[erlang-questions] FOP (was: Re: Trace-Driven Development)

[Michael Turner]

> There are several edits there, purportedly by me, of a version that claims
> I'm the cousin of some footballer, which I am not.

SInce I've written over and over on this thread about how becoming an
editor should be a much more restrictive process than Wikipedia's
(which is something you can do in MediaWiki - it offers fairly
fine-grained access control.) I can only take the complaint you offer
as a sign of either serious amnesia ()get that looked at) of serious
disrespect for anything I have to say.

> I'd like to thank 'Gadfium' who apparently corrected the article, but I
> have no idea who Gadfium is.

You could post here, on his talk page

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gadfium

if you were thankful. If you need to know who he is, you could ask
there, and he might send you private e-mail.

In any case, this is all irrelevant for our discussion, since policy
of any Erlang/OTP wiki could easily include (and probably should
include) a rule that everybody editing must be identified by their
real-world name. This rule could be enforced by putting a human being
in the loop of signup, someone who makes sure that the e-mail address
sent as part of signup is that of a real person, and that this real
person sent that application for editorship.

> In my wildest dreams I couldn't have asked for a better example of a
> Wiki going wrong.

Then you don't have much experience at all with editing wikis, because
much worse stuff happens all the time. It needn't happen with an
Erlang/OTP wiki, for reasons I've explained over and over, in earlier
message, and which you apparently either can't remember (get  that
looked at, the amnesia may be effecting your work too) or choose to
ignore (can't help you with that problem.)

> I do not see any advantage to be gained by making
> rapid acceptance of untrue information with forged credentials easy.

Nor do I. MediaWiki, and all wikis worth of the name, provide
administrator dashboards from which one can enforce requirements on
membership. As you can see, the need for it is obvious. And in fact,
employed often enough. I've been part of the process of banning people
from editing, including IP blocks. In one case, it involved someone
who made legal threats against me, and only for revising an article on
a controversial subject to be more accurate (in case you're wondering
why most editors - not me, but most - choose anonymity.)

Again, you're falling back on "wikis suck because I found something
bad." You're not asking, "Why does this bad thing happen, and is there
anything to be done to prevent it?" In fact, these problems are quite
manageable, and Wikipedia, in the interests of gathering the largest
possible membership, leaves editing quite open. It also means some
information is unreliable at one time or another. Anyone who reads
Wikipedia without keeping that in mind is simply a fool.

-michael turner

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On 9/06/2012, at 7:30 PM, Michael Turner wrote:
>>
>>  http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kennita-watson/1/321/a19
>>
>> Kennita's most recent resume entry there:
>>
>> too much experience
>> Long Term Disability
>> July 2005 – Present (7 years) Sunnyvale, CA
>>
>> I haven't worked since 2005; the purpose of this entry is to get
>> LinkedIn to stop asking me for a current position.
>> ---
>>
>> Maybe she's only joking about the disability part.
>
> I'm not a member of LinkedIn, so I am unable to read her profile.
> She may well not be joking; one of the highly innovative people
> in the Prolog community, Lee Naish, pretty much dropped out of
> sight for similar reasons.  He's a really nice person too.
> (And Melbourne is an Erlang-friendly University:  the Mercury
> language/system has a back end that generates Erlang.  If Lee
> hadn't become ill, he might have contributed a lot to Erlang.)
>
>>
>>> And now we come to the crux of the matter.  It's the *review* process.
>>> That takes time and effort and management, and it's not at all clear
>>> to me what, if anything, makes a wiki easier to manage than the current
>>> setup.
>>
>> I don't know either, because I don't know Ericsson Erlang/OTP
>> documentation patch review processes.
>>
>> For how it would work in a wiki, try starting at this link
>>
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_O%27Keefe&diff=489842048&oldid=489773645
>>
>> and keep clicking "Previous edit". I think this interface makes it
>> pretty easy to tell that a small, simple edit (which is most of them,
>> and which would be most of them, in what I propose) is in fact
>> correct. If it's not, note the "undo" links -- very often, "undo" just
>> works without fuss.
>
> That actually tells me a lot about review processes, and it is damning.
>
>        • 12:19, 29 April 2012 (diff | hist) . . (-4)‎ . . Richard O'Keefe ‎
>        • 12:19, 29 April 2012 (diff | hist) . . (+13)‎ . . Richard O'Keefe ‎
>        • 12:18, 29 April 2012 (diff | hist) . . (+67)‎ . . Richard O'Keefe ‎
>        • 23:22, 30 March 2012 (diff | hist) . . (-39)‎ . . Stiliyan Petrov ‎ (→‎External links)
>        • 20:53, 13 February 2012 (diff | hist) . . (+50)‎ . . Syd Barrett ‎
>
> There are several edits there, purportedly by me, of a version that claims
> I'm the cousin of some footballer, which I am not.
>
>  - The information is untrue.
>  - The purported author is not the real author.
>  - The subject is alive and readily reachable and
>   the changes were not verified.
>
> I'd like to thank 'Gadfium' who apparently corrected the article, but I
> have no idea who Gadfium is.  When I tried to send feedback saying that
> I'd like to thank Gadfium for the correction, I got a "Form submission
> error" with no indication of what the error actually was.
>
> In my wildest dreams I couldn't have asked for a better example of a
> Wiki going wrong.  And what the history features of Wikipedia actually
> guarantee is that the wrong information will be discoverable forever.
>
>> So if this is the "crux of the matter", maybe a wiki would actually
>> make documentation patch review and acceptance *easier* than it is now
>> at Ericsson:
>
> I do not see any advantage to be gained by making
> rapid acceptance of untrue information with forged credentials easy.
>
>