub-set of FDs. BTW the chapter was written by Dave Noble, the person credited with leading the team that developed the first flexible diskette and drive.
- Wikipedia categorizes the ZIP drive as
The Zip drive is a discontinued removable floppy disk storage system ...
. I suspect Cole will now change this article to reflect his POV - An Iomega spokesperson describes the ZIP drive as
... 3.5 inch floppy disks have recently jumped from the ubiquitous 1.44MB floppies to the 100MB ZjpTM disk
[2] Note Briggs even describes it as a 3½-inch disk which is approximately correct.
- I really fail to understand Cole's attempt to use the compound adjective "high-capacity" to exclude a whole class of devices from this article just because sometimes the sources compare "high-capacity floppy disk drives" with just "floppy disk drives" leaving off an implicit "standard" or "low-capacity" adjective. Even Cole imputes an implicit "standard" above. That is no evidence supporting his POV, it is ambiguous at best, so burden still remains on him to produce an RS that "high-capacity" floppy disks and drives are not floppy disks or floppy drives. After all standard floppy disks have a lot of sub-categories such as SSSD, DSDD, ED, HD, etc, and I am sure I can find sources that say some were more or less popular or succeeded one or another, but such history and categorization does not make then not floppy disks.
- Finally I suggest that relying upon categories contemporaneously published by Jim Porter, a recognized storage analyst and historian, in his the DISK/TREND Report – Flexible Disk Drives from 1977 to 1994, widely cited and used by manufacturers and institutions and by used by Denis Mee who wrote the book on Storage History is a far better approach than continuing with Cole's unsupported POV about the ambiguous writings of current authors who possibly know little or nothing about the history of floppy disks and drives Tom94022 (talk) 21:11, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
"HIGH-CAPACITY DESIGNS" is not a chapter in Mee's book, it is a section of a chapter entitled, "Data Storage on Floppy Disks,"
OK, and in the chapter there are six sections with one devoted to "High-Capacity Designs". Seeing that this chapter makes up such a small part of the book makes me even more convinced that they don't directly refer to high capacity formats as straight "floppy disks", but rather always qualify their references to them.It seems clear that Mee considers high-capacity FDs and FDDs a sub-set of FDs.
One that is considered on its own, with its own qualifier, "high capacity".BTW the chapter was written by Dave Noble, the person credited with leading the team that developed the first flexible diskette and drive.
History is replete with examples of creations being named something their creators didn't intend. Noting, again, this source is from 1999, in the middle of the switch from floppy disks to other formats (at the time it was still unclear what would replace floppy disks, would it be Zip disks, CD-RW or...? as it turned out, it was USB mass storage devices that would ultimately replace floppy disks).Wikipedia categorizes the ZIP drive as
So... WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS?The Zip drive is a discontinued removable floppy disk storage system ...
. I suspect Cole will now change this article to reflect his POVhis POV
You keep saying that, but it's our sources POV. You appear very very determined to enforce your POV however, by misreading and deliberately mischaracterizing sources, and so far the only ones that aren't fully addressed are ones stuck behind paywalls or not digitized (and regardless, are 25-30+ years old!). It strains logic to think there isn't easily accessible reliable online sources that can back up your claim that high-capacity "floppy disks" are actually just called "floppy disks".An Iomega spokesperson describes the ZIP drive as
A company spokesperson attempting to aid in the marketing of a product as a "floppy disk" calling it a "floppy disk". In 1996. The modern sources you provided initially clearly consider Zip/Jaz/LS-120 separately and distinct from the traditional 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disk. I would not consider an Iomega spokesperson, nor anything based on statements made by such a person, to be reliably sourced.... 3.5 inch floppy disks have recently jumped from the ubiquitous 1.44MB floppies to the 100MB ZjpTM disk
Note Briggs even describes it as a 3½-inch disk which is approximately correct.
That is no evidence supporting his POV, it is ambiguous at best, so burden still remains on him to produce an RS that "high-capacity" floppy disks and drives are not floppy disks or floppy drives.
As stated previously, it is not my POV, it is our sources. The WP:BURDEN still rests with you to prove your claim that ZIP/LS-120/etc. are "floppy disks" (not "high-capacity floppy disks" or some other designation) and that such designation is widely supported in WP:RS.Finally I suggest that relying upon categories contemporaneously published by Jim Porter, a recognized storage analyst and historian, in his the DISK/TREND Report – Flexible Disk Drives from 1977 to 1994, widely cited and used by manufacturers and institutions and by used by Denis Mee who wrote the book on Storage History is a far better approach than continuing with Cole's unsupported POV about the ambiguous writings of current authors who possibly know little or nothing about the history of floppy disks and drives
So.... lots of words to say, "disregard recent reliable sources because I don't like what they say and they don't support my POV". Obviously I think deferring to sources that are over thirty years old is a mistake, there are more recent sources and just as consensus can change, so too can the opinions of reliable sources looking at a topic retrospectively. —Locke Cole • t • c 14:41, 22 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole, your rejection of Tom94022's paid-to-access references would appear to contradict WP:PAYWALL. These types of reference are allowed and cannot be rejected on those grounds alone. Making a request at WP:RX is the most appropriate way to resolve this. 11WB (talk) 02:25, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
- @11wallisb I did not reject the source because of the pay-wall (I didn't reject the source at all, actually). I did wager the source would not support Tom's claim because, based on the abstract/chapter list, it's already clear the source also uses the more definitive term "high capacity". Also because of the age of the source relative to more recent sources which have the advantage of having more modern understandings of the formats. I do have a request in for access to the Wikipedia Library which should allow me to access most of the paywalled sources (I requested this nearly seven days ago, so it's unclear how long it takes to get a reply). —Locke Cole • t • c 02:49, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
- It was to my knowledge that you only needed to be Extended confirmed to get access to the Wikipedia Library. With over 19k edits, you should have automatically received access a long time ago. 11WB (talk) 03:00, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
- I was granted access, and while IEEE Xplore is one of the resources available through the Wikipedia Library, the specific article Tom is professing is a source is not covered by TWL's subscription apparently. —Locke Cole • t • c 21:56, 28 July 2025 (UTC)
- It was to my knowledge that you only needed to be Extended confirmed to get access to the Wikipedia Library. With over 19k edits, you should have automatically received access a long time ago. 11WB (talk) 03:00, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
- @11wallisb I did not reject the source because of the pay-wall (I didn't reject the source at all, actually). I did wager the source would not support Tom's claim because, based on the abstract/chapter list, it's already clear the source also uses the more definitive term "high capacity". Also because of the age of the source relative to more recent sources which have the advantage of having more modern understandings of the formats. I do have a request in for access to the Wikipedia Library which should allow me to access most of the paywalled sources (I requested this nearly seven days ago, so it's unclear how long it takes to get a reply). —Locke Cole • t • c 02:49, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
- Cole is entitled to his POV that somehow ZIP disks are not floppy disks, but this is the Mee, cited above! Mee includes ZIP in his history of Data Storage on Floppy Disks and that should be dispositive. Jim Porter doesn't yet get a Wikipedia article, but this storage industry recognized analyst and historian who published the DISK/TREND Report – Flexible Disk Drives from 1977 to 1994 and was widely cited by manufacturers and institutions makes a similar statement. There couldn't be two more reliable sources. Coles's continues editing of two articles in pursuit of his POV for an extended time without support of other editors is the definition of tendentious editing. Tom94022 (talk) 01:19, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
- ZIP is not a 3.5" floppy. SuperDisk is a similar shape, and drives are backwards compatible, but they are still different. 3" floppies were a thing, but not to our WP:RS which don't consider them alongside the more widely known 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks that were widely available and commercially successful. —Locke Cole • t • c 03:07, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- FWIW, Mee's 1998 book states in a chapter entitled "Data Storage on Floppy Disks" that "From 1971 to 1991, flexible disk capacity increased by a factor of 17.5. ... Today's most popular flexible disk sector servo drive is the 3.5-inch Iomega ZIPTM drive, having a user capacity of 100 MB. ... Forecasts indicated that only 10% of the total number of flexible disk drives marketed in 1997 would be of the high-capacity or superfloppy type." [1]. Not quite a dead tree since it is likely behind a paywall but this should put an end to Cole's tortured use of English to somehow exclude high-capacity floppy disks, like the cited ZIP disk, from this article. I suggest the WP:BURDEN is now on Cole to find RS's to support is POV that high-capacity FDs are not FDs! Tom94022 (talk) 17:08, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Sorry, but you're completely ignoring the fact that ED, SuperDisk and ZIP are 3.5-inch floppies. Still, 3-inch floppies are also a thing which you try to exclude here – for what exact reason? They are of low capacity and their drives use the Shugart interface. Your definition for floppy disk is still very hazy. Please use less wording and more precision. --Zac67 (talk) 06:25, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Recalling that WP:NOR is a thing, what do our reliable sources say? The sources provided by Tom (provided above, discussed at length below) carefully qualify "high-capacity floppy disks" from "floppy disks" (sometimes qualified as "traditional" or "standard" where the term may be ambiguous, but otherwise, just "floppy disk"). The first source in this article is Encyclopedia Britannica, which really only discusses "traditional" or "standard" floppy disks, explicitly making this statement:
- @Locke Cole: I still cannot comprehend why a high-capacity floppy disk shouldn't be a floppy disk. A green house is a house, isn't it? And a racing car a car? --Zac67 (talk) 10:38, 17 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Zac67 Since someone is using your !vote as a basis for their !vote, I guess this needs a longer reply. First, thanks for the ad hominen attack, I'm sure since we've jettisoned logic out of this discussion your comment about a "strange conviction" will shine as a beacon of truth to those who agree with you.
... apparently even requiring a Shugart interface on their drive
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about here. Can you point to something I've said that supports your claim of what I have astrange conviction
for?They totally ignore the 3-inch floppies used by Amstrad computers during the 1980s, SuperDisks in the exact same jacket as "3.5-inch", and also 3.5-inch-sized Zip disks.
Do you know who else ignores them? Our sources. They refer to them as "high-capacity floppy disks" or by their brand names (SuperDisk/LS-120/etc, Jaz Disk, Zip Disk, etc). So far the only sources produced in this discussion refer to floppy disks as 8", 5.25" and 3.5" disks, and nothing more.Drives were or still are available with Shugart, SCSI, PATA or USB interfaces, without somehow making the disks anything else than 'floppies'.
Their interface has nothing to do with their status as a floppy disk, you're conflating a discussion at Talk:Parallel ATA with the separate discussion of what the primary topic of this article is.That newly introduced distinction is entirely arbitrary and artificial.
You should go write our sources and let them know they're wrong.The name points out their physical distinction in contrast to hard disks.
That's not the only thing the name points out... —Locke Cole • t • c 19:16, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Zac67 You can see my analysis of the sources Tom provided below. But suffice it to say, they seem to support the notion that these other formats are not "floppy disks". We also won't be !voting away sitewide policy, so you can skip the bolded !vote. It means nothing without evidence to support it. —Locke Cole • t • c 14:34, 16 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Tom94022, let's take your issues point by point:
- You can see why I made my
massive change
directly above in #Remove tag bombing of article?. You can also see the steps you'll need to take to restore that material according to policy. You won't be achieving a consensus here to overturn sitewide policy, so any vote you hold here is irrelevant and really wasting time you could have spent finding reliable sources to support the removed statements. - I'm not sure of the distinction you're making between "floppy disk" and "standard floppy disk", those are the same things, you're just putting the word "standard" in front of it which makes it longer..?
in his opinion the "
You do realize the diff you provide shows me removing the passage "most popular (and commercially available)", do you not?most popular (and commercially available)
"which gives us the alternative of renaming the article or reverting the changes
You left out other options: 3) Finding sources for the challenged material and restoring them one by one. 4) Leaving the article as-is and continuing to improve it from here.which IMO amount to disruptive editing
It's disruptive to productively edit articles now? I checked that link and didn't see anything about productive editors being considered "disruptive"...This comes from an ongoing discussion as to what qualifies as a "floppy disk" which never reached consensus.
Correct, and as the WP:BURDEN is on those wishing to include challenged material, without a consensus, the material should not be included. Calling every single product with a magnetic circle and a plastic outer shell a "floppy disk" in the absence of reliable sources supporting that statement is a clear violation of WP:V.Cole believes the term is limited to the high-volume standardized ones but there is no question that are floppy disks other than the so-called "standard" include ones such as the frequently called super floppies that were popular and in high volume.
I'm not sure if you're just being deliberately obtuse, but you even say the quiet part out loud in this quoted passage.floppy disks other than the so-called "standard" include ones such as the frequently called super floppies
... do you see it? They're not called "floppy disks", they're called "super floppies".The article now reflect his opinion
No, the article reflects the sources. You might remember those are the things required by WP:V, a sitewide policy with BROAD support. It's the policy that makes Wikipedia more reliable to our readers and verifiable to our critics. Unless your goal is to make Wikipedia less reliable...?to cite a few contradictory reliable sources
Let's take these one at a time, since you're misreading these to the point of being WP:CHERRYPICKING..."The Zip Drive and its high-capacity floppy disks never really replaced the standard floppy, but of the many “superfloppy” products that tried, only Iomega’s came close." (PC Magazine, 2022)!
Let's start with just the quotation you selected... first, they don't refer to them as "floppy disks", but "high-capacity floppy disks", they use the term "superfloppy" in reference to Zip disks (and similar formats), and then note the product "tried" and that Zip disks "came close". If this source was supposed to be supportive of the notion that Zip disks are just "floppy disks", it's not off to a great start. As we start reading the article, you'll note that 8", 5.25" and 3.5" and referred to as simplyfloppy disk
with no additional qualifier. Finally we arrive at item #5, the "Zip Disk" (not the "Zip floppy disk" or the "Zip high-capacity floppy disk", just "Zip Disk"). We're back to qualified terms, in this case,high-capacity floppy disks
. This is also where your chosen quotation resides, which again, is not very supportive of the idea that Zip Disks arefloppy disks
. Throughout this section and the following one, #6 "Jaz Disk", these products are never directly referred to as just "floppy disks". Rounding out #5 isBut timing is everything. Zip Drives were caught between the era of the floppy and the onslaught of writable CDs that could seek data much faster, plus local networks that made file transfers much easier. EMC bought Iomega, and soon partnered with Lenovo before killing off the Zip drive line.
Now "Zip Disk" isbetween the era of the floppy
implying a Zip Disk is not a floppy disk, andthe onslaught of writable CDs
. When we get down to item #8, "Memory Card", we get another clear delineation between "floppy disks" and, well.. everything else:Originally, memory cards were meant to replace floppy disks or even the high-capacity ones like the Zip.
After that, "floppy" isn't mentioned again in this article (which goes on to cover other storage mediums, such as optical discs and SSD's)."SuperDisk is a type of high-capacity floppy disk that provides increased storage compared to traditional floppy disks " (Lenovo, 2025)
This appears to be a support article from Lenovo about SuperDisks. Confusingly, this doesn't seem to support Tom's notion that Zip disks or LS-120 disks (or SuperDisks as they're called by Lenovo) are "floppy disks". Some select quotations to drive the point home:SuperDisk is a type of high-capacity floppy disk that provides increased storage compared to traditional floppy disks.
Directly compares "floppy disks" (which it notes as "traditional") vs. "high-capacity floppy disk".How does SuperDisk differ from traditional floppy disks?
(section title of the article)The SuperDisk offered a middle ground between floppy disks and optical media in terms of capacity and compatibility. It could store 120 MB of data, making it more capacious than standard floppy disks but less so than CDs or DVDs. Unlike optical media, SuperDisks retained the magnetic storage method, which allowed for backward compatibility with floppy disks.
Here it's more direct, noting that SuperDisk is a "middle ground" between "floppy disks" and optical discs. This passage does note the backwards compatibility the LS-120/SuperDisk drives have with "floppy disks", but backwards compatibility with something does not grant that future product the moniker "floppy disk" by association...Its ability to read and write standard floppy disks as well made it a versatile tool during its peak usage, especially for users transitioning away from floppy disks.
Again, source directly separates LS-120/SuperDisk from "floppy disk".The SuperDisk, or LS-120, primarily supported the FAT12 and FAT16 file systems, which were prevalent during its era. These file systems were extensions of the ones used for traditional floppy disks and early hard drives, facilitating a seamless transition for users moving from standard floppy disks to SuperDisks.
Same as before.
* Jim Porter, a market analyst and storage historian, for at least 8 years (1992-1999) published a series of market analysis reports that categorized as high capacity floppy disk drives the ZIP, SuperDisk and all of the other drives collectively known as super floppy disk drives
Here Tom is telling on himself again, he even bolds the phrase "high capacity floppy disk drives". His external link uses the term "floppy" one time, in this passage:The reports covered optical drives (CD, DVD), floppy disks, hard drives, and removable storage, like ZIP and Bernoulli disks and provide a long-term record of the global storage industry unlike any other
. Again, ZIP and Bernoulli disks are separated and distinct from "floppy disks" in this listing. LS-120/SuperDisk does not even merit a mention here.There is no dispute that ZIP was commercially available and very popular while some of the FDs remaining were not very popular
Not sure what this bullet is meant to prove, but...?(Laser Servo-120) A high-capacity floppy disk from 3M, Compaq, Panasonic and O.R. Technology that was introduced in 1996, but never caught on. (PC Magazine, current)
Again, never called simply floppy disks, there is a qualifier used throughout, in this case,high-capacity
. It notes the backwards compatibility with floppy disks which is not disputed, and then has this caption for a drawing of the disk:LS-120 media looked like floppy disks, but held 80 times as much. Despite this, it never achieved commercial success
. They "looked like" floppy disks andnever achieved commercial success
. But we're supposed to call them "floppy disks" in Wikipedia's voice to appease Tom?
This seems to me to be sufficient to establish that such drives and disks belong in an article entitled "Floppy disk.
If you can read my analysis of your sources above and come away with any idea that we should call them "floppy disks", you and I are clearly speaking different languages.FWIW, Cole denigrated Porter as dead wood, the challenge in finding RSs is that this is about dead products one has to go back to dead wood for RSs.
I referred to the source you provided as "dead wood", and not having access to the source to review it for accuracy and authenticity makes using such a source... difficult. There are plenty of sources in print only that are perfectly reliable, but it seems suspicious that something about technology (especially something you are so fiercely arguing for here) wouldn't have any easily accessible digital sources for support.My experience suggests there will be lots of RSing in the in contemporaneous product literature and market analyses but IMO the above is sufficient
Product literature is not WP:RS, it's actually something we actively avoid precisely because product literature is written by marketing departments, and of course they will refer to themselves as "floppy disks" to try and sway uninformed or easily influenced readers into blindly believing them. It's self-serving, and no evidence of... anything? Except marketing departments lie? Water is also wet, in case you wanted something else obvious.So if there is agreement we can revert the Tendentious edits or we should retitle the article and include at least statement that there were other sizes and capacities.
*sigh* Tom, there is nothing tendentious about my edits. WP:V is very very clear on this. Verifiability is non-negotiable. You will not be !voting away a core pillar of Wikipedia on some far-flung talk page. 100 people could show up and support you and we would still not do what you're asking because we'd be restoring unsourced and unverifiable statements. As noted above at #Remove tag bombing of article?, you had one whole year to find even some sources to support the statements I removed. You did not. If this article means so much to you, I strongly suggest you use the link I provided above as a courtesy and review the statements labelled as needing a citation and set about finding reliable sources to support them. That is how you will "revert" my changes. Not by casting aspersions about my motives and character, or attempting to utilize cherry picked sources which, upon reading, don't even support what you're trying to say!
- You can see why I made my
- TL;dr: The sources don't say what you seem to think they say, or want them to say. You're casting aspersions about my motives and behavior despite the fact that I initiated this conversation over at Talk:Parallel ATA over a week ago before even making any edits to try and see if I had just missed something. No sources were presented, and after a significant amount of back and forth, I edited to remove statements that were not supported by the provided sources. As to the more drastic changes here, there were dozens of unsourced statements in the article that you were well aware of for over a year. You have shown no interest in resolving those issues, referring to the matter as "tag bombing" in a prior discussion above. I'll close by again noting WP:BURDEN and WP:ONUS. Anywhere on this project, the person wishing to add or restore challenged statements is the one who must provide the sources to support those statements. You do not simply get to vote away sitewide policy. —Locke Cole • t • c 14:32, 16 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Stepho-wrs and Nightscream: Pinging users from the discussion above, and also the discussion at Talk:Parallel ATA since Tom is now trying to hold discussions in multiple places simultaneously... —Locke Cole • t • c 14:36, 16 July 2025 (UTC)
- I won't bother to respond in detail, but I will make three points:
- The fact that Cole cannot access the Porter material is irrelevant but FWIW I will put a few links online.
* Porter published "Disk/Trend Report-Flexible Disk Drive" market analyses from 1974 to 1994 mentioning "high capacity floppy formats" as early as 1987 and including them as a separate category beginning 1991, noting "The high capacity and low profile floppy drive designs now entering the production phase are proof that innovation in floppy disk drives is a continuing process."[3]
* From 1994 thru 1999 Porter then included floppy disk drives in his "Disk/Trend Report-Removable Data Storage" from 1995 to 1998 including two categories of floppy disk drives, "low capacity flexible disk drives" and "high capacity flexible disk drives."[4]
Clearly Porter, probably the preeminent storage industry analyst, and a distinguished industry historian, segments all Floppy disks into two types "high capacity" and "low capacity." - We must be speaking a different language - at least in the grammar I am familiar with, when an adjective modifies a noun it can create a subset of that noun, as in large dogs. Here we have a compound adjective "high capacity" modifying a compound noun "floppy disk" or its equivalent "flexible disk" used extensively by Porter when the products were in production and continuing to date in multiple online RS citations. Collectively these RS's establish that Floppy Disk accurately and completely includes at least high-capacity FDs and low-capacity FDs. Cole's POV is that the adjective somehow excludes the noun. Note that the Magazine article has a section on High-capacity magazines linking to a separate High-capacity_magazine article. I personally am indifferent between one or two articles but the WP:BURDEN and WP:ONUS is on Cole to find a reliable source that "Floppy Disk" does not include high-capacity FDs and in its absence his massive edit should be reversed. Cole is free to create two articles if that is what he thinks appropriate, but then this article becomes, Floppy disk (low capacity)!
- Cole chose to combine two issues into one series of interrelated edits, scope of the article and the many {{cn}} tags. If it is agreed that the definition of FD is inclusive, then the simplest fix is to revert his massive change. He can then remove the material that needs to be removed at his leisure. AFAICT Cole has never made an edit to this article, so it is not clear he has the knowledge to decide that any material "needs an inline citation" other than the date of the tag which doesn't seem to be a particularly strong reason to remove material. FWIW as one who does have experience in this subject area it appears to me that most of the tags do have supporting RS's but it is not worth my effort to find such material. I suspect most of the other editors who actually contribute to this article have felt the same way.
- The fact that Cole cannot access the Porter material is irrelevant but FWIW I will put a few links online.
- Unfortunately, the {{cn}} tag talk above did not provoke any discussion so I took no action; hopefully this one will. Unlike Cole I will wait for a concensus before editing, and to encourage discussion I am notifying editors who have made recent or significant contributions to this page: @Bubba73, ReadOnlyAccount, Surv1v4l1st, Comp.arch, Hairy Dude, Okterakt, Andritolion, Matthiaspaul, and Wtshymanski:
- Tom94022 (talk) 20:48, 17 July 2025 (UTC)
- As you've resorted to WP:CANVASSing, this discussion really isn't going to go anywhere. If you wanted to solicit additional input, you should have considered other WP:DR options such as WP:3O or even a WP:RFC. I will say that it's funny that you won't respond in detail, but then take issue with what made up such a small portion of my reply (the Porter material) and ignore the issues with every other source you provided. WP:COMMONNAME applies to this matter as well, as so far all the sources referring to simply "floppy disks" seem to always refer to the 8", 5.25" and 3.5" formats that were in wide use, not the successor formats which never reached the same success. —Locke Cole • t • c 03:05, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- I have responded in sufficient detail in #2 above, following your strange use of English grammar, 3½-inch FDs are not FDs because they replaced or superseded 5¼-inch FDs. Big Bird is not a bird, but most birds described as big birds, are birds: the burden is on you to find an RS that a high-capacity FD is not an FD. The best way to organize this article would be to follow the Porter taxonomy of 8-inch, 5¼-inch, 3½-inch and high-capacity. Tom94022 (talk) 19:39, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- As you've resorted to WP:CANVASSing, this discussion really isn't going to go anywhere. If you wanted to solicit additional input, you should have considered other WP:DR options such as WP:3O or even a WP:RFC. I will say that it's funny that you won't respond in detail, but then take issue with what made up such a small portion of my reply (the Porter material) and ignore the issues with every other source you provided. WP:COMMONNAME applies to this matter as well, as so far all the sources referring to simply "floppy disks" seem to always refer to the 8", 5.25" and 3.5" formats that were in wide use, not the successor formats which never reached the same success. —Locke Cole • t • c 03:05, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- I won't bother to respond in detail, but I will make three points:
- Restore per the reasons given by Zac67 above.--Surv1v4l1st ╠Talk║Contribs╣ 21:15, 17 July 2025 (UTC)
- An AfD for this article was just closed after only 5 hours as WP:SNOW keep, it appears as a result of the discussions in this talk page dispute. My concern are mostly policy related, insofar as I believe a couple have been violated, namely WP:Canvassing above where @Tom94022 pinged 9 editors, of which only 4 are significant contributors to the article in question (according to Xtools). Subsequently, one of the non-significant editors gave his support (@Surv1v4l1st). The AfD was then opened (see above) which I believe violates the WP:FORUMSHOP policy. Would it be possible to resolve WP:COMMONNAME by renaming the article to a hypernym name that encompasses all names, sizes and standards of floppy disk drives, perhaps 'Floppy disk drive', to match the articles Hard disk drive and USB flash drive? I think this is something to consider before any more pages are opened on other parts of the site or before any other policies are potentially violated. 11WB (talk) 07:50, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- (I don't know why those hyperlinks are below my message. Apologies if I messed up the formatting for this discussion. I added my comment in the editor, rather than as a reply.) 11WB (talk) 07:51, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- You didn’t do anything wrong, see {{reflist-talk}}. —Locke Cole • t • c 13:12, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for this. Just wanted to be sure! 11WB (talk) 14:03, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- You didn’t do anything wrong, see {{reflist-talk}}. —Locke Cole • t • c 13:12, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- (I don't know why those hyperlinks are below my message. Apologies if I messed up the formatting for this discussion. I added my comment in the editor, rather than as a reply.) 11WB (talk) 07:51, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- I notified
editors who have made recent or significant contributions to this page
(emphasis added). The article is quite old and most of the significant contributors have not made recent edits so I notified all editors who made 2025 contributions; this is appropriate notification and not in any way WP:Canvassing. The article as it stands could be renamed "Floppy disk (low-capacity)" following the Porter taxonomy but then the deleted material should be resorted some place or it could be reverted and errors, omissions and need references fixed. At this point there hasn't been a lot of discussion but there still is no support for leaving it as it is nor for deleting as Cole apparently suggested. Tom94022 (talk) 19:39, 19 July 2025 (UTC)- I can't comment further on the canvassing claim. My initial message was to point out what I saw, along with the AfD which really shouldn't have been opened. 11WB (talk) 21:23, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- For the article name, as I said in the AfD, having multiple articles for different types of floppy disk would come under WP:BADFORK. 11WB (talk) 21:25, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- I've had a look over everything again (including the now closed AfD, this dispute and some of the other discussions) involving @Locke Cole and @Tom94022. This is coming from someone who has been uninvolved, at this time I genuinely don't see any issues with the article itself. The first few lines of the opening (
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks.
) take care of all the issues surrounding WP: COMMONNAME. There is also the Floppy disk#Sizes section which lists all the different sizes in grid form. New articles for each different variant are not required. If what I've read is correct, Tom wants the article to remain as it is without different articles for different standards, whilst LC wants to WP:TNT the article for a complete rewrite (even though copyediting would achieve this). If so, I would oppose what LC is proposing regarding deleting or WP:Page blanking the current article. I don't believe pinging 9 editors or starting an AfD were the best choices when (as LC said above) different types of dispute resolution procedures exist. My hope is this will be resolved in an agreeable way, as both editors are clearly very knowledgeable of the subject matter and have a strong understanding of which sources are reliable. 11WB (talk) 23:52, 19 July 2025 (UTC)- The thing is, that article intro you quote with "The three floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks" is WP:POV, since it ignores the existence of the other types - those three might have been the most commercially successful versions, but they certainly weren't "The three floppy disks", when many other sizes, like Famicom Disk System discs (which also got removed from the table) or the 3" discs Amstrad pushed existed. It's like a home video tape article which says "the home video tape format was the Video Home System (VHS)" and pretends the likes of U-Matic, Betamax or Video 2000 didn't exist.
- Basically, big parts of the article already got TNT'd by LC in effect. The article as it stood definitely needs work, but that's not the same thing as what LC did. - Psi-Locked (talk) 09:24, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- Those can easily be added to the 'Sizes' section, or a different section specifically listing different types. Your claim on WP:POV I personally don't see in that section. Without looking over the history I can't comment on which editor wrote it, however it is informative and neutral from my perspective. I think if Tom and LC can work out a way to keep the article without splitting it off into new articles, whilst including all agreeable content, this article could very well be resubmitted to WP:GAC (it was WP:FA until 2006, however I think we're a ways off that). Unfortunately, per WP:QF, this article would not qualify point 4 of the criteria. LC has undertaken cleanup, now what remains is to establish exactly which types of floppy disk should be written about (with the rest being listed in the grid). 11WB (talk) 09:39, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- POV is explicit from statements made by LC here and in the AfD. The line originally said "The three most popular (and commercially available) floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks." and they removed the qualifiers (implicitly as WP:UNDUE). What's left is a statement in the intro that there are only three types of floppy disk, which is entirely false. - Psi-Locked (talk) 10:26, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- On POV and whether the article currently has issues with this, I think posting at WP:NPOV/N might be a good idea. 11WB (talk) 11:19, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- If this is the point of contention, then adding a line such as, 'There also other types of higher capacity floppy disks such as...', kept short and brief, with a RS would surely take care of the issue? 11WB (talk) 13:57, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
What's left is a statement in the intro that there are only three types of floppy disk, which is entirely false
I'm glad you think that. Do you have reliable sources to back that statement up? Are you absolutely certain you're giving these also-ran formats (that never gained the type of wide commercial success or wide reliable source coverage of actual floppy disks) due weight? Or is it entirely possible you're pushing a fringe theory? Recall that every single source Tom provided above qualified "floppy disk" with additional descriptors, typically "high-capacity floppy disk". Consider also, MOS:SCOPE and WP:OOS:When the name of an article is a term that refers to several related topics in secondary reliable sources, primary topic criteria should be followed to determine if any of the uses of that term is the primary topic, and, if so, then the scope of the article should be limited to, or at least primarily, cover that topic. For example, Cat is limited in scope to the primary topic for cat, the Domestic cat (which is a redirect to Cat), even though lions and tigers are considered to be "cats" in the broad sense of that term.
The primary topic of this article, based on the sources provided so far, are the 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks. The other variants, which were never widely released, commercially successful, and definitely not widely covered in reliable sources are out of place in article about "floppy disks". They certainly may make sense in our (already existing) Floppy disk variants (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) article, but other than linking to that article from a small note about the variants the primary formats inspired, there's no valid reason to include them here without sources to back that up. —Locke Cole • t • c 18:49, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- POV is explicit from statements made by LC here and in the AfD. The line originally said "The three most popular (and commercially available) floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks." and they removed the qualifiers (implicitly as WP:UNDUE). What's left is a statement in the intro that there are only three types of floppy disk, which is entirely false. - Psi-Locked (talk) 10:26, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- I ought to add, those are only suggestions. I apologise if that came across autocratic in any way. That was not my intent. 11WB (talk) 09:42, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- This is why following the steps at WP:DR such as asking for a WP:3O or starting an WP:RFC would have been better. Of course people who have edited this article directly and left much of what is under discussion untouched/unchallenged are implicitly biased towards maintaining that content. What you did was a clear example of WP:VOTESTACKING. —Locke Cole • t • c 19:00, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- I can't comment further on the canvassing claim. My initial message was to point out what I saw, along with the AfD which really shouldn't have been opened. 11WB (talk) 21:23, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- I notified
- Restore per Zac67. This is ludicrous. - Psi-Locked (talk) 20:02, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- @Psi-Locked, Surv1v4l1st, Zac67, and Tom94022: Which one of you lot is going to be finding the WP:RS since you appear to be !voting for restoring dozens of unsourced statements? Or is it your intent to ignore WP:BURDEN and pretend WP:LOCALCON doesn't apply? —Locke Cole • t • c 19:02, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- Happy to see this restored as long as it can be referenced. Per WP:BURDEN that's the responsibility of whoever restores it. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:44, 24 July 2025 (UTC)
@ActivelyDisinterested and Locke Cole: Since the consensus is to revert I will do so, I will then reference all material that "needs" RS's and finally edit the article to define FDs per the several RS's. This will likely take many hours over several days and I will use appropriate templates to flag whether the article is under construction or in use. I would appreciate it if editors would abide by the suggestions of the templates and thereby making the task more difficult thru unnecessary edit conflicts. Tom94022 (talk) 18:09, 28 July 2025 (UTC)
- That's fine with me, BURDEN must be met but there is no deadline. I suggest using the {{in use}} template to warn editors, it's helpful to stop edit conflicts. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:52, 28 July 2025 (UTC)
- I am very concerned that the editor most involved with this article is the one deciding there is "consensus". Also, while WP:DEADLINE is a thing (an essay), WP:BURDEN (a policy with wide community support) doesn't carve out an exception for using "no deadline" as an excuse for restoring challenged material that is unsourced. The better solution would be to work on a userspace sandbox version and then integrate the changes once they're ready. WP:LOCALCON is clear that a small group here cannot override the will of the community. It's also distressing to see all of these variations of the floppy disk here again, when none of them are considered floppy disks by our reliable sources. —Locke Cole • t • c 22:32, 28 July 2025 (UTC)
- I think that we're taking this from the wrong approach entirely. The thing about article titles and scopes is that the scope has to come first. That is you say "What is this article about? Okay, what's a good name for that?" What you don't say is "The article's current title is floppy disk, and I found a source claiming that a Zip drive is a floppy disk, so that should be in the article called floppy disk!"
- In my experience, we talked about floppies and Zip drives as being in separate categories. That suggests that there should be an article that is (a) about 'basic' floppies (8", 5.25", 3.5") but (b) not about every kind of storage medium that used a similar technology. So my question for the folks who want to add what we would have considered non-floppy disks content is: If the article dedicated to floppies-as-narrowly-defined isn't at this page, where is it/should it be? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:51, 30 July 2025 (UTC)
If the article dedicated to floppies-as-narrowly-defined isn't at this page, where is it/should it be?
What's really distressing here is that the answer already exists: Floppy disk variants. An article which was created with this edit summarysplit from loppy disk for length
. Floppy disk underwent significant by @Thumperward and looked like this after a day of trimming/reorganization, and then about a month later, it looked like this (diff for comparison's sake, diff of article prior to Thumperward edits). I'd argue the expanded "historical sequence" table would be more at home in the Floppy disk variants article, and a trimmed back version to just the actual "floppy disks" would be more at home here.- And recall, this all stemmed from my attempt to get sources for the claim that floppy disk drives utilized Parallel ATA as their connector, which none of them did. And, to date, no source has been provided to support that claim. —Locke Cole • t • c 21:44, 31 July 2025 (UTC)
- Well, you're never going to find a reliable source that says all floppy disk drives used parallel ATA/IDE, because Big Blue didn't own the world, no matter how much they pretended to. Whether any of them did is something I wouldn't know. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:52, 1 August 2025 (UTC)
Late to this party but Locke Cole (talk · contribs) was entirely correct to remove enormous amounts of long-unsourced trivia. If this needs to be removed piecemeal so as to not to invite the accusation of "mass disruptive editing" (laughable) then I'll be happy to do so. Tom94022 has a predilection for wanting super-articles full of every single possible permutation of a given phrase, which is at this point almost an entire sub-genre of WP:SYN in itself (except that the synthesized title already exists). This results in unreadable garbage. We should not advocate for nor action in favour of unreadable garbage. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 23:13, 1 August 2025 (UTC)
- As for the pile-on supports for reverting, they're perfectly summarised by the very first one: the argument that house should talk exhaustively about greenhouses, because a greenhouse is a house. (A greenhouse is not a house.) Unserious arguments more concerned about stuffing articles full of extraneous trivia than they are about building a readable encyclopedia. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 23:17, 1 August 2025 (UTC)
- The problem with the greenhouse analogy assumes that the purpose is to have the article's subject match the title. It's the other way around: First, what do you want to write about? Only second, what should you call that?
- Compare, e.g., Ketogenic diet. The subject is a medical treatment for refractory pediatric epilepsy, which happens to be called a ketogenic diet. The subject of the article is not all the diets have been called ketogenic.
- If editors believe that this page should be about traditional floppies, then it should exclude super floppies (or mention them briefly, by way of contrast). And if editors believe that this page should be about every storage device that has any flexible, disc-shaped magnetic medium, then it should include both traditional and super floppies and anything else meeting that criterion. But you make this decision first, and only later decide what the title is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:36, 2 August 2025 (UTC)
- We basically have three options.
- Make this a disambiguation page, which does nothing but point at other articles.
- Make this a summary page, which treats this as a super-subject but leaves most of the content to sub-pages. (This is closest to where we are now, except that far too much content in here is still trivia.)
- Make this an article on the subject that most people think of as a floppy disk, which is the mainstream removable file format briefly popular in the second half of the twentieth century.
- Wikipedia has always, always favoured the third, everywhere, on the grounds that this is first and foremost a resource for the common person to gain information on subjects in a readable manner. It is not a directory of every single thing to have ever existed. It is not an attempt to taxonomise things which may only be loosely related to one another. It is a place where, if you go to the article on floppy disks, you expect it to talk about the thing you understand to be a floppy disk, based on the principle of least surprise. If you go to that article and it spends half its time talking about 70s laboratory experiments or things that were briefly popular in the Bulgarian software pirating industry at the fall of the Cold War then you are going to be confused and disheartened.
- There's the core of a useful article in here, but the only real question should be "how much space needs to be devoted to 8-inch disks as opposed to the two massively more popular successors". The entire category of super floppies warrants a single paragraph labelled "related technologies" and then an article elsewhere. That's the endgoal here.
- Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 09:26, 2 August 2025 (UTC)
- We basically have three options.
- I specifically want to address the assertion that zip disks are 3.5" floppies. This is arrant nonsense. They are a removable storage medium specifically designed to have a similar form factor to 3.5" floppies. They do the same thing, in a much more complicated manner. A platypus has a bill and can swim in a lake. This does not make it a category of swan. Whether a source can be found that calls them "floppy disks" or not is irrelevant, because you can find an order of magnitude or more sources which treat them as different things. The people making this argument fundamentally do not understand that when it comes to names on wikipedia, "floppy disk" means the specific thing that an average person would expect it to, and not "every single thing which looks like a disk and can be flexed". The latter has to be wholly rejected. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 09:34, 2 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Thumperward you are certainly entitled to your opinion as to what FD means but before you force it into Wikipedia shouldn't you have an RS? At this point we have RS's from the inventor (1996), the preeminent storage industry analyst (1998), a distinguished storage industry technical writer (1988) and the Computer History Museum (2025) all of whom explicitly state that the ZIP disk and drive are FDs or FDDs. After all this discussion, it is probably true to say that
Today some observers mean "low-capacity" FDs when they use the term FD.
but I think that is OR. So if you can find an RS that the language has changed then perhaps such a note in the article would be appropriate but to expunge material based multiple reliable sources seems to me the anthesis of Wikipedia. Tom94022 (talk) 17:05, 3 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Thumperward you are certainly entitled to your opinion as to what FD means but before you force it into Wikipedia shouldn't you have an RS? At this point we have RS's from the inventor (1996), the preeminent storage industry analyst (1998), a distinguished storage industry technical writer (1988) and the Computer History Museum (2025) all of whom explicitly state that the ZIP disk and drive are FDs or FDDs. After all this discussion, it is probably true to say that
- Do you expect to find a source that says "Wikipedia ought to have one big article on all the many disks that stored data on thin plastic disk coated with magnetic material", or one that says "Wikipedia ought to have two different articles, one that is focused primarily on the 5.25 and 3.5-inch disks, and separate one that covers super floppies"?
- Because the question here isn't "Where's a source that says ____ is/isn't a true floppy?" The question here is how editors choose to organize the information. To quote WP:N, Editors may use their discretion when deciding whether a subject is better handled as one big article or two smaller ones. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:36, 3 August 2025 (UTC)
- I'll look for sources which explicitly distinguish between floppy disks and the latter inventions. Proving a negative is of course difficult, but if it helps to resolve this nonsense then so be it. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 15:06, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Thumperward, I agree with you: Editors are allowed to choose one of the other options, but I think this page should be about what "the common person" will "understand to be a floppy disk, based on the principle of least surprise". Which is to say that I never once called my Zip drive "a floppy", and I'd be WP:SURPRISED if anyone had asked for "your floppy" instead of "your Zip drive". It might technically be true that Zip drives used floppy technology, but it's not relevant.
- I particularly agree with you that "Whether a source can be found that calls them "floppy disks" or not is irrelevant, because you can find an order of magnitude or more sources which treat them as different things".
- But in the end, article scope has to be decided by consensus.
- Maybe the path forward is to split Floppy disk variants#Superfloppy into a separate article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 2 August 2025 (UTC)
- My preference is #3 from your list. We already have Floppy disk variants, History of the floppy disk, Floppy disk drive interface, List of floppy disk formats, Floppy-disk controller, and a number of supporting articles such as Berg connector, Floppy disk hardware emulator and tangentially related articles such as Floptical, Magneto-optical drive, Bernoulli Box, Jaz drive, SuperDisk and Zip drive. As you say, those last six or so should be summarized in one or two sentences along with the variants article I linked at the start of that list.
- This article should have a very short summary of History of the floppy disk (especially as it relates to the original 8" (very briefly), 5.25" and 3.5" drives), a section that describes the mechanics of how a floppy disk works in a way a layperson can comprehend, individual sections that describe these three "floppy disks" and their most common formats, and then leave the discussion of how operating systems interacted with them to articles on those OS's.
- Right now, the article is (IMO) a clear instance of WP:IINFO/WP:NOTTEXTBOOK/WP:NOTEVERYTHING. It's why I attempted to run this article through AFD after the canvassing occurred above with the suggested resolution being WP:TNT. The article as it exists now belongs in a personal blog or something where your goal is to retain as much technical information as possible. For an encyclopedia reader, this article is not what a reader would expect.. —Locke Cole • t • c 18:16, 2 August 2025 (UTC)
CONTINUING EDIT DISCUSSION MOVED TO NEW SECTION
- Briggs, John C (January 15, 1996). Enabling technologies for a 100-MB 3.5" floppy (ZIPtm) disk drive (Report). SPIE. pp. 220–227. Retrieved July 21, 2025.
IBM PS/2 soft-eject verification
The claim about IBM PS/2 soft-eject drives and DOS EJECT command appears technically accurate but requires specialized documentation (IBM PS/2 technical manuals, DOS command references) to verify specific models and versions. PC DOS 5.02 existence is confirmed via IBM documentation. Respecting the good faith of the editor who originally contributed this material and given my own limited expertise in this technical area, I am reluctant to delete it and suggest it remain until editors with more time and specialized knowledge can resolve any reliability issues with this material. Tom94022 (talk) 21:56, 28 July 2025 (UTC)
- I'll have a look to see if I can find anything. I've changed {{verification needed}} to {{citation needed}}, the former is a redirect to {{verify source}} and there is currently no source to verify. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:01, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
- The IBM PS/2 feature was called "Electronic eject" as shown by the maintenance manual and the EJECT command was introduced in PC-DOS 5.02. That last ref is probably good for the EJECT command, but I can't find anything that details the "electronic eject" feature (the maintenance manual doesn't explian what it is). -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:38, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for your efforts. My issue with {{citation needed}} is that it doesn't link to discussion, there are likely sources which I have identified but can't get to. This happens on older topics where there are likely sources in dead trees not accessible online. I'm struggling with the same issue on how Apple FD's recover from read errors. If I can't link to a talk discussion a less informed editor at any point could delete the material without at least being aware of the situation. Under current policy I can't stop that but at least I'd like to be able to warn one - any suggestion? Tom94022 (talk) 19:08, 30 July 2025 (UTC)
- Dead trees, hard to access, or only accessible with great effort, it doesn't matter. Accessibility doesn't effect reliability, urls are only a courtesy to help make verification easier. I'm pretty sure the PS/2 data can be found in the IBM FTP server (I haven't had time to check), making it inaccessible without dedicated software (just finding out ftp has been removed from modern browsers).
I'm a bit busy over the next fews days, once I get time I'll see if I can find something for the Apple FD error recovery if you haven't already. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:51, 30 July 2025 (UTC)- Maybe https://openlibrary.org has scanned some old computer manuals? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:16, 1 August 2025 (UTC)
- Sorry I spent several hours last night but I couldn't find anything for error correction on Apple FDs. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:02, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- Dead trees, hard to access, or only accessible with great effort, it doesn't matter. Accessibility doesn't effect reliability, urls are only a courtesy to help make verification easier. I'm pretty sure the PS/2 data can be found in the IBM FTP server (I haven't had time to check), making it inaccessible without dedicated software (just finding out ftp has been removed from modern browsers).
- Thanks for your efforts. My issue with {{citation needed}} is that it doesn't link to discussion, there are likely sources which I have identified but can't get to. This happens on older topics where there are likely sources in dead trees not accessible online. I'm struggling with the same issue on how Apple FD's recover from read errors. If I can't link to a talk discussion a less informed editor at any point could delete the material without at least being aware of the situation. Under current policy I can't stop that but at least I'd like to be able to warn one - any suggestion? Tom94022 (talk) 19:08, 30 July 2025 (UTC)
CONTINUING EDITS
At this point the article IMO is in pretty good shape, at 90k somewhat bigger than in the past but with all the old CN's ref'ed and the unwarrented deletions restored. The major issue I see with the article as it stands now is that it has high-capacity FD/FDD material is split between this article and the Variants article which is awkward but may be acceptable.
One issue with major restructuring is that much of the drive mechanisms is common across all types and is more or less covered in the one "Structure" section. Major restructuring might produce
Thumperwald suggested some options but I think a more complete list, based upon not eliminating referenced material ("trivia?"), are the following options:
- Make this a disambiguation page, which does nothing but point at five articles, 8", 5¼", 3½, HC, Other.
- Make this a summary page, which treats this as a super-subject but leaves most of the content to four main articles, LCFD, HCFD, Variant FD, FD Mechanics.
- Remove all material related to high-capacity FD/FDDs either to the Variant article or to a new HCFD article.
- Move the high-capacity FD material from the Variant article into its section in this article.
- Create a new HCFD article from the materials in this article and the Variant article
- Leave it alone, minor edits from here on.
As I said, I am very busy on interesting project that requires immediate attention, so I am not going to finish the major edit for a day or two. So, I'd like to hear from other editors as to which direction the article should go. I've already spent too much time here so I am not willing to work on all the options, IMO and in rank order only 4, 6 and 5 are worth doing, so in addition to expressing opinion I would suggest a willingness to do the work might be useful. Tom94022 (talk) 17:11, 3 August 2025 (UTC)
- 3 needs doing regardless. The question is whether 5 constitutes synthesis. I would say it does. There are multiple overlapping examples of this genre which do not claim to be part of a specific group. We might organise them together in a variants article, but picking a term (e.g. "HCFD" or "super floppy") and ascribing this to all of them is not appropriate. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 15:09, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- My intent is to do 4 as it is less work than 5 or 3. I don't see why 5 involves synthesis and would appreciate examples. There are lots of reliable sources that establish the all FDs are similar in structure with the fundamental difference being servomechanisms in HCFDs - so I suspect most apparent syntheses can be resolved if the consensus is 5. Tom94022 (talk) 20:40, 5 August 2025 (UTC)
- I agree with Chris, #3 makes the most sense. But Tom has been adding additional HCFD content here and changing redirects to point to this article (see Super floppy and Superfloppy). I don't believe there is a consensus for inclusion of this content that is out of scope for an article on "floppy disks". Tom, you will not achieve what you wish by presenting editors with a fait accompli. —Locke Cole • t • c 19:45, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
- And just to add, Tom has now started edit warring over Parallel ATA and the inclusion of floppy disk as a format that ever used the connection (no floppy disk drive ever used PATA). —Locke Cole • t • c 19:47, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
RFC: What should the scope of the floppy disk article be?
- The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
What should the scope (see also WP:OFFTOPIC) of the article floppy disk encompass? —Locke Cole • t • c 16:23, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
Should it be:
- 1. Traditional floppy disks: Just the traditional floppy disks (8", 51⁄4" and 31⁄2" sizes) as they existed from the 1970's through the 1990's.
- This scope would limit the article to the primary three "floppy disks" that were widely used by computer users through the 1970's through the 1990's. High-capacity / "super floppy" formats would be excluded, beyond a small "variants" section which would provide a brief 1-2 paragraph summary of floppy disk variants. Such variants would be excluded comparison charts/tables (such charts/tables would be acceptable on floppy disk variants). Odd sizes or edge-cases would also be discussed at length in floppy disk variants.
- 2. Traditional floppy disks and odd sizes/formats: Traditional (as per the above) and temporally related (that is, released or developed in the same time period) sizes (such as 3" sizes) and odd formats (such as non-DOS/Windows/Apple formatted disks).

- 3. Traditional and high-capacity floppy disks: Traditional (as per the above) and so-called "super floppy" or "high-capacity" floppy disks.
- This scope would be more inclusive, adding in discussion of "super floppy" / high-capacity floppy disk formats that were marketed as "successors" to the traditional floppy disk in the late 1980's through the early 2000's.
- 4. Any magnetic based portable media: Anything containing a spinning magnetic disc meant for portable storage of computer data.
- Basically all of the above and anything else remotely related.
- 5. Floppy disk: The current article as it exists today, four industry recognized categories of floppy disk in one article
- 6. Flexible disks: Anything containing a spinning flexible magnetic disk meant for storage of computer data. This would be all inclusive.
- All of the above adding any storage having a rotating flexible magnetic disk.
- 7. Floppy disk: The current article as it exists today less the section Historical sequence of floppy disk_formats which could be moved to History of the floppy disk article.
- X. Something else: Something else? Feel free to add a new idea to the list above, being careful to number future entries in sequence. I give this permission per WP:TPG.
Comments
- Please place your comments below, recall that these discussions are not a vote, so please provide the rationale for your choice, or refer to another editor's rationale that you support.
- #1 with soft support for #2: Consider the example at WP:OOS, specifically
Cat is limited in scope to the primary topic for cat, the Domestic cat (which is a redirect to Cat), even though lions and tigers are considered to be "cats" in the broad sense of that term
. Are there other disk-based storage solutions that are mechnically and/or physically similar to traditional floppy disks? Absolutely. But almost all of the reliable sources tend to be only talking about the primary three formats when discussing just "floppy disks", and when any of the attempted successor formats are discussed, it's typically using terms such as "super floppy" or qualifying the term with "high-capacity". We should thus keep our article to the topic readers are most likely looking for. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:34, 13 August 2025 (UTC)- Also worth mentioning is that History of the floppy disk exists and also discusses these other non-traditional formats. Though, depending on the outcome of this RFC, it might be worth considering moving it to History of portable magnetic media or something similar to encompass the full history. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:58, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- FYI: Tom added options #5 and #6, with my permission as discussed in X. As noted by WhatamIdoing in the Extended discussion below, #5 is very likely a WP:RFCNEUTRAL issue, however, I did not want to edit war over his "options" even though fundamentally #3 and #5 are identical (outside of adding his opinions and including sources of his choosing [see my criticisms of them below]), and #4 and #6 are identical other than some minor word changes. —Locke Cole • t • c 23:37, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
- 1. Traditional floppy disks, as floppy disk lists under its History section, which the overwhelmingly vast majority of this format fell under. Later devices were known as removable media or cartridges. Celjski Grad (talk) 16:37, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- As the lede and many RSs make clear, the term "floppy disk" and "cartridge"
arecan be synonymous. The 8-inch and 5¼-inch generations used sleaves while the 3½-inch and high-capacity generation used hard cases which many refer to as cartridges. Since there are new scopes you may want to reconsider your preference. Tom94022 (talk) 00:36, 14 August 2025 (UTC)- No thanks. I have never heard anyone refer to a 3 1/2" floppy as a cartridge in my 40+ years of professional tech experience. Celjski Grad (talk) 09:35, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Tom, you've yet to provide any sources to support
the term "floppy disk" and "cartridge" are synonymous
. I feel it's unfortunate that people are !voting while you're making these bold, unsupported claims. —Locke Cole • t • c 17:12, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- As the lede and many RSs make clear, the term "floppy disk" and "cartridge"
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) ...
from the lede. Tom94022 (talk) 21:36, 14 August 2025 (UTC)- I see you've edited your reply after myself and another editor replied and replaced "are" with "can be"... you're really stretching the limits of AGF by repeatedly misrepresenting sources and changing your comments after someone has replied in significant ways (even if you struck through your original claim). —Locke Cole • t • c 21:44, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- At its beginning 3½-inch flexible media was referred to by the likes of the Microfloppy Industry Consortium, Shugart Corp., IBM and Sony using "cartridge" so as to distinguish this then new medium from the flexible envelope of the prior generations. Furthermore, multiple industry standard committees defined "traditional" 3½ media as a "Flexible Disk Cartridge," for example, ANSI X3.171 (1987) and see: List of ECMA standards]. Multiple reliable sources identify high-capacity floppy disks as a failed attempt at a fourth generation of floppy disks and not as "variants". Because of interchangeability some high-capacity "cartridges" can easily be mistaken for "traditional" floppy disks. With cartridge for "traditional" 3½-inch FDs. So it's hard for me to see how its usage on high-capacity FDs precludes their inclusion in this article and in my mind the question becomes do you want to see this article with an accurate historical perspective on the history of floppy disks ("#5") or on the basis of current jargon should it be rewritten and renamed "Floppy disk (traditional) ("#1")? Tom94022 (talk) 19:05, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- I see you've edited your reply after myself and another editor replied and replaced "are" with "can be"... you're really stretching the limits of AGF by repeatedly misrepresenting sources and changing your comments after someone has replied in significant ways (even if you struck through your original claim). —Locke Cole • t • c 21:44, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- #1 Traditional floppy disks: The variants are not simply "floppy disks" - they are "variants" which is why they categorically don't make sense here. Since there is an article floppy disk variants already, it is unnecessary to include them here anyway. (BTW... my first computer was a TI 99/4a which used cassette storage, although I have a 5¼-inch for it now - yes, I did say now... I actually have a few blank floppies lying around, too.). ButlerBlog (talk) 17:23, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Butlerblog: I suggest the evidence is that collectively "high-capacity FDs" are the failed attempt at a fourth generation of FDs and not fairly categorized as "variants". The generation was quite successful, exceeding the first two generations in peak revenue and volume, but dwarfed by the third, 3½-inch generation. Some have argued that the small volume makes mention WP:UNDUE but that certainly would apply to much if not all of the first two generations. If u go back and look at the history of this article, just prior to the first fork (2011) the high-capacity FDs were listed as Standard floppy replacements albeit as a subsection of "Non-standard formats." Since then, a number of editors in about 2,000 edits have added back material until after the second fork this July, now restored, the article now covers all four generations. In retrospect, it looks to me that the 2011 fork was, in part a mistake, in removing the 4th generation, and that is why I suggest #3 or #5, which keeps the article in a comprehensive (i.e., encyclopedic) coverage of the subject. Tom94022 (talk) 19:51, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- #1 Traditional floppies, with strong efforts to Wikipedia:Build the web to related articles. This article should IMO include a full description of history, including mentioning and linking to articles about non-traditional floppies (e.g., some other sizes were tried; all floppies were eventually replaced by high-capacity disks, cheaper hard drives, thumb drives, etc.). A reader should be able to start here and easily end up at an article that tells them everything they might wish to know about anything disc-shaped flexible magnetic media, no matter what variant, alternative, replacement, etc. they could possibly be interested in. But this article itself should be primarily focused on the "traditional" or "standard" floppies. (#2 is my second choice.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:41, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- #5 Floppy disk with conditional support for #1: It is true that some now may not consider high-capacity floppies as floppies or may not remember that they were so categorized when they were actively produced, the solution is not to banish them from this article but to include them here.
- There are RS's to support this scope, to date there are no reliable sources that define "traditional" or "standard" floppy disks other than perhaps the published ISO/ANSI standards for some but not all "traditional" floppy disks. None the less, I would support #1 on the condition that the article be renamed "Floppy disk (standard)" and that someone commit to creating a new article Floppy disk (high-capacity) incorporating and explanation in the lead paragraph of both explaining the relationship and inter-linking the paragraphs. However, keep in mind that the many of the media of high-capacity FDs are identical to that of some tradtional FDs so there would be quite a bit of reduncandy. Tom94022 (talk) 20:02, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- Tom references five "reliable" sources (I put reliable in quotes as I also am not confident they are all reliable, as in the case of DISK/TREND, they are simply a survey of whatever manufacturers provided to them), claiming they support his desired scope for the article. Let's go over them, one by one from the #5 proposal.
- 1991 Disk/Trend Report-Flexible Disk Drives, p. Sum-16: This is a single page which means it lacks significant context. Consider also, it is from 1991: Zip was not released until 1995, and SuperDisk lacks a specific entry to market date, but says Iomega abandoned the tech in 1994, and it was picked up by 3M some time after that. This source refers to many technologies as
flexible disk drive technology
, and seems to reservefloppy disk
for consideration of the typical 31⁄2-inch disks released in 1986. And then there's this excerpt:Consequently, alternate technologies are finding only limited success in breaking into floppies established markets, although some displacement of floppy drives is occurring in notebook and hand-held computers where there is insufficient space or power for floppy drives. The high capacity and low profile floppy drive designs now entering the production phase are proof that innovation in floppy disk drives is a continuing process
. Again, remembering that at this point neither Zip nor SuperDisk have been released, this is both WP:CRYSTALBALLish, and suffers from WP:OLDSOURCES (the terminology was in flux, with many manufacturers wanting to ride on "floppy disks" coattails). - Enabling technologies for a 100-MB 3.5" floppy (ZIPtm) disk drive: This is, quite literally, marketing material written by an employee of Iomega (the manufacturer of ZIP(tm) disk drives). As noted previously, many manufacturers were eager to be called
floppy disks
, and Iomega was one such company. - 1998 Disk/Trend Report-Removable Data Storage: Repeating same WP:RS concerns as noted for #1 as this is DISK/TREND. This is 3 pages from a larger report, including a Table of Contents, however, it still lacks context. First off, the term
floppy disk
does not appear anywhere. Secondly, where the TOC is concerned, they discussHIGH CAPACITY FLEXIBLE DISK DRIVES
andLOW CAPACITY FLEXIBLE DISK DRIVES
. The final page has a section titledDISK/TREND product groups
where there is an admitted arbitrary nature to their organization:In most cases the product groups used for individual drives are clear, but a few arbitrary decisions have been made. Please note that all drives with capacities under 5 megabytes have been placed in the low capacity group, regardless of disk diameter
. If anything, this source supports a larger taxonomical grouping that floppy disk, Zip drive and SuperDisk all are within,flexible disk drives
. - Magnetic Recording, the First 100 Years, Chapter 19: Data Storage on Floppy Disks, Section: High-Capacity Designs: This is a book on magnetic recording, and is probably the most reliable source provided. I've been granted access to the Wikipedia Library, and despite this, this document is unavailable for me to download. Having said that, the section list is available online, and while included within the chapter titled
Data Storage on Floppy Disks
, it would appear to be within a section titledHigh-Capacity Designs
(the last section prior to a references list). I'm assuming good faith that Zip/SuperDisk appear within, but given the layout of the rest of the book, it makes sense why the authors chose to include them here (other chapters are on magnetic recording of sound, the telegraphone, steel tape and wire recorders, magnetophon, a history of digital audio, challenges of recording video (with at least four chapters after that on various video recording systems based on magnetic recording), then data storage on drums, data storage on tape, data storage on hard disk, and finally data storage on floppy disks). Given this layout, I think it's a stretch to put any weight behind this, especially since the authors carefully separated outhigh-capacity designs
from the remainder of the chapter on the topic of floppy disks in general. - Computer History Museum: Floppy Disks: We're faced with a similar situation as #4, clearly whoever organized this into topics wanted to discuss larger format flexible disk technologies, but didn't believe they merited their own chapter/section. And this is telling once you read through it, at no point is Zip disk/drive referred to directly as a
floppy disk
. To quote the relevant portion:Various companies made proprietary higher-capacity disks with packages similar to – but incompatible with – the 3.25-inch [sic] standard. Iomega’s 100 MB ZIP disk was halfway between a floppy disk and a hard disk
. Here ZIP disks are referred to ashigh-capacity disks
(not floppy disk), and states they werehalfway between a floppy disk and a hard disk
.
- 1991 Disk/Trend Report-Flexible Disk Drives, p. Sum-16: This is a single page which means it lacks significant context. Consider also, it is from 1991: Zip was not released until 1995, and SuperDisk lacks a specific entry to market date, but says Iomega abandoned the tech in 1994, and it was picked up by 3M some time after that. This source refers to many technologies as
- At the end of the day, the vast majority of sources discussing "floppy disks" are discussing option #1, above (and actually, including 8-inch is a stretch as most sources seem to discuss just 51⁄4-inch and 31⁄2-inch floppy disks). —Locke Cole • t • c 16:56, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- I can see parts of the 1999 book (#4 in this list) in Google Books. I'm a little concerned about the book being dated, since the chapter ends with a kind of glurgey statement that "the floppy disk...will continue to impact our lives in many ways". More than 25 years later, I think we can all agree that floppy disks aren't affecting us at all.
- Just above that statement, it says that high-capacity/superfloppies were expected to be "only 10% of the total number of flexible disk drives marketed in 1997". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:44, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Of course the price and capacity of HCFDs was much greater than "traditional" FDs; Porter says the actual revenue in 1997 was $1.7 M for TFD and $0.5M HCFD, he predicted that in 2001 the revenues would be $1.0M and $1.2M respectively. It is just indisputable that the high-capacity segment was the failed fourth generation of FDs. Tom94022 (talk) 21:01, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Tom, you are overstating these sources. Significantly. You did reply to my numbered refutations, however, you violated WP:INTERLEAVE despite being warned not to do so. If you want to debate my responses, simply do a numbered reply using standard formatting. —Locke Cole • t • c 21:26, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- @WhatamIdoing Thank you for finding that Google Books online source!! It appears the high-capacity section is just less than two pages in length (in a book of hundreds of pages) which just reinforces my concerns from our earlier discussions about these being WP:DUE in this article as well. Further, SuperDisk is not discussed at all, and the closest ZIP or Bernouilli get is being discussed in a section about "high-capacity designs", where they repeatedly referred to as "magnetic flexible disks" and never "floppy disks". —Locke Cole • t • c 21:37, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Of course the price and capacity of HCFDs was much greater than "traditional" FDs; Porter says the actual revenue in 1997 was $1.7 M for TFD and $0.5M HCFD, he predicted that in 2001 the revenues would be $1.0M and $1.2M respectively. It is just indisputable that the high-capacity segment was the failed fourth generation of FDs. Tom94022 (talk) 21:01, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- For a discussion on the various reliable sources jump to:
Hi-Capacity Floppy Disk Reliable sources Tom94022 (talk) 22:15, 22 August 2025 (UTC)
- #1 Traditional floppies, that's what mos people are looking for. --FaviFake (talk) 21:35, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- #2 Traditional floppy disks and odd sizes/formats because there is an evolution between the standards and Apple disks belong in that. Option 1 is not suitable because you can actually take an PC floppy, format it on a mac and transfer files from the mac. The floppy will now not work on PC. You can not do the same with an Apple floppy. For younger readers not including Mac disks is a bit like saying that a Apple Hard Drive should not be in the Hard drive article, but unlike Hard disks the difference goes deeper than just the file system. High capacity should be mentioned in the 3.5 inch chapter, but most of content moved to an separate article. High capacity I think was mainly a separate drive and sufficiently different to be in a different article.--Snævar (talk) 22:29, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Snævar Just to be clear, #1 would already allow DOS/Windows/Apple, #2 expands into formats and operating systems beyond that. #2 also allows other non-standard physical sizes such as 3" and 21⁄2". —Locke Cole • t • c 23:33, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Snævar: Just to be clear, many of the 3½-inch high-capacity FDDs read and wrote some of the low-capacity 3½-inch FD formats; the high and low-capacity FDs were physically compatible, and the media looked the same (formulation was different), so moving them to a different article would likely entail some duplicate material. And FWIW HCFDs and HCFDDs have been within the scope of this article for quite some time. Tom94022 (talk) 22:38, 22 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Snævar Just to be clear, #1 would already allow DOS/Windows/Apple, #2 expands into formats and operating systems beyond that. #2 also allows other non-standard physical sizes such as 3" and 21⁄2". —Locke Cole • t • c 23:33, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- #5 Floppy disk: The current article as it exists today as my first preference, thought not entirely opposed to #1, #2, or #3 if disambiguated and/or well-linked to related topics as mentioned by WhatamIdoing. Approaching this as someone relatively uneducated on the topic, only having used floppies a handful of times as a child, Tom94022's argument makes the most sense to me. I think some people in this discussion may have projected their level of knowledge about floppies onto the general public - the average reader, especially in 2025, is unlikely to be able to or interested in differentiating between floppy disks sensu stricto and the many later variants. Modern readers searching simply for "floppy disk" are likely using a far broader definition of the term than the highly knowledgeable editors working on this topic. Ethmostigmus 🌿 (talk | contribs) 03:43, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- #5 Floppy disk Looks like least OR variant, also status quo. We should follow what the sources say, not make our own categorization. Pavlor (talk) 05:47, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Pavlor, which sources do you think this article should rely on for deciding what should be addressed in this article vs addressed on a separate article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:38, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- #5 Floppy disk This is the parent article for things called "floppy disk" most of which were "rigid squares". While encyclopedic coverage does not require that we cover everything to the same level of detail in this article, instead using the
{{Detail}}template to refer to other articles, we should provide a top-level coverage and comparison tables. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 06:24, 14 August 2025 (UTC).- @Rich Farmbrough Per my analysis of the sources provided in Tom's entry #5 (which I've added above as a reply to Tom), would you be on board with floppy disk being #1 or #2, and then a new article, portable magnetic media (or removable magnetic media, or some other name that we can hammer out after the RFC), that does a broad overview as you've described? As it is, #5 is doing a lot of OR in the form of SYNTH to shoe-horn things that aren't called "floppy disks" into the floppy disk article. Recalling that we're NOTPAPER, a broader article layout would allow us to spread this out more logically. —Locke Cole • t • c 19:51, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Despite the prohibition on OR we are required to perform it to avoid UNDUE and maintain NPOV among other things. A good example might be "generally referred to as ruby slippers, but occasionally called floppy slippers" - I doubt you will find sources that explicitly compare the use of terms, but if you have a reasonable understanding of the literature, I would not object to this sort of statement. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 17:44, 22 August 2025 (UTC).
- Despite the prohibition on OR we are required to perform it to avoid UNDUE and maintain NPOV among other things. A good example might be "generally referred to as ruby slippers, but occasionally called floppy slippers" - I doubt you will find sources that explicitly compare the use of terms, but if you have a reasonable understanding of the literature, I would not object to this sort of statement. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 17:44, 22 August 2025 (UTC).
- @Rich Farmbrough Per my analysis of the sources provided in Tom's entry #5 (which I've added above as a reply to Tom), would you be on board with floppy disk being #1 or #2, and then a new article, portable magnetic media (or removable magnetic media, or some other name that we can hammer out after the RFC), that does a broad overview as you've described? As it is, #5 is doing a lot of OR in the form of SYNTH to shoe-horn things that aren't called "floppy disks" into the floppy disk article. Recalling that we're NOTPAPER, a broader article layout would allow us to spread this out more logically. —Locke Cole • t • c 19:51, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- #1/#2. This matches the usage in popular sources and avoids surprise. I also object to the wording of #5 - late-adding it is fine, but it needs to comply with WP:RFCNEUTRAL. Per WhatamIdoing, I have no problem with linking to mechanically similar devices that were not popularly called floppy disks but operated on near-identical principles, but that can be in an "Other" type section with lots of links. Arguments in favor of #5 on grounds of it being the STATUSQUO are very weak given that it wasn't the status quo traditionally, but edited to be such. Which doesn't mean it's wrong, but doesn't mean it gets the benefit of the doubt, either. (I'm not sure why #6 was late-added, as it's clearly a different topic.) SnowFire (talk) 19:24, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Actually, it has been WP:STATUSQUO since at least 2009
2023and was only recently edited into #1 by one editor who removed about 3k words (6 bytes/word) and then after discussion by 6 editors with only the editor who made the article into #1 dissenting, restored by adding about 6k word. 21:55, 22 August 2025 (UTC) Tom94022 (talk) 21:56, 22 August 2025 (UTC)Actually, it has been WP:STATUSQUO since at least 2009
. As usual Tom, you are severely misrepresenting things. Much of this material was removed in 2011 by @Thumperward. Over some time this article slowly ballooned back to the mess it is now, but it's inaccurate to claim it was all-inclusive since 2009, when much of it was removed in 2011 (and in the months after that diff, even more was removed). Your WP:BADNAC also is irrelevant here. —Locke Cole • t • c 23:36, 22 August 2025 (UTC)2023[3]- @SnowFire: Can we agree #5 was the WP:STATUSQUO on July 13, 2025, when Cole in his first edit to this article removed about 3k words? Cole is correct that in 2011 "Standard floppy replacements", what are herein called "high-capacity floppy disks," were moved from this article to the Floppy_disk_variants article but since then in over 2000 edits by multiple editors the material has been restored so the current article comprehensively covers all four generations of floppy disks, not a "mess" as Cole characterizes it. The real question is are these "high-capacity floppy disks" variants or are they the fourth generation of floppy disks? There is ample evidence that they are the fourth generation, smaller than the third, but larger than the first or second, and not a variant so if not in this article they deserve an article of their own and we have three articles, Floppy disk (traditional), Floppy disk (high capacity) and Floppy disk variants. Tom94022 (talk) 20:15, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- Procedurally, the whole point of citing STATUSQUO is when an article is stable about XYZ for a long period, then major changes happen that are contested. That's a strong STATUSQUO argument that the tiebreaker should be to revert. The major changes in the past 5 years render a STATUSQUO argument for either side useless and impossible. You can't just pick a date a mere month and a half ago that suits your "side" any more than Locke can pick a date longer ago and cite that. (It's about page protection rather than scope change, but see also WP:WRONGVERSION.) You'll need to win on the merits here, not by default. SnowFire (talk) 21:04, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- It is a long time from 2011 to 2025 and on July 13 the status quo seemed to have shifted back to including high-capacity disks in the article. No one is supporting any of the clear variants back. Looking back on 2011 I think it was a mistake to move the high-capacity media to a variant article - they were not variants. On the merits, the argument is that in order to be encyclopedic this article should cover all four generations of the floppy disk, not just the first three. The fourth generation was at least as large as the first two, none of them matched the third, "traditional" 3½-inch generation. If the typically reader is "surprised" in this article that there were four generations of FDs, that some of the 4th generations of FDDs could read and write third generation FDs, isn't that what Wikipedia is about? And I am really not sure that "popular sources" are as relevant to the scope of this article as Mee, Porter, Noble and the Computer History Museum - language evolves, people forget, but history shouldn't depend upon current popular sources. Tom94022 (talk) 21:49, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- Procedurally, the whole point of citing STATUSQUO is when an article is stable about XYZ for a long period, then major changes happen that are contested. That's a strong STATUSQUO argument that the tiebreaker should be to revert. The major changes in the past 5 years render a STATUSQUO argument for either side useless and impossible. You can't just pick a date a mere month and a half ago that suits your "side" any more than Locke can pick a date longer ago and cite that. (It's about page protection rather than scope change, but see also WP:WRONGVERSION.) You'll need to win on the merits here, not by default. SnowFire (talk) 21:04, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- @SnowFire: Can we agree #5 was the WP:STATUSQUO on July 13, 2025, when Cole in his first edit to this article removed about 3k words? Cole is correct that in 2011 "Standard floppy replacements", what are herein called "high-capacity floppy disks," were moved from this article to the Floppy_disk_variants article but since then in over 2000 edits by multiple editors the material has been restored so the current article comprehensively covers all four generations of floppy disks, not a "mess" as Cole characterizes it. The real question is are these "high-capacity floppy disks" variants or are they the fourth generation of floppy disks? There is ample evidence that they are the fourth generation, smaller than the third, but larger than the first or second, and not a variant so if not in this article they deserve an article of their own and we have three articles, Floppy disk (traditional), Floppy disk (high capacity) and Floppy disk variants. Tom94022 (talk) 20:15, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
- Actually, it has been WP:STATUSQUO since at least 2009
- 1 or 5 per Locke Cole for 1 and Ethmostigmus for 5 IndrasBet (talk) 10:08, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
- 1 (with weak support for #2 -- this helps establish a very natural and bright line for what should and should not be included in this article, avoid it from becoming an argument each time if something qualifies for inclusion. Currently the page has a blury definition on what should be included, wherein the propose #1 is the most common thing people are going to be seeking out (eg the cat example above), whereas, Floppy disk variants helps cover all of the edge cases, and is a great place for all of the lesser known and often lesser sought after things that migth have also been considered or referred to as a "floppy disk"... TiggerJay (talk) 22:09, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
- There doesn't need to be this clean a boundary, the page could for example primarily focus on #1 and have a WP:SS main section for the variants. CMD (talk) 04:30, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- #1 considers this, which is why it includes this:
... beyond a small "variants" section which would provide a brief 1-2 paragraph summary of floppy disk variants
. There have been attempts to include more and more in this article, which is not supported by the sources, see for example the recent redirect changes in Super floppy and Superfloppy and the recent additions to this article. - None of these are "floppy disks". They were all products competing to become the next "floppy disk", but none of them really succeeded and CD-RW and USB mass storage devices (flash/thumb/jump drives and eventually external HDD/SSD) really removed the need for something like the floppy disk. What is happening now is a combination of WP:OR/WP:SYNTH and WP:UNDUE given the sources. —Locke Cole • t • c 04:54, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- A longer legacy section? CMD (talk) 10:18, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- I'm not against that. My biggest concern is the citogenesis potential (and probably after this long, actual damage) of readers thinking these were ever called "floppy disks". None of the sources Tom has provided label them with that moniker, the closest we got was "high-capacity floppy disk" which was in one source IIRC. —Locke Cole • t • c 19:39, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Chipmunkdavis: Please take a quick look at Hi-Capacity Floppy Disk Reliable sources where all five sources do so label the category "high-capacity" as being a subset of "Floppy disk" or specific devices as such. Cole tortures English to find distinctions without substance, one of the more interesting being the current Computer History Musuem's article entitled "Floppy disk" which lists within that article the "Zip disk" along with "8-inch floppy disk", "5.25-inch floppy disk" and "3.5-inch floppy disk." That should be the end but somehow the absence of "floppy disk" in front means it is not what the article clearly says it is. Cole then points within the article where it says that the Zip disk is
halfway between a floppy disk and a hard disk
which is true - flexible disk media with Winchester heads is halfway between a floppy disk drive and a hard disk drive, innovative and unexpected at its time to fly Winchester heads on floppy media, but it just means a Zip disk drive can be categorized as a floppy disk drive or a Winchester disk drive but not a hard disk drive! You know when one is between two places, they can be on one side or the other, and in this case, Zip disk is clearly on the floppy side :-) And note in one of the references above, Iomega calls Zip a floppy but that is dismissed as marketing material. Tom94022 (talk) 23:11, 22 August 2025 (UTC)
- A longer legacy section? CMD (talk) 10:18, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- #1 considers this, which is why it includes this:
- #3 These were described as floppy disks at the time, and there are RS calling them such. Yes they all competed to become the next standard floppy disk variant, and failed and became redundant, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be included. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 09:45, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- Which sources call them "floppy disks"? —Locke Cole • t • c 19:36, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- diff — Note: An editor has expressed a concern that editors have been canvassed to this discussion. —Locke Cole • t • c 19:42, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- I did not need to be canvassed as I've been discussing the verification issues with this article since the 24th of July, after it was raised at VPP and then at the talk page for V. In those discussions I was quite vehement in my opposition to Tom94022's suggestion. I was reminded of the discussion by your notification of it at VPT. I was still thinking of my reply when Tom94022 posted to my talk page, so I thought I would post my comment before reply on my talk page. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:11, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- You're entitled to your opinion. Just noting this is now the second time Tom has engaged in canvassing on this talk page. —Locke Cole • t • c 20:21, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- My opinion is that you have a very expansive idea of what constitutes canvassing. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:25, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hmm? It's dictionary definition WP:VOTESTACKING. That's not expansive. That's a WP:PAG. —Locke Cole • t • c 20:27, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- That's a little circular, you're just saying that because it's canvassing therefore it's canvassing. It's not as per my previous comments. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:34, 18 August 2025 (UTC)
- *sigh*... from WP:VOTESTACKING
In the case of a re-consideration of a previous debate (such as a "no consensus" result on an RFC, AFD or CFD), it is similarly inappropriate to send a disproportionate number of notifications specifically to those who expressed a particular viewpoint on the previous debate.
Tom knew how you !voted previously (particular viewpoint on the previous debate
), and contacted just you (disproportionate number of notifications
). Also, it doesn't matter if you intended to reply here, Tom clearly didn't know that, hence the inappropriate canvass attempt. And just to be clear, when I said earlier that you'reentitled to your opinion
, I was speaking of your !vote here. Noting the canvassing is more about the behavior of Tom. —Locke Cole • t • c 23:01, 18 August 2025 (UTC)- As I said I don't agree with Tom94022, even if I do have a similar opinion on this small point. Again most of our interactions have been in opposition, so I would be an odd person to contact if they were looking for affirmation. Tom94022 seems to think this is the end of the world, but if you read my reply to him (or any of my comments about the importance of V) you will see I do not have the same opinion. Sigh all you like, but discussing a situation in which I was previously involved, and was well aware of, is not canvassing. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 00:38, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
Sigh all you like, but discussing a situation in which I was previously involved, and was well aware of, is not canvassing.
Correct. Tom canvassed, not you. —Locke Cole • t • c 04:31, 19 August 2025 (UTC)- @Locke Cole - as it relates to THIS RfC discussion, the diff you provided does not indicate any form of vote stacking -- as that diff occurred well before this RfC. Additionally, AD has been quite active on this talk page prior to the RfC so this page being on their watchlist is very reasonable to presume, and their opinions would have been reasonably expected to be expressed. I would suggest that you consider collapsing everything in this reply thread relating to vote stacking as it doesn't help you cause, and it a distraction from the discussion that we should be spending energy on. TiggerJay (talk) 04:53, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
- The creation of this RFC: 2025-08-13T16:23:53 The WP:VOTESTACKING attempt: 2025-08-16T00:40:16 (about 2.5 days later)
- So the chronological order is there. As to the rest, it doesn't matter if AD was or wasn't going to post here (or even that he previously had — in fact, doing so and expressing an opinion makes WP:VOTESTACKING even more relevant, not less). What matters is the behavior displayed. —Locke Cole • t • c 05:01, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
- This is has a become a major aside that's irrelevant to the actual question of the RFC, let's just move on. If there are questions about an editors behaviour they should be addressed at a proper forum, not an article's talk. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:23, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole - as it relates to THIS RfC discussion, the diff you provided does not indicate any form of vote stacking -- as that diff occurred well before this RfC. Additionally, AD has been quite active on this talk page prior to the RfC so this page being on their watchlist is very reasonable to presume, and their opinions would have been reasonably expected to be expressed. I would suggest that you consider collapsing everything in this reply thread relating to vote stacking as it doesn't help you cause, and it a distraction from the discussion that we should be spending energy on. TiggerJay (talk) 04:53, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
- As I said I don't agree with Tom94022, even if I do have a similar opinion on this small point. Again most of our interactions have been in opposition, so I would be an odd person to contact if they were looking for affirmation. Tom94022 seems to think this is the end of the world, but if you read my reply to him (or any of my comments about the importance of V) you will see I do not have the same opinion. Sigh all you like, but discussing a situation in which I was previously involved, and was well aware of, is not canvassing. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 00:38, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
- *sigh*... from WP:VOTESTACKING
- That's a little circular, you're just saying that because it's canvassing therefore it's canvassing. It's not as per my previous comments. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:34, 18 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hmm? It's dictionary definition WP:VOTESTACKING. That's not expansive. That's a WP:PAG. —Locke Cole • t • c 20:27, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- My opinion is that you have a very expansive idea of what constitutes canvassing. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:25, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- You're entitled to your opinion. Just noting this is now the second time Tom has engaged in canvassing on this talk page. —Locke Cole • t • c 20:21, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- I did not need to be canvassed as I've been discussing the verification issues with this article since the 24th of July, after it was raised at VPP and then at the talk page for V. In those discussions I was quite vehement in my opposition to Tom94022's suggestion. I was reminded of the discussion by your notification of it at VPT. I was still thinking of my reply when Tom94022 posted to my talk page, so I thought I would post my comment before reply on my talk page. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:11, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- #1 Traditional floppies, least surprising for people who are looking for information on the most common use. Content about other media should be split to other articles. - MrOllie (talk) 22:06, 22 August 2025 (UTC)
- #7 Floppy disk as a shorter and improved version of #5 Floppy disk. The section of this article, "Historical sequence of floppy disk formats" includes all formats so it fits better in History_of_the_floppy_disk and shortens the article. If no one objects I will likely do it regardless of the outcome of this discussion. Tom94022 (talk) 22:17, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
- #2/4/6 unless retitled "Standard floppy disks - per WP:TITLE and WP:PRECISION - the article should match to the title so if the title is going to be the overall generic "Floppy disks", then the article scope is all such items. It seems good for a high-level parent article to WP:CFORK off material for subtopics like variants and this article just have a short summary here and redirect for the 10 inch or 2 inch floppies. That's just normal practice and suitable given the relative WP:WEIGHT of the subtopics. But it would be bad for navigation if there was no linkage or content at all except for the most standard size items. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 03:16, 12 September 2025 (UTC)
Extended discussion
- Please move or refactor extended conversations here, or any meta-discussion relating to the RFC itself and not directly about the topic.
- This RFC should run for at least the standard thirty days of a normal RFC. If thirty days has elapsed, feel free to make a request to close the RFC at WP:CR. I would support an earlier close after two weeks if there is a clear consensus forming or discussion has died off. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:29, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- Tom94022, This kind of commentary, in which you pass judgment on the other options by saying things like "there have been no RS to support any of the other proposed scopes", is not really appropriate. The list of options should be a description of the option, without any reasons why you think that option is best. You can move all of that to your own signed response. BTW, "The current article as it exists today" is not going to be very informative, so you might want to replace that with a description. I think that explaining how "The current article as it exists today" differs from "Anything containing a spinning magnetic disc meant for portable storage of computer data" would be particularly helpful, as I can't figure out what the difference is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:54, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for pointing out the typo in #6, corrected and it is now the most broad scope, i.e., any storage medium that has a magnetically coated flexible medium. Maybe I should have said flexible plastic or polymer.
- I do think RS's are a requirement so I left their existence in #5; however, the comparison the other scopes remains in my signed preference.
- #5 splits the FD world into two articles, Floppy disks (in four industry defined categories) and Floppy disk variants (all the rest). I could see four detailed articles with maybe a short disambiguation article but I have a hard time separating high-capacity from the other three because the four categories represent four generations with the last one not being as successful as the previous three (but bigger than the first) For the most part the generations have a great deal of commonality. They do differ, sleeves vs cartridges, holes vs hubs, servos vs open-loop, coating variations, etc. To me it makes sense to put the four generations in one article and highlight the commonality as well as the differences. Tom94022 (talk) 00:29, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- See also I don't think the number of see alsos is an issue per se. They may benefit from structuring, or perhaps we should have List of removable magnetic media. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 06:32, 14 August 2025 (UTC).
- Use cases for the article. It's worth considering these - reading for general information, searching for specific detail, and maybe even nostalgia… I'm happy with the article Floppy disk variants existing alongside this article, so I might revise my comments above a little - but I think it's a question of "summary style". One stylistic phenomenon I'd like to avoid is where a section is solely a main, details, or see link. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 06:48, 14 August 2025 (UTC).
To the right is one page from one of the 23 Disk/Trend reports published on "Flexible Disk Drives" from 1977 to 1998 which segments the market into four categories, 8-inch, 5¼-inch, 3½-inch and high-capacity! In all of these reports Porter, tracking the global storage industry to generate possibly the most significant archive of market research data relating to the modern storage industry to date [2025].
segmented the market by disk size and/or capacity. The last 1998 report shows the market for 3½-inch FDDs predicted as peaking and with the market for high-capacity FDDs growing. I'd be happy to post that if necessary, but I suggest this chart is a RS that the market was so segmented by its participants when the market flourished.
Contrary to Cole's assertion above that Disk/Trend Reports were compilations, they included substantial and original analyses of the floppy disk drive market and other disk drive markets, including forecasts of future volumes and technologies, for which as I recall we paid over $1,000 for each volume!
There is no reliable source for "traditional floppy disk," it is used many times with meaning varying over time but if one uses the dictionary definition of traditional it might exclude many floppy disks and disk drives that were the earliest models in each category, since many were not media, interface, nor physically compatible with what became the more common de-facto standard in each category. For example, the first three or more 8-inch floppy disks were not media compatible with IBM's Diskette 1 which became the first defacto industry standard so I guess it is what most would call the first traditional floppy disk and since it was labeled "Diskette 1" some might even say it was not a "floppy disk."
Scope "#3" (and "#5") encompass the current article, and after extended discussion above, Talk:Floppy_disk#Revert_or_Retitle_Article, its scope was agreed upon by 5 editors with only Cole not supporting either alternative. In that discussion two scopes were proposed, Restore which is essentially "#3" above or Retitle which is essentially "#1" above.
Scopes 1. Traditional floppy disks: and Traditional floppy disks and odd sizes/format are in effect proposals to WP:Split this article. I have no objection to #1 so long as the high-capacity material is preserved in an article. Depending upon what #2's article is entitled I might object, there is nothing odd about the high-capacity FDs nor are they a variant, they collectively represent the failed 4th generation of FDDs and FDs.
Fifty years from now when no one remembers what a floppy disk was and they come to this Wikipedia article do we want them to find what some editors now think it is or do we want them to find what the industry participants including the customers thought it was in the late 20th century when that industry was vibrant. I suggest the latter. Tom94022 (talk) 19:55, 18 August 2025 (UTC)
Hi-Capacity Floppy Disk Reliable sources
This is a discussion of five RSs relating to high-capacity FDs (and high-capacity FDDs) being FDs and FDDs respectively. It was originally posted above and reverted so it has been copied herein and reorganized into separate sections so that editors can see and make discussions in context.
Tom references five "reliable" sources (I put reliable in quotes as I also am not confident they are all reliable, as in the case of DISK/TREND, they are simply a survey of whatever manufacturers provided to them), claiming they support his desired scope for the article. Let's go over them, one by one from the #5 proposal.
—By Locke Cole at 16:56, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- FWIW Jim Porter was the preeminent storage market analyst and historian from 1974 until his death in 2012, see the Computer History Musuem's Jim Porter and the History of the Global Storage Industry. From 1974 until 1998 he annually published a series of Disk/Trend reports on disk storage, one covering "Flexible disk drives." His reports were viewed by industry and media as the premier disk storage market analyses, better than Gartner and IDC and far more than the
simply a survey of whatever manufacturers provided to them.
that Cole asserts. Tom94022 (talk) 20:46, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
1. 1991 Disk/Trend Report-Flexible Disk Drives, p. Sum-16:
This is a single page which means it lacks significant context. Consider also, it is from 1991: Zip was not released until 1995, and SuperDisk lacks a specific entry to market date, but says Iomega abandoned the tech in 1994, and it was picked up by 3M some time after that. This source refers to many technologies as
—By Locke Cole at 16:56, 14 August 2025 (UTC)flexible disk drive technology
, and seems to reserve floppy disk
for consideration of the typical 31⁄2-inch disks released in 1986. And then there's this excerpt: Consequently, alternate technologies are finding only limited success in breaking into floppies established markets, although some displacement of floppy drives is occurring in notebook and hand-held computers where there is insufficient space or power for floppy drives. The high capacity and low profile floppy drive designs now entering the production phase are proof that innovation in floppy disk drives is a continuing process
. Again, remembering that at this point neither Zip nor SuperDisk have been released, this is both WP:CRYSTALBALLish, and suffers from WP:OLDSOURCES (the terminology was in flux, with many manufacturers wanting to ride on "floppy disks" coattails).
- This RS quote that
high capacity ... floppy drive designs now entering the production phase are proof that innovation in floppy disk drives is a continuing process
establishes that as early as 1991 Porter considered HCFDs as FDs. The manufacturers wanted to establish the next generation of traditional FDs; they tried and succeeded to some degree but not the degree as the 3½-inch generation. Tom94022 (talk) 20:46, 14 August 2025 (UTC)- This, like most of the sources you've put forward in support of your POV, feels a lot like someone saying "Now, I want to put in the article Donald Trump that he's been called a bad name, so let me search for
"Donald Trump" "bad name". Look, I found five reliable sources using that exact word! Out of thousands of possible sources, five sources using the word I want to stuff in the article is obviously WP:DUE, right?" - This Google Ngram says that in 1996 (a year I picked as being particularly favorable to high-capacity drives), "floppy disk" was about 5,000 times as likely to be used in English-language sources as "high capacity floppy disk". Why should 1/5,000th of the subject be pushed so hard? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:50, 23 August 2025 (UTC)
- Because Porter, who provided "a long-term record of the global storage industry unlike any other." marks the beginning of the fourth generation of floppy disk storage as early as 1991! The fact that in 1996, not a particularly favorable year for high capacity, it is a small percentage of a large number is pretty much irrelevant as to whether this is a reliable source as to the beginnings of the fourth generation. Tom94022 (talk) 22:32, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
- This, like most of the sources you've put forward in support of your POV, feels a lot like someone saying "Now, I want to put in the article Donald Trump that he's been called a bad name, so let me search for
2. Enabling technologies for a 100-MB 3.5" floppy (ZIPtm) disk drive:
This is, quite literally, marketing material written by an employee of Iomega (the manufacturer of ZIP(tm) disk drives). As noted previously, many manufacturers were eager to be called
—By Locke Cole at 16:56, 14 August 2025 (UTC)floppy disks
, and Iomega was one such company.
- This article was published by SPIE in Proceedings Volume 2604, High-Density Data Recording and Retrieval Technologies; (1996) from Photonics East '95, 1995, Philadelphia, PA, United States. SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics and it's publications are about an RS one can get. The title alone establishes at least the author and the SPIE editor believed that the ZIP drive was a 3.5-inch FDD. I have the article and that is quite clear therein. Tom94022 (talk) 20:46, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you for sharing a marketing white paper. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:19, 23 August 2025 (UTC)
3. 1998 Disk/Trend Report-Removable Data Storage
Repeating same WP:RS concerns as noted for #1 as this is DISK/TREND. This is 3 pages from a larger report, including a Table of Contents, however, it still lacks context. First off, the term
—By Locke Cole at 16:56, 14 August 2025 (UTC)floppy disk
does not appear anywhere. Secondly, where the TOC is concerned, they discuss HIGH CAPACITY FLEXIBLE DISK DRIVES
and LOW CAPACITY FLEXIBLE DISK DRIVES
. The final page has a section titled DISK/TREND product groups
where there is an admitted arbitrary nature to their organization: In most cases the product groups used for individual drives are clear, but a few arbitrary decisions have been made. Please note that all drives with capacities under 5 megabytes have been placed in the low capacity group, regardless of disk diameter
. If anything, this source supports a larger taxonomical grouping that floppy disk, Zip drive and SuperDisk all are within, flexible disk drives
.
- Noting again that Cole's concerns about Disk/Trend are unfounded
- What is pretty clear from just these few excerpts that by 1998 the market for "traditional" floppy disk drives had diminished to the point where the three traditional categories 8-inch, 5½-inch, and 3½-inch could be incorporated into one category, in Porter's terms, "low-capacity" disk drives. He could have called them "traditional" disk but they are all flexible disk drives according to Porter. BTW, if we choose 1, following Porter is possibly an RS to title this article "Floppy disk (low-capacity)
- I am pretty sure I posted this summary info elsewhere in this extended discussion; the high-capacity FDD market in 1998 as reported by Porter comprised 13 manufacturers offering 30 models. The "traditional" FDD market was 10 manufacturers also offering 30 models. Porter clearly supports that by 1998 the FDD market was split between "traditional" and "high-capacity" FDDs. This does bring up the issue of drives versus media, the markets are different and if enough editors care I can drive over to the Computer History Museum’s archives and access the Magnetic Media Information Reports and get market data on FDs, and BTW, likely find more RS's that HCFDs and TFDs are in the same market and therefore should be in one article. Tom94022 (talk) 20:46, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
4. Magnetic Recording, the First 100 Years, Chapter 19: Data Storage on Floppy Disks, Section: High-Capacity Designs:
This is a book on magnetic recording, and is probably the most reliable source provided. I've been granted access to the Wikipedia Library, and despite this, this document is unavailable for me to download. Having said that, the section list is available online, and while included within the chapter titled
—By Locke Cole at 16:56, 14 August 2025 (UTC)Data Storage on Floppy Disks
, it would appear to be within a section titled High-Capacity Designs
(the last section prior to a references list). I'm assuming good faith that Zip/SuperDisk appear within, but given the layout of the rest of the book, it makes sense why the authors chose to include them here (other chapters are on magnetic recording of sound, the telegraphone, steel tape and wire recorders, magnetophon, a history of digital audio, challenges of recording video (with at least four chapters after that on various video recording systems based on magnetic recording), then data storage on drums, data storage on tape, data storage on hard disk, and finally data storage on floppy disks). Given this layout, I think it's a stretch to put any weight behind this, especially since the authors carefully separated out high-capacity designs
from the remainder of the chapter on the topic of floppy disks in general.
- As the title implies, it is a book about the history of magnetic recording with one section devoted to just floppy disk and written by Dave Noble, the person who led the development of the first FD and FDD, given the extensive coverage, the author and the editor this should be give much weight. The editor Mee is the author of several books on magnetic recording in addition to the cited history book. It should be clear that their decision to include a section on
high-capacity designs
in a chapter entitled "Data Storage on Floppy Disks" is an RS that HCFDs are FDs. It seems to me that Cole is saying in an article about hard disk drives, a section on Conner drives means they are not hard disk drives. Tom94022 (talk) 20:46, 14 August 2025 (UTC)given the extensive coverage
Tom, why do you habitually overstate things? WhatamIdoing provided a link that allows us to see howextensive
this coverage actually is. The topic of "high capacity designs" received a grand total of... 1.5 pages. In a book tipping the scales near 340 pages. The chapter on floppy disks is 15 pages. So a topic that merited 1⁄10 of the space is WP:DUE here... why, precisely?in a chapter entitled "Data Storage on Floppy Disks" is an RS that HCFDs are FDs
that would be inaccurate, considering this "high-capacity designs" section uses the word "floppy" twice. Once when explaining the word "floptical" as being a contraction of "floppy" and "optical", and again in the last paragraph which is also the last paragraph of the entire chapter. Here it saysThe personal computer, and its companion the floppy disk, have played an important role in our society. With further advances in technology and the development of new hardware and software, they will continue to impact our lives in many ways
. Now, notwithstanding that a book from 1999 was clearly very very wrong on the long term impacts of "floppy disks" let alone the long term success of formats attempting to replace "floppy disks", this book is a nothing-burger when it comes to the claim that ZIP/Superdisk were "floppy disks". It's also worth mentioning that Superdisk isn't even mentioned in this book, only Zip disk, and again, not directly referred to as a "floppy disk". Simply discussed alongside them because the technology was marketed heavily as the successor format. Marketing != truth. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:16, 23 August 2025 (UTC)- Statistics don't lie, but ... Mee covers 100 years of all storage, computer tape gets only 18 pages! His 15 pages on Floppy disk are his version of this article covering 29 years of FDs. If we follow his teachings about 10% of this article should be devoted to high-capacity and as he does in his book, this article should include Floptical, ZIP and other high-capacity floppy disks. Tom94022 (talk) 23:22, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
5. Computer History Museum: Floppy Disks:
We're faced with a similar situation as #4, clearly whoever organized this into topics wanted to discuss larger format flexible disk technologies, but didn't believe they merited their own chapter/section. And this is telling once you read through it, at no point is Zip disk/drive referred to directly as a
—By Locke Cole at 16:56, 14 August 2025 (UTC)floppy disk
. To quote the relevant portion: Various companies made proprietary higher-capacity disks with packages similar to – but incompatible with – the 3.25-inch standard. Iomega’s 100 MB ZIP disk was halfway between a floppy disk and a hard disk
. Here ZIP disks are referred to as high-capacity disks
(not floppy disk), and states they were halfway between a floppy disk and a hard disk
.
- This is cited because one of Cole's criticisms was the lack of a modern referral. This article entitled "Floppy disk" is one of many articles in the Computer History Museum's Exhibition - Memory & Storage covering all storage from 17th century to date and written by professionals under the supervision of the museum's staff and its Storage Special Interest Group. Like 4 above it is indisputably an RS where the team chose to include in the article on "Floppy Disk" the "Zip disk" and the "Zip disk drive" - that should be the end of the discussion. Yes, they are halfway between a floppy disk and a hard disk because of the servo and the heads, but they still use flexible media which makes them an FD and an FDD, respectively. Tom94022 (talk) 20:46, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- I mean, if you're organizing information for a book or online presentation, and a whole chapter on the topic of Zip isn't warranted, where would you slip Zip in? The most logical place is with the product it was intended (but never did) replace, the timeless "floppy disk". But as you, erstwhile author, are aware, you'd never refer to Zip as a "floppy disk" because it wasn't. And you didn't, and neither did the CHM, which is why it is mentioned alongside "floppy disks", but the only things called "floppy disks" in that section are the actual "floppy disks". And of course there's still the matter of Superdisk/LS-120/etc. not even bearing an honorable mention. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:32, 23 August 2025 (UTC)
- It appears we agree that high-capacity floppy disks were offered to replace the then "traditional" 3.5-inch and that is why they belong in this article. The article is incomplete without all four generations. Note at the beginning of each generation there was a competition for the designs that would become the de facto or even de jure standard for the media, the drive form factor and the drive interface, the high-capacity generation was deja vu all over again, except other better technologies limited the success and that story should be in this article. Tom94022 (talk) 23:33, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
- I mean, if you're organizing information for a book or online presentation, and a whole chapter on the topic of Zip isn't warranted, where would you slip Zip in? The most logical place is with the product it was intended (but never did) replace, the timeless "floppy disk". But as you, erstwhile author, are aware, you'd never refer to Zip as a "floppy disk" because it wasn't. And you didn't, and neither did the CHM, which is why it is mentioned alongside "floppy disks", but the only things called "floppy disks" in that section are the actual "floppy disks". And of course there's still the matter of Superdisk/LS-120/etc. not even bearing an honorable mention. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:32, 23 August 2025 (UTC)
References
- [2]Briggs, John C (January 15, 1996). Enabling technologies for a 100-MB 3.5" floppy (ZIPtm) disk drive (Report). SPIE. pp. 220–227. Retrieved July 21, 2025.
Close challenge
FYI that my closure of the RfC above was challenged on my talk page. I've declined to reconsider it. Ed [talk] [OMT] 22:04, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for pointing out that discussion, hopefully if a close challenge is started it will be linked from here. I was unaware there was any discussion regarding the closure and was looking to update the article in the coming weeks (hopefully prior to the holidays) to reflect the consensus closure. Thank you for your service in providing a neutral closure. —Locke Cole • t • c • b 23:32, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
- Just to add, Tom has indicated on The_ed17's talk page that he wants to WP:CLOSECHALLENGE the result above, but
in a week or so
. I have given Tom a 24-hour deadline, as I intend to begin editing the article to conform with the above result shortly after that. Should he choose to ignore that deadline, I'll ask that his challenge be closed as stale/late given that it will have been a month since the discussion was closed. —Locke Cole • t • c • b 23:10, 20 October 2025 (UTC)- To set the record straight, in accordance with the WP:CLOSECHALLENGE I have been in discussion with the closing editor that ended yesterday. I will post the challenge well before Cole's original plan to
update the article in the coming weeks (hopefully prior to the holidays)
. It will take me a bit of time to prepare a fair and accurate summary of the prior discussion and accurately cite the policy bases of the appeal. This discussion has been going on since July 15, it can wait for the challenge to be posted and responded. I suggest that all editors, especially Cole refrain from substantive changes until after the appeal is closed. Tom94022 (talk) 19:15, 21 October 2025 (UTC)- It appears Tom has missed the deadline, so I will begin making edits today to bring the article in line with the consensus decision above. WP:CCC, but as Tom appears to be acting in bad faith and disruptively, I will ignore his antics going forward as I suspect his challenge will be closed quickly. To set the record straight, Tom has been making substantial changes to this article during the discussions above and the RFC, so I take his "suggestion" has just more stonewalling.
Rules for thee, but not for me
. —Locke Cole • t • c • b 14:41, 22 October 2025 (UTC)- I am hard at work on the WP:CLOSECHALLENGE and should have it filed by early next week, well before the holidays. To be clear my request above is that all editors refrain from making any substantial reduction in the current scope of this article until after the appeal is resolved. For the record, the current scope has all floppy disks covered, that is 8-inch, 5¼-inch, 3½-inch, high-capacity, and, by linkage, variants. Should the appeal be accepted any substantial change that reduces the scope to just "traditional" floppy disks will be reverted. FWIW, the few edits I made to this article since the RfC was posted were consistent with the current scope and AFAICT there have been no inconsistent edits yet applied. Tom94022 (talk) 19:17, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
- It appears Tom has missed the deadline, so I will begin making edits today to bring the article in line with the consensus decision above. WP:CCC, but as Tom appears to be acting in bad faith and disruptively, I will ignore his antics going forward as I suspect his challenge will be closed quickly. To set the record straight, Tom has been making substantial changes to this article during the discussions above and the RFC, so I take his "suggestion" has just more stonewalling.
- To set the record straight, in accordance with the WP:CLOSECHALLENGE I have been in discussion with the closing editor that ended yesterday. I will post the challenge well before Cole's original plan to
- Just to add, Tom has indicated on The_ed17's talk page that he wants to WP:CLOSECHALLENGE the result above, but
3.5" floppy
On the reverse side of 3.5" floppies (opposite of the label side), there's an oblong indentation under the write-protect icons. It looks like it might be for a label but it's not clear what the function of this actually is. What is the function of this feature? ~2026-14255-03 (talk) 18:59, 5 March 2026 (UTC)
