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

[Richard O'Keefe]

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.