Larry Sanger, whose only claim to fame is a brief association with something that became impressive well after he left, is upset that people aren't deferring to him just because he has an official stamp of expertise in something other than the topic he is currently opining on.
If they aren't happy with the consequences of working for an organization that denies people their basic human dignities, then they should be looking for a new job.
Amen. Small-scale wrongness just requires some asshole. But ugliness in the large requires not just an asshole at the top, but a lot of compliant "just-doing-my-job" zombies at the bottom. We will never completely get rid of the assholes, but there's no reason to help them make the world worse. Even if it does come with a steady paycheck.
As if he'd use a script. I hear his plan is just to take prints of all his previous movies, blow them up with a lot of C4, and then take the frames that flutter down as the initial storyboards. Kind of like trusting to God, but Michael Bay believes only in Michael Bay.
(like dumping ALSA and moving back to the new OSS).
Speaking of which, what is up with Linux sound? I'm just an OS consumer these days, so normally I don't bitch about Linux issues. But for years sound has been at best a bit wonky, and often entirely fucked. And that's on mainstream hardware.
I ask because it sounds like you know some of the story.
I wasn't around for it. But I'd say it's just another example of cargo cult programming.
It's much easier to say you're doing something, and maybe to observe some of the rituals, than to actually do the work. A lot of people working in OO languages don't even know what constitutes real OO. And I don't blame them; most intro Java books, for example, just give little snippets of procedural code with an occasional OO gloss.
You can see the same pattern happening today with Agile development. Some people get great results by deeply changing how they work. Others hear about it, adopt a fraction of it, and still see improvement. Then a lot of other people jump on the bandwagon, watering it down to the point where it's worthless, but in the meantime turning a big profit on certification, training, and consulting.
Then you're doing something wrong. I'm sorry for this, but I can't stand people who blame job markets for being unemployed. There's *always* work, so long as you know where to look.
Amen, brother! I just got done with a round of hiring. I figured with the recession it would be easy. Not so! For 5 senior developer slots, we interviewed at least 20, did phone screens with circa 100, and got easily 500 resumes.
The number one reason we didn't hire people was because we didn't think they could code. Some were more scripters than real developers. Some had been ruined by too many years doing "enterprise" blah-blah; we wanted people to make stuff, not draw diagrams of best-practice pattern paradigms for proactive service-oriented synergies. Some just lacked the basics: a surprising number couldn't figure out the number of bits in an IP address, and two didn't know the number of bits in a byte.
The number two reason we said no to people was that they were risky, crazy, or broken. If I'm going to spend the next couple of years in a room with you working on something I care a lot about, I have to believe that a) you are not totally insane, b) you will not screw us over, and c) you are there to solve problems for our users. I don't think these are particularly high standards, but it seems like a surprisingly large fraction of people either left mom's basement too late or should never have left at all.
If people out there are having trouble getting hired, here's my tip: do practice interviews with friends or relatives who have hired before. Hopefully they can tell you the things that are invisible to you but are painfully obvious to people on my side of the table.
A landlord could not get away with inserting unconscionable terms into leases because renters would never agree to them.
Heh. That's cute. You clearly have never been a leasing agent. Or a consumer salesman for anything that requires signing contracts. If you'd like to learn something, go on a vacation to someplace warm and sign up for a timeshare presentation. Even if you manage to hold on to your wallet, you will discover just how many people can be persuaded to agree to pretty much any idiocy.
Regarding leases, even if renters bother to read everything and try to understand it, which is pretty rare, they lack the experience necessary to see all the angles. The landlord, on the other hand, has plenty of experience. And by the time the renter realizes what a bad situation they have, their stuff is moved in, so moving is a giant hassle. So as long as the landlord can keep the perceived awfulness below the perceived costs of finding a new place and moving, they can get in quite a lot that the renter never expected up front.
No, the principle is that there are more renters than apartment owners, and therefore politicians pander to the tyranny of the majority (and those who feel sorry for them) while trampling on the property rights of the minority. Votes over principle. Just please don't call it "renters' rights."
Having been on both sides of the landlord/tenant divide, I disagree with you to some extent.
Yes, in some spots, renter protection laws are egregious. I rent in one of them, and would give up some of my rights in a heartbeat if I could, as they're ridiculous.
But giving renters special protection makes some sense. Free markets work best when relationships are relatively equal and very fluid.
For example, near my house, there are three different corner stores. They're all run by their owners, and all compete vigorously for roughly the same set of customers. This works well for them, because good business practice is quickly rewarded, and for us, because they're always trying to find ways to give a better deal.
But changing houses is difficult and expensive, and shopping for them is a lot of murky work. Further, things are somewhat asymmetrical. It's easier for a landlord to lose a tenant than it is for a tenant to move. A similar asymmetry also allows landlords more practice, meaning that they will be better at controlling the relationship. All that allows bad landlords and employers to get up to all sorts of shenanigans without any market penalty.
I have some hopes that the Internet is slowly turning the murk into clarity, fixing the information asymmetry. But it can't fix the asymmetries of importance or experience, so for the foreseeable future, landlords and employers will always have more opportunity for manipulation and bad behavior. Tenant and employee protection laws are a reasonable way to go about fixing that.
How about this solution? When the service shuts down, [...] limited duration FTP [...] DVDs [...] snail mail in case a user lost e-mail as well.
Reasonable in theory, but you're ignoring three sets of psychological factors.
One is that talking much about service shutdown will likely dissuade potential users, not encourage them. When people by the millions signed up for GMail, how many of them actually thought about what would happen when Google got tired of it or failed? A vanishingly small percentage, I'd bet, because part of the reason they trusted Google with their mail was that they didn't even consider the endgame.
Two is that the only software that really works is software that gets cared about and used. If a company built something like this in advance, it would probably not work when the time came. Sure, it'd meet somebody's checklist. But they probably wouldn't have thought it through, because if they took the odds of shutdown seriously, they wouldn't have started the business in the first place.
And that brings me to the third point: what a company feels like when it is shutting down. Because people have focused on avoiding it, they probably don't have enough cushion left to do a perfectly graceful shutdown. And even if they did, everything seems kinda pointless and incredibly hard, as if you were wearing an outfit made out of dental x-ray vests.
Competition for customer satisfaction would drive other providers to adopt this if one did.
I'd think it would be better to tie a service like this not to shutdown, but either to openness or to backups. Both of those are positive things that allow you to get your data out.
I agree that behavior like that is a problem. What I am not yet persuaded of is that it is a big problem. A couple of anonymous anecdotes backed with little or no evidence is not proof of a giant problem, it's proof that Wikipedia works like it works. Most of the things you think were off-topic were in fact related to that particular point.
I'm sorry you don't like the citation system. I agree that it would be better if noted experts could participate more usefully. However, your proposed solutions seem implausible to me.
Yes, it's a lot of work to actually get an article to the level where it's impossible to manipulate. That seems like a bad thing when you've decided that you're on the side of truth and right. But it cuts a few ways: it makes it harder for nefarious people to control an article, and it keeps well-meaning but over-certain people from wrecking the article as well. I'm sorry you don't personally want to put in the work anymore, but people getting frustrated with Wikipedia and quitting is not a new phenomenon, and given the unending font of volunteer labor, it may not actually be a problem, no matter how distasteful we find it personally.
I did indeed point readers at evidence, which you did not even bother to try to look up,
When you originally mentioned it, I thought you were suggesting we go look at the editing history of the article, which yes, I saw no need to look up, as I was already aware of the previous controversy surrounding it, much of which was driven, as I mentioned, by the Overstock.com crazy guy.
When you suggested that there was more (without bothering to link) I went and read the register.co.uk article, which was the best I could find. But although I enjoy the Register's style on some occasions, they are not what I'd call particularly careful with their facts, and they relied very heavily on Weiss and a guy paid by Weiss. When I asked for more, you linked to an article bought and paid for by the same Overstock.com people. It's all one side of a multi-sided story, and nothing from an outfit with, say, a journalistic reputation and a fact-checking department.
So don't get your knickers in a twist. From what you've shown so far, all your evidence is one big anecdote. I already agree that people sometimes behave badly on Wikipedia, and I'd like to see less bad behavior. I just don't think it's a particularly big problem as measured by effects on readers.
The Deep Capture blog is not a reliable news source, and is run by a player in this tale, apparently after hiring a journalist. You wanna try 30 seconds this time and see if it gets you any further?
I'm beginning to realize too many engineers and computer nerds fall into a trap where they can only see how things will fail. [...] Force yourself into doing things that don't require stringent rules like programming. And for god sake, stop trying to fucking correct your girlfriend/wife/whatever on minor technical details (even though it is hard sometimes, trust me)!!
Yeah, I had a similar epiphany a decade ago. After a hard week dealing with my dying grandparents, and a six-hour drive in bad weather, I came home to find my roommate's relentlessly negative girlfriend sitting in my favorite chair, drinking my scotch.
For the next hour I sat numbly while she complained at me about whatever speck of the world's badness was bothering her at the time. Eventually she went away, and I had an incredible feeling of relief. It was like somebody had finally stopped feeding scrap tin through a paper shredder. Over the next few hours I killed the bottle of scotch and thought a lot about the nature of life.
When the hangover cleared the next morning, I had already made my decision: negative people were annoying as fuck, and I resolved not to be one. It took me a long time to retrain myself, and I still slip occasionally. But it was entirely worth it, both for its effect on others and on my own mental health.
Quick tip from a fellow nerd: when people say something that is obviously retarded or meaningless when interpreted literally, they often are speaking figuratively.
For example, "it is what it is" is often used to mean that they want people to focus on what's possible in the current situation, rather than what is ideal.
A lot of what I previously thought of as psychobabble actually now makes good sense to me. Once I realized that although I'm intellectually bright, I'm relatively weak in both interpersonal and intrapersonal areas, I spent some time studying hard in areas that come naturally to most people. If you're interested, I'd start with Emotional Intellgence, which is a pop-sci examination of how intelligence is not a single axis, but has a number of areas along which people vary somewhat independently. Then run with the references from there.
Being smarter than other people actually seems to be a disadvantage in management.
This is not true, although it appears that way for two reasons.
One, a big part of management skills are people skills, and a lot more people are strong in one area than in two. People tend to specialize in things they're good at.
Two, people tend to undervalue skills that they don't have, perhaps for reasons related to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Intellectually average managers may look at a dorky programmer and mainly notice their lack of social skills and poor dress sense. Equally, that programmer may fail to appreciate what the manager is actually good at, and focus on how much lower their IQ is.
Another confounding factor is politicking. The larger the company, the more room there is for individuals to advance themselves without regard for the company or their colleagues. Some of the dumbest decisions I've ever seen came from perfectly smart people who were just acting in their own personal interests.
Can you tell us more about how your friend got into that position?
Sure. He's very talented, has a long history of working on enterprise apps, is very skilled at cleaning up legacy code, and was pals with the head of a relatively young consulting company when the end client was forced to do some intensive rework on a core part of their revenue stream. He got a reasonably good consulting rate to work on that. And then he worked on things like an endlessly patient terrier, somehow maintaining his sanity while cleaning up other people's mistakes.
Honestly, you aren't likely to find a gig like that. First, because you're probably not endlessly patient and very financially driven like this guy is. Second, because when gigs like that are common, large consulting companies take them using a lot of sales mojo, and then keep most of the revenue, paying their developers modestly. And third, because there aren't a lot of companies that simultaneously a) have crappy legacy code bases, b) have a strong company culture that you should clean up messes, and c) have enough raw cash that they don't mind paying consulting rates to the same guy for five years.
What you're saying pretty much translates into 'I want to work more and get paid less.'
You forgot one important part: "while not being driven fucking insane". Being able to actually get things done without a lot of bullshit is worth a lot of money to me, and plenty of others.
Sweeping up crap after one managerial elephant parade after another can pay quite well, because jobs like that suck and really good people rarely want to waste their time like that. Taking less money for more satisfaction and less stress is, for a lot of people, a great trade.
And if the original poster is one of those people who doesn't mind being a human pooper scooper, then he should certainly become a contractor or consultant. I know one contractor who for the last 5 years has been cleaning up other people's spaghetti code at a large internet company, and grossing over $300k/year for it. And he can do that as long as he wants, because the permanent employees can always tie things in knots faster than he can untangle them.
You are absolutely right to keep your day job for now, and kudos to you for getting motivated to make a change before you go postal.
Two vital warnings: do not quit your day job until you have so much other work that you can't possibly do both. It will take a while to build up enough of a network to do that. And you should also have at least six months expenses in cash. There will be ups and downs, and you and your family must be financially and emotionally prepared to ride them out.
As far as finding work, start with your social network, especially friends and family. There is somebody out there who needs something simple built. As long as the job is of modest size and the money is more than pocket lint, take it. You'll need to build up a portfolio, collect references, and learn how to run your own business. Practice all that on small, easy jobs.
The way you get more business after that? When somebody needs you, you must be the person they hear about. The best way to do that is by doing great work for people socially connected to them. And that's great on their terms, not on yours. So study what people really want, and practice setting aside your personal taste in technology. Also study how they are interconnected, and how they decide whom to trust. Being in a service business is all about people, even if you're using technology to provide a service.
Personally, I love being independent; it doesn't mean you can do as you please around the clock, but being able to tell any one client that they're too crazy to work with is a pearl beyond price.
Hi! Your points are good ones. The bad behavior and bad user experiences definitely bother me, and I wish it were otherwise.
On the other hand, I'm cautious about comparing real things against imaginary standards rather than existing competitors. That's not to knock imaginary standards, as they help us push for a better world. But although they tell us what we'd like, they don't tell us what is possible.
It's my hope that ten years from now we'll have a number of other collaborative Internet projects at Wikipedia's scale that have eliminated many of the flaws of Wikipedia's model. But looking at traffic rankings, the only sites that strike me as closely comparable are IMDB and Flickr. Both are nakedly commercial, and totally controlled and run by full-time staff. IMDB is very hard to participate in effectively, and on Flickr, you have to pay to contribute much. Flickr also avoids a lot of Wikipedia's battling by letting people set up as much personal territory as they want, which is a better experience for contributors, but makes it a lot less useful for readers.
Another interesting comparison is Craiglist, which is just as open as Wikipedia, and is at least close to a non-profit. But again, what little control is strongly central. There, the central control is informed by the active participants, but it's still Craig's territory. And the only thing that makes it useful to readers is the search; a large swathe of the content is somewhere between "dubious" and "open sewer" in quality level.
Two other interesting comparisons are the social networks, the benefits and numerous flaws of which are obvious, and search engines. The Internet is already one giant collaborative project, and the search engines are the gateways to that, trying to extract some order from the soup. But it's not obvious to me that is of higher quality or less drama-filled than Wikipedia. As evidenced by the fact that Wikipedia is in the top three for an awful lot of searches, a lot of people find Wikipedia more useful than the rest of the content the search engines are indexing.
So in sum, I agree that Wikipedia isn't perfect, but for at least some ways of ranking, we don't have anything better yet.
Of course - you've invested a lot of your time in "levelling up" on Wikipedia, so anybody saying that Wikipedia has troubles *which don't affect "levelled up" people* is going to just feel fine. Common psychological mechanism. This is doubly true when we say that Wikipedia should change to remove your "levelled up" advantage. Which, overall, is the problem.
In this case, probably not so much. I do have a pretty old account, but I'm not a very active contributor, except in occasional bursts. To the extent that there's an inside and an outside, I'm mainly on the outside; I just don't have the time for it to be otherwise. But it's fascinating to watch.
Actually, in the most recent case (for me), I was trying to clarify the kind of action on a particular kind of gun. The "camper" did not want the issue clarified, and did not accept Wikipedia's own article on the subject as sufficient authority. He went so far as to edit the discussion page (not the article page, the discussion page), to remove my comments about the issue.
I agree that it's a problem that he was a jerk. I am also sad that you didn't feel able and/or willing to use one of the many mechanisms for sorting this out. At least for editing the discussion pages, the guy probably deserved a beating, and possibly for other stuff, to.
On the other hand, hearing your interpretation of a couple of incidents is not making me worry for Wikipedia's reliability as a whole, for a few reasons.
First, things like this will always happen. When you have a project where you let everybody in the world contribute (or at least everybody minus a few people difficult enough to get banned), things are not going to go smoothly all the time. Wikipedia should try hard to minimize the bullshit, but they can't eliminate it without wrecking things that are much more important.
Second, given that most people make changes because they think that they are improving things, it's not a shock that a lot of people would walk away butthurt and thinking that Wikipedia's got it wrong. For a lot of attempted changes, that's the second-best outcome. (The first would be people coming to a happy joint agreement.)
Third, Wikipedia's always going to have some rough articles. That's because the coverage boundary is continually expanding. For things without sufficient attention, articles may be dubious. That's great, as dubious bits drive improvement, and keep people in shape. Getting major things wrong on major articles would be a big problem. Having minor things wrong for a while is tolerable.
Fourth, that people argue over how to apply the rules is not a bad thing; it's a good thing. It forces people to understand what an encyclopedia is and how you have to work in a collaborative project to succeed. From one perspective, Wikipedia is one of the largest MMORPG on the planet, and resolving disagreements is a big part of how people level up.
Fifth, I don't even expect Wikipedia to work particularly well on the level of particular changes. As long as each edit has as much as a 51% chance of being beneficial, then the project gets better over time.
So overall, evidenceless anecdotes from anonymous Internet people are never going to worry me much.
FYI, Wikipedia pages aren't reliable sources for other Wikipedia pages. Only good external sources are. That's because Wikipedia is just a compilation of information from other places, not a real source on its own.
That people do attempt to take ownership of articles and that other people dispute it is not proof that the guy's idea of increasing article ownership is anything but ridiculous.
It has been a long time since I turned in my colored coat and my trading floor badge, but when the whole naked short selling thing came up again recently, I looked into it and then called a number of pals who are still in the industry. None of them thought it was a particularly great idea, and all of them thought it was an anachronism, but none of them thought it was a big deal, either.
I'll note that the group you point to is linked to overstock.com, which as I pointed out earlier has been on a jihad for years against naked short selling because they were sure that their stock price should be higher. I couldn't find any record of the group's donations or payments, so it's not clear to me who's paying whom there.
Anyhow, from what I can tell, the Wikipedia article pretty accurately reflects the balance of opinion out there. If you are reading that article as "abysmally onesided and biased", you should switch to decaf. It makes it pretty clear that there are two sides to the story.
If you want to insist that I cite examples, then use the example of the article on naked short selling in the stock market. If you are not familiar with that case, look it up. It is hardly an isolated case.
Without even looking at the article, I suspect you are one of two sorts of crazy person:
The Overstock.com nut job who a) has his own personal jihad against naked short selling, b) has a related jihad against Wikipedia, and c) posts here using a variety of sock puppets. Or,
One of the great raft of economic kooks who were convinced that naked short selling was undermining our entire economic system and part of a plot to contaminate our precious bodily fluids. Or keep us off the gold standard. Or something.
More generally, for approximately every article on Wikipedia, there is at least one person who thinks that the article is a flagrant abuse of something or other, and proof of rottenness at the heart of the operation. Why? Because it does not reflect their views the way they would like to hear them.
letting the article creator decide would create a whole new level of article integrity
On Wikipedia, there is no "article creator". Sure, somebody had to create some particular article, but there is no article ownership. Creating a page means bupkis.
Also, letting financially benefiting individuals decide which advertising and how much surely would create a whole new level of integrity: none. First, the link-spammers, affiliate whores, and PR departments of the world would immediately flood Wikipedia with crap. And for the few grad students who elbowed their way in, they would begin to learn why real publishers try to separate advertising and editorial entirely: because it influences the writing.
For those who want to read a whole book on the topic, see Punished By Rewards. It makes a very persuasive case that for a great swathe of human activity, reward systems look very appealing but actually undermine or wreck the behaviors you're trying to encourage.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess before I've read the article:
Larry Sanger, whose only claim to fame is a brief association with something that became impressive well after he left, is upset that people aren't deferring to him just because he has an official stamp of expertise in something other than the topic he is currently opining on.
If they aren't happy with the consequences of working for an organization that denies people their basic human dignities, then they should be looking for a new job.
Amen. Small-scale wrongness just requires some asshole. But ugliness in the large requires not just an asshole at the top, but a lot of compliant "just-doing-my-job" zombies at the bottom. We will never completely get rid of the assholes, but there's no reason to help them make the world worse. Even if it does come with a steady paycheck.
As if he'd use a script. I hear his plan is just to take prints of all his previous movies, blow them up with a lot of C4, and then take the frames that flutter down as the initial storyboards. Kind of like trusting to God, but Michael Bay believes only in Michael Bay.
(like dumping ALSA and moving back to the new OSS).
Speaking of which, what is up with Linux sound? I'm just an OS consumer these days, so normally I don't bitch about Linux issues. But for years sound has been at best a bit wonky, and often entirely fucked. And that's on mainstream hardware.
I ask because it sounds like you know some of the story.
Why didn't the promise of OO happen?
I wasn't around for it. But I'd say it's just another example of cargo cult programming.
It's much easier to say you're doing something, and maybe to observe some of the rituals, than to actually do the work. A lot of people working in OO languages don't even know what constitutes real OO. And I don't blame them; most intro Java books, for example, just give little snippets of procedural code with an occasional OO gloss.
You can see the same pattern happening today with Agile development. Some people get great results by deeply changing how they work. Others hear about it, adopt a fraction of it, and still see improvement. Then a lot of other people jump on the bandwagon, watering it down to the point where it's worthless, but in the meantime turning a big profit on certification, training, and consulting.
Then you're doing something wrong. I'm sorry for this, but I can't stand people who blame job markets for being unemployed. There's *always* work, so long as you know where to look.
Amen, brother! I just got done with a round of hiring. I figured with the recession it would be easy. Not so! For 5 senior developer slots, we interviewed at least 20, did phone screens with circa 100, and got easily 500 resumes.
The number one reason we didn't hire people was because we didn't think they could code. Some were more scripters than real developers. Some had been ruined by too many years doing "enterprise" blah-blah; we wanted people to make stuff, not draw diagrams of best-practice pattern paradigms for proactive service-oriented synergies. Some just lacked the basics: a surprising number couldn't figure out the number of bits in an IP address, and two didn't know the number of bits in a byte.
The number two reason we said no to people was that they were risky, crazy, or broken. If I'm going to spend the next couple of years in a room with you working on something I care a lot about, I have to believe that a) you are not totally insane, b) you will not screw us over, and c) you are there to solve problems for our users. I don't think these are particularly high standards, but it seems like a surprisingly large fraction of people either left mom's basement too late or should never have left at all.
If people out there are having trouble getting hired, here's my tip: do practice interviews with friends or relatives who have hired before. Hopefully they can tell you the things that are invisible to you but are painfully obvious to people on my side of the table.
A landlord could not get away with inserting unconscionable terms into leases because renters would never agree to them.
Heh. That's cute. You clearly have never been a leasing agent. Or a consumer salesman for anything that requires signing contracts. If you'd like to learn something, go on a vacation to someplace warm and sign up for a timeshare presentation. Even if you manage to hold on to your wallet, you will discover just how many people can be persuaded to agree to pretty much any idiocy.
Regarding leases, even if renters bother to read everything and try to understand it, which is pretty rare, they lack the experience necessary to see all the angles. The landlord, on the other hand, has plenty of experience. And by the time the renter realizes what a bad situation they have, their stuff is moved in, so moving is a giant hassle. So as long as the landlord can keep the perceived awfulness below the perceived costs of finding a new place and moving, they can get in quite a lot that the renter never expected up front.
No, the principle is that there are more renters than apartment owners, and therefore politicians pander to the tyranny of the majority (and those who feel sorry for them) while trampling on the property rights of the minority. Votes over principle. Just please don't call it "renters' rights."
Having been on both sides of the landlord/tenant divide, I disagree with you to some extent.
Yes, in some spots, renter protection laws are egregious. I rent in one of them, and would give up some of my rights in a heartbeat if I could, as they're ridiculous.
But giving renters special protection makes some sense. Free markets work best when relationships are relatively equal and very fluid.
For example, near my house, there are three different corner stores. They're all run by their owners, and all compete vigorously for roughly the same set of customers. This works well for them, because good business practice is quickly rewarded, and for us, because they're always trying to find ways to give a better deal.
But changing houses is difficult and expensive, and shopping for them is a lot of murky work. Further, things are somewhat asymmetrical. It's easier for a landlord to lose a tenant than it is for a tenant to move. A similar asymmetry also allows landlords more practice, meaning that they will be better at controlling the relationship. All that allows bad landlords and employers to get up to all sorts of shenanigans without any market penalty.
I have some hopes that the Internet is slowly turning the murk into clarity, fixing the information asymmetry. But it can't fix the asymmetries of importance or experience, so for the foreseeable future, landlords and employers will always have more opportunity for manipulation and bad behavior. Tenant and employee protection laws are a reasonable way to go about fixing that.
How about this solution? When the service shuts down, [...] limited duration FTP [...] DVDs [...] snail mail in case a user lost e-mail as well.
Reasonable in theory, but you're ignoring three sets of psychological factors.
One is that talking much about service shutdown will likely dissuade potential users, not encourage them. When people by the millions signed up for GMail, how many of them actually thought about what would happen when Google got tired of it or failed? A vanishingly small percentage, I'd bet, because part of the reason they trusted Google with their mail was that they didn't even consider the endgame.
Two is that the only software that really works is software that gets cared about and used. If a company built something like this in advance, it would probably not work when the time came. Sure, it'd meet somebody's checklist. But they probably wouldn't have thought it through, because if they took the odds of shutdown seriously, they wouldn't have started the business in the first place.
And that brings me to the third point: what a company feels like when it is shutting down. Because people have focused on avoiding it, they probably don't have enough cushion left to do a perfectly graceful shutdown. And even if they did, everything seems kinda pointless and incredibly hard, as if you were wearing an outfit made out of dental x-ray vests.
Competition for customer satisfaction would drive other providers to adopt this if one did.
I'd think it would be better to tie a service like this not to shutdown, but either to openness or to backups. Both of those are positive things that allow you to get your data out.
I agree that behavior like that is a problem. What I am not yet persuaded of is that it is a big problem. A couple of anonymous anecdotes backed with little or no evidence is not proof of a giant problem, it's proof that Wikipedia works like it works. Most of the things you think were off-topic were in fact related to that particular point.
I'm sorry you don't like the citation system. I agree that it would be better if noted experts could participate more usefully. However, your proposed solutions seem implausible to me.
Yes, it's a lot of work to actually get an article to the level where it's impossible to manipulate. That seems like a bad thing when you've decided that you're on the side of truth and right. But it cuts a few ways: it makes it harder for nefarious people to control an article, and it keeps well-meaning but over-certain people from wrecking the article as well. I'm sorry you don't personally want to put in the work anymore, but people getting frustrated with Wikipedia and quitting is not a new phenomenon, and given the unending font of volunteer labor, it may not actually be a problem, no matter how distasteful we find it personally.
I did indeed point readers at evidence, which you did not even bother to try to look up,
When you originally mentioned it, I thought you were suggesting we go look at the editing history of the article, which yes, I saw no need to look up, as I was already aware of the previous controversy surrounding it, much of which was driven, as I mentioned, by the Overstock.com crazy guy.
When you suggested that there was more (without bothering to link) I went and read the register.co.uk article, which was the best I could find. But although I enjoy the Register's style on some occasions, they are not what I'd call particularly careful with their facts, and they relied very heavily on Weiss and a guy paid by Weiss. When I asked for more, you linked to an article bought and paid for by the same Overstock.com people. It's all one side of a multi-sided story, and nothing from an outfit with, say, a journalistic reputation and a fact-checking department.
So don't get your knickers in a twist. From what you've shown so far, all your evidence is one big anecdote. I already agree that people sometimes behave badly on Wikipedia, and I'd like to see less bad behavior. I just don't think it's a particularly big problem as measured by effects on readers.
The Deep Capture blog is not a reliable news source, and is run by a player in this tale, apparently after hiring a journalist. You wanna try 30 seconds this time and see if it gets you any further?
I'm beginning to realize too many engineers and computer nerds fall into a trap where they can only see how things will fail. [...] Force yourself into doing things that don't require stringent rules like programming. And for god sake, stop trying to fucking correct your girlfriend/wife/whatever on minor technical details (even though it is hard sometimes, trust me)!!
Yeah, I had a similar epiphany a decade ago. After a hard week dealing with my dying grandparents, and a six-hour drive in bad weather, I came home to find my roommate's relentlessly negative girlfriend sitting in my favorite chair, drinking my scotch.
For the next hour I sat numbly while she complained at me about whatever speck of the world's badness was bothering her at the time. Eventually she went away, and I had an incredible feeling of relief. It was like somebody had finally stopped feeding scrap tin through a paper shredder. Over the next few hours I killed the bottle of scotch and thought a lot about the nature of life.
When the hangover cleared the next morning, I had already made my decision: negative people were annoying as fuck, and I resolved not to be one. It took me a long time to retrain myself, and I still slip occasionally. But it was entirely worth it, both for its effect on others and on my own mental health.
Quick tip from a fellow nerd: when people say something that is obviously retarded or meaningless when interpreted literally, they often are speaking figuratively.
For example, "it is what it is" is often used to mean that they want people to focus on what's possible in the current situation, rather than what is ideal.
A lot of what I previously thought of as psychobabble actually now makes good sense to me. Once I realized that although I'm intellectually bright, I'm relatively weak in both interpersonal and intrapersonal areas, I spent some time studying hard in areas that come naturally to most people. If you're interested, I'd start with Emotional Intellgence, which is a pop-sci examination of how intelligence is not a single axis, but has a number of areas along which people vary somewhat independently. Then run with the references from there.
Being smarter than other people actually seems to be a disadvantage in management.
This is not true, although it appears that way for two reasons.
One, a big part of management skills are people skills, and a lot more people are strong in one area than in two. People tend to specialize in things they're good at.
Two, people tend to undervalue skills that they don't have, perhaps for reasons related to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Intellectually average managers may look at a dorky programmer and mainly notice their lack of social skills and poor dress sense. Equally, that programmer may fail to appreciate what the manager is actually good at, and focus on how much lower their IQ is.
Another confounding factor is politicking. The larger the company, the more room there is for individuals to advance themselves without regard for the company or their colleagues. Some of the dumbest decisions I've ever seen came from perfectly smart people who were just acting in their own personal interests.
Can you tell us more about how your friend got into that position?
Sure. He's very talented, has a long history of working on enterprise apps, is very skilled at cleaning up legacy code, and was pals with the head of a relatively young consulting company when the end client was forced to do some intensive rework on a core part of their revenue stream. He got a reasonably good consulting rate to work on that. And then he worked on things like an endlessly patient terrier, somehow maintaining his sanity while cleaning up other people's mistakes.
Honestly, you aren't likely to find a gig like that. First, because you're probably not endlessly patient and very financially driven like this guy is. Second, because when gigs like that are common, large consulting companies take them using a lot of sales mojo, and then keep most of the revenue, paying their developers modestly. And third, because there aren't a lot of companies that simultaneously a) have crappy legacy code bases, b) have a strong company culture that you should clean up messes, and c) have enough raw cash that they don't mind paying consulting rates to the same guy for five years.
What you're saying pretty much translates into 'I want to work more and get paid less.'
You forgot one important part: "while not being driven fucking insane". Being able to actually get things done without a lot of bullshit is worth a lot of money to me, and plenty of others.
Sweeping up crap after one managerial elephant parade after another can pay quite well, because jobs like that suck and really good people rarely want to waste their time like that. Taking less money for more satisfaction and less stress is, for a lot of people, a great trade.
And if the original poster is one of those people who doesn't mind being a human pooper scooper, then he should certainly become a contractor or consultant. I know one contractor who for the last 5 years has been cleaning up other people's spaghetti code at a large internet company, and grossing over $300k/year for it. And he can do that as long as he wants, because the permanent employees can always tie things in knots faster than he can untangle them.
You are absolutely right to keep your day job for now, and kudos to you for getting motivated to make a change before you go postal.
Two vital warnings: do not quit your day job until you have so much other work that you can't possibly do both. It will take a while to build up enough of a network to do that. And you should also have at least six months expenses in cash. There will be ups and downs, and you and your family must be financially and emotionally prepared to ride them out.
As far as finding work, start with your social network, especially friends and family. There is somebody out there who needs something simple built. As long as the job is of modest size and the money is more than pocket lint, take it. You'll need to build up a portfolio, collect references, and learn how to run your own business. Practice all that on small, easy jobs.
The way you get more business after that? When somebody needs you, you must be the person they hear about. The best way to do that is by doing great work for people socially connected to them. And that's great on their terms, not on yours. So study what people really want, and practice setting aside your personal taste in technology. Also study how they are interconnected, and how they decide whom to trust. Being in a service business is all about people, even if you're using technology to provide a service.
Personally, I love being independent; it doesn't mean you can do as you please around the clock, but being able to tell any one client that they're too crazy to work with is a pearl beyond price.
Hi! Your points are good ones. The bad behavior and bad user experiences definitely bother me, and I wish it were otherwise.
On the other hand, I'm cautious about comparing real things against imaginary standards rather than existing competitors. That's not to knock imaginary standards, as they help us push for a better world. But although they tell us what we'd like, they don't tell us what is possible.
It's my hope that ten years from now we'll have a number of other collaborative Internet projects at Wikipedia's scale that have eliminated many of the flaws of Wikipedia's model. But looking at traffic rankings, the only sites that strike me as closely comparable are IMDB and Flickr. Both are nakedly commercial, and totally controlled and run by full-time staff. IMDB is very hard to participate in effectively, and on Flickr, you have to pay to contribute much. Flickr also avoids a lot of Wikipedia's battling by letting people set up as much personal territory as they want, which is a better experience for contributors, but makes it a lot less useful for readers.
Another interesting comparison is Craiglist, which is just as open as Wikipedia, and is at least close to a non-profit. But again, what little control is strongly central. There, the central control is informed by the active participants, but it's still Craig's territory. And the only thing that makes it useful to readers is the search; a large swathe of the content is somewhere between "dubious" and "open sewer" in quality level.
Two other interesting comparisons are the social networks, the benefits and numerous flaws of which are obvious, and search engines. The Internet is already one giant collaborative project, and the search engines are the gateways to that, trying to extract some order from the soup. But it's not obvious to me that is of higher quality or less drama-filled than Wikipedia. As evidenced by the fact that Wikipedia is in the top three for an awful lot of searches, a lot of people find Wikipedia more useful than the rest of the content the search engines are indexing.
So in sum, I agree that Wikipedia isn't perfect, but for at least some ways of ranking, we don't have anything better yet.
Of course - you've invested a lot of your time in "levelling up" on Wikipedia, so anybody saying that Wikipedia has troubles *which don't affect "levelled up" people* is going to just feel fine. Common psychological mechanism. This is doubly true when we say that Wikipedia should change to remove your "levelled up" advantage. Which, overall, is the problem.
In this case, probably not so much. I do have a pretty old account, but I'm not a very active contributor, except in occasional bursts. To the extent that there's an inside and an outside, I'm mainly on the outside; I just don't have the time for it to be otherwise. But it's fascinating to watch.
Hmmmm. Did a reliable news source write this up? At first glance, the only think I can find is the register.co.uk article.
Actually, in the most recent case (for me), I was trying to clarify the kind of action on a particular kind of gun. The "camper" did not want the issue clarified, and did not accept Wikipedia's own article on the subject as sufficient authority. He went so far as to edit the discussion page (not the article page, the discussion page), to remove my comments about the issue.
I agree that it's a problem that he was a jerk. I am also sad that you didn't feel able and/or willing to use one of the many mechanisms for sorting this out. At least for editing the discussion pages, the guy probably deserved a beating, and possibly for other stuff, to.
On the other hand, hearing your interpretation of a couple of incidents is not making me worry for Wikipedia's reliability as a whole, for a few reasons.
First, things like this will always happen. When you have a project where you let everybody in the world contribute (or at least everybody minus a few people difficult enough to get banned), things are not going to go smoothly all the time. Wikipedia should try hard to minimize the bullshit, but they can't eliminate it without wrecking things that are much more important.
Second, given that most people make changes because they think that they are improving things, it's not a shock that a lot of people would walk away butthurt and thinking that Wikipedia's got it wrong. For a lot of attempted changes, that's the second-best outcome. (The first would be people coming to a happy joint agreement.)
Third, Wikipedia's always going to have some rough articles. That's because the coverage boundary is continually expanding. For things without sufficient attention, articles may be dubious. That's great, as dubious bits drive improvement, and keep people in shape. Getting major things wrong on major articles would be a big problem. Having minor things wrong for a while is tolerable.
Fourth, that people argue over how to apply the rules is not a bad thing; it's a good thing. It forces people to understand what an encyclopedia is and how you have to work in a collaborative project to succeed. From one perspective, Wikipedia is one of the largest MMORPG on the planet, and resolving disagreements is a big part of how people level up.
Fifth, I don't even expect Wikipedia to work particularly well on the level of particular changes. As long as each edit has as much as a 51% chance of being beneficial, then the project gets better over time.
So overall, evidenceless anecdotes from anonymous Internet people are never going to worry me much.
FYI, Wikipedia pages aren't reliable sources for other Wikipedia pages. Only good external sources are. That's because Wikipedia is just a compilation of information from other places, not a real source on its own.
That people do attempt to take ownership of articles and that other people dispute it is not proof that the guy's idea of increasing article ownership is anything but ridiculous.
It has been a long time since I turned in my colored coat and my trading floor badge, but when the whole naked short selling thing came up again recently, I looked into it and then called a number of pals who are still in the industry. None of them thought it was a particularly great idea, and all of them thought it was an anachronism, but none of them thought it was a big deal, either.
I'll note that the group you point to is linked to overstock.com, which as I pointed out earlier has been on a jihad for years against naked short selling because they were sure that their stock price should be higher. I couldn't find any record of the group's donations or payments, so it's not clear to me who's paying whom there.
Anyhow, from what I can tell, the Wikipedia article pretty accurately reflects the balance of opinion out there. If you are reading that article as "abysmally onesided and biased", you should switch to decaf. It makes it pretty clear that there are two sides to the story.
If you want to insist that I cite examples, then use the example of the article on naked short selling in the stock market. If you are not familiar with that case, look it up. It is hardly an isolated case.
Without even looking at the article, I suspect you are one of two sorts of crazy person:
More generally, for approximately every article on Wikipedia, there is at least one person who thinks that the article is a flagrant abuse of something or other, and proof of rottenness at the heart of the operation. Why? Because it does not reflect their views the way they would like to hear them.
letting the article creator decide would create a whole new level of article integrity
On Wikipedia, there is no "article creator". Sure, somebody had to create some particular article, but there is no article ownership. Creating a page means bupkis.
Also, letting financially benefiting individuals decide which advertising and how much surely would create a whole new level of integrity: none. First, the link-spammers, affiliate whores, and PR departments of the world would immediately flood Wikipedia with crap. And for the few grad students who elbowed their way in, they would begin to learn why real publishers try to separate advertising and editorial entirely: because it influences the writing.
Yes! That is exactly it.
For those who want to read a whole book on the topic, see Punished By Rewards. It makes a very persuasive case that for a great swathe of human activity, reward systems look very appealing but actually undermine or wreck the behaviors you're trying to encourage.