The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853 <comment><USER2> For those wondering about the backstory, I went and looked at the history of the deleted page.

The article for Jessie Stricchiola was created by account "Stricchiola" in November 2009. The commit message: "Added article for search industry pioneer Jessie Stricchiola". That account made only one other significant edit, which was to link the Jessie Stricchiola article into the first paragraph of "Search Engine Marketing".

Within 15 minutes, Wikipedians marked the article as insufficiently referenced, a probable conflict of interest, and possibly lacking notability. Stricchiola edited the article for the next few days, ignored the warnings, and eventually stopped editing. Other than minor fixes from Wikipedians, the article was basically untouched until September 2009, when user Cantaloupe2 nominated it for deletion discussion.

So as far as I can tell, a search engine marketing person wrote a self- promotional article about herself. Wikipedians immediately warned that the article had a number of issues, all of which she (and everybody else in the world) ignored for nearly 2 years. Somebody eventually noticed; Wikipedians discussed it and decided the article was unsalvageable.

<comment><USER3> That's what makes this particular discussion strange. Of all the problems Wikipedia does actually have, this isn't one of them: the system worked ok here, in a pretty straightforward way. It also lacks any evidence that the person in question was even interested in contributing to Wikipedia in the first place, _except for the sole purpose of inserting a backlink to herself_. Those aren't the kinds of contributions Wikipedia is most direly lacking, so when it comes to improving the community, I'd focus effort on not scaring away the people who are actually attempting to contribute things (other than self- promotion).

I did sort of chuckle when I realized this was about an SEO/SEM person, though, as I've run into this kind of angry reaction outside Wikipedia as well. If you run a private wiki/forum/whatever, it's not uncommon to run into people attempting to "organically" contribute links to themselves, who seem to think they're being very clever and incognito when in fact their contributions look spammy from a mile away, and then get extremely indignant and try to raise an internet-stink when you delete their contributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> His case for the notability of his friend doesn't seem to add anything that hadn't already been considered by the Wikipedians already, and his attitude was monstrously shitty. Especially his reaction to the guy/girl that removed his comments on the page that said not to leave comments on it, saving them on his "user page" with a helpful message about the process to get the debate, which was already over, reopened.

I hate the tone of this. He knows what should be in Wikipedia, and what they should consider notable under their standards, yet feels put upon by having to know what a "talk page" or "deletion review" is, and assaulted by being informed of a talk page being created for him. In turn, he assaults the random person who tried to help him with his goal by saving his work and giving him directions with more than a half dozen paragraphs of angry, condescending tl;dr like he was reading his list of grievances to the King of Wikipedia.

<comment><USER4> I seem to be dropping like a stone here, so let me go on forever about this:

1\. Danny Sullivan hears that his friend Jessie Stricchiola, a pioneer in fighting click fraud, has been deleted from Wikipedia.

2\. He somehow gets to a discussion about the deletion of her page on Wikipedia. On it is a debate between 13 people about whether her page should be deleted, and at the top of that page is a detailed explanation by the editor that made the final decision why that decision was made.

3\. At the top of this page is an explanation that this page is an archive, and that any comments should be added to the article's "talk page" or a "deletion review". The text for "deletion review" is a link to this page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review> which explains Wikipedia's deletion review policies, and offers a pretty clear six step process for having a deletion reviewed.

4\. Author rages and instead writes on archive page. Summary: a. Stricchiola was a founding member of SEMPO, the largest trade group of the search marketing industry. b. Stricchiola was the earliest, and the largest stature person in the area of click fraud. c. Co-authored a popular book on click fraud.

5\. Some time later, author gets an email from Wikipedia saying his "talk page" had been created and changed. When he clicks through, he is shown what changes were made, and they are a suggestion by one of the participants in the debate on deletion that his comments will not be read on the archive page, and yet another link to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review> which, again, explains Wikipedia's deletion review policies, and offers a pretty clear six step process for having a deletion reviewed.

6\. Instead of following this link, he clicks through the link in the email that told him how to get in contact with the person that edited his "talk page."

7\. It clicks him through to a page that it then tells him not to touch. That's _really annoying,_ but it immediately gives him the link to the place to talk to him in the same place.

8\. He rages at this user about being asked to go through "some arcane cryptic obscure Wikipedia deletion review process," and asks why this user didn't just do it for him. He tells this Wikipedia editor that the decision to delete Stricchiola's article came from "the insane closed little world of Wikipedia editors, where non-specialist editors pretend to be experts on what's notable[...]", and refers to his general feeling that "contributing anything to Wikipedia is a big giant waste of time[...]"

I don't know much about Wikipedia, and don't care whether Stricchiola is notable or not, or included or not, except in the general sense that I support the mission of Wikipedia and find it useful, and I hope that they at least keep it as useful as it has been, or make it even more useful. I want friction in my crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and know that it is far less friction than would occur in the World Book, where the appeal process would be far more obscure, and far less democratic. The deletion review process seemed pretty clear and quick to me. There was a lot of copying and pasting involved, it _would_ be nice to have a button for that, but I'm not sure that the free form nature of the debate on the deletion page lends itself well to one. I consider this a flaw in the deletion page, not a reason not to simplify the process, but there is something to say in having a bit of friction in a process to reopen a debate that had already been concluded.

The sense of entitlement in this blog entry astounds me. I'm really surprised that so many people sympathize.

\---

edit: I did skip the conclusion. In the end, he does go to the "deletion review" page. Instead of following the six step process (and _notably_ not including a screenshot of that in his blog entry), he decides that it's the wrong page, and instead finds another page with a banner on top that begins: "Please note that this page is NOT for challenging the outcome of deletion discussions[...]"

More righteous condemnation ensues.

<comment><USER5> _I seem to be dropping like a stone here, so let me go on forever about this_

You are my new favorite commenter.

<comment><USER6> Yeah - Both of you got my up. I too like Wikipedia - and its chock a block full of good stuff - so it seems some folk have taken the time to learn the rules and add to collective knowledge contained within.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong _in an encyclopedia._ Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets _Wikipedia's standards_ and decided that they do not.

Now, the author feels entitled to barge in _without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works,_ and complain that it's too hard to find the right place to go and complain. The author even managed to _complain_ when someone helpfully pointed out that he went to the wrong place to revise a _pointless and already settled argument_.

Seriously, this is a Wikipedia success story. If this person had been allowed to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia failure.

If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching on a blog, and figured out how to revive an already-settled issue, he could have successfully managed to waste people's time on this. But no. "I demand to be listened to NOW, and if I'm not, Wikipedia is Closed and Unfriendly."

<comment><USER8> I spent a half-hour just trying to find the right form to merely request that the page be reviewed for restoration. That form, as I explained in detail, doesn't actually work.

There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill- defined uncontroversial reasons.

Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much.

If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that the lack of an agreement is a consensus.

When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia.

That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure, that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute.

If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork.

I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly.

But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having studied the bureaucracy better.

<comment><USER9> I'd be curious to know if this resistance to input from "subject matter experts" is the same for, say, notable physicists or notable cardiac surgeons? It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that because the subject matter in question is "SEO" that there are a lot of prejudices and suspicion of ulterior motives from the wikipedia end. In one sense, I'm of the opinion that if you're promoting yourself as "an SEO expert" your contributions to wikipedia should be treated with significant additional scrutiny due to the possibility of conflict of interest.

<comment><USER2> I don't know that this is specifically _resistance_ to contribution by subject matter experts. I think Wikipedia is more precisely _indifferent_ to their subject matter expertise when it comes to considering _direct_ contributions. If Danny Sullivan wants to edit Wikipedia, he's welcome to, but nobody's going to treat him with more deference than any other editor.

What they do make great use of is _indirect_ contributions. If a physicist or a cardiac surgeon writes and publishes a paper on the topic of their expertise, that is fantastic raw material for Wikipedia. Which is precisely the relationship that most subject matter experts have with any other encyclopedia, so it seems reasonable to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just the latest victim of the deletionist forces. This is the reason I, and many many other people have given up on contributing to Wikipedia altogether.

Jason Scott has a very eloquent description of the problem [1],[2], and Wikipedia's failure in addressing it several years ago; nothing has changed since then, and I doubt it will any time soon, since the Wikipedia administration sees no problem with the status quo. It's sad.

[1] <http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808>

[2] <http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt>

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia)

<comment><USER11> The reason is because deletion is one of the single biggest areans for status games.

See, from the outside, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And there's a community there to write an encyclopedia. Sensible, no?

Actually, the community comes first and the encyclopedia is a side-effect. The community functions very politically, and very much like a game as well. The original intention might have been an encyclopedia with the minimum number of rules necessary to make that successful, but ultimately, the rules and red tape turned into the fun part of the game, and the encyclopedia-writing is just the grinding bit.

If all you wanted was a huge encyclopedia unlimited by the constraints of physical book size, you'd have a deletion policy like this: "each statement of fact has to be cited from a reliable source, every article has to be composed entirely of statements of fact, any other content should be deleted". So if there are no reliably-sourced statements of fact about a given subject, you don't get an article about them. If I started a Wikipedia article about my neighbor's cat and wrote a lot of outrageous claims, they would all be deleted and we'd be left with a blank article, which would probably be deleted as a relatively boring matter of procedure.

But what fun is that, when we can have a concept like "notability"? Ah! Suddenly, instead of all that boring shit about citing facts and removing uncited content, and just keeping whatever reliable information we have about something, we can have a massive PvE game where you get to find articles about subjects you don't care about and declare "this isn't notable!", and then you can lawyer a "consensus" of other players into agreeing with you. Or if another player disagrees, suddenly you have a massive PvP battle! Fun! Well, at least for a certain type of person who enjoys lawyering and gets off on will-to-power stuff that motivates one to try and delete articles from an encyclopedia, which is exactly the type of person that gravitates towards the project. And--believe it or not--these kinds of highly-social games, and one's success in them on Wikipedia, are a major factor in getting elected "administrator", at which point your duties now entail _judging_ these lawyering games and _actually deleting the articles_!

<comment><USER12> On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand....

95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and _because_ so many people _do_ get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people who, in between PvP battles, improved the quality of the encyclopedia, it would be a net loss.

<comment><USER11> That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you make the sausage.

Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly sausage-making process should let you ramp up into it at the very least, and at the most, should have useful methods of collecting and processing input from novice users rather than rejecting it unseen or outright discouraging it in the first place.

<comment><USER13> _sigh_

It doesn't work like that.

<comment><USER11> I spent years in that particular sausage factory. They even let me work some of the levers not everyone gets to work. My time there didn't work out well in the long run. Sorry, but it's pretty ugly and political in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> There's a lot of Wikipedia I think should be more transparent or more approachable. But deletion discussions aren't really one of them.

Deciding what really fits in an encyclopedia isn't simple. Wikipedia has spent literally a decade working out a set of rules that balances utility, fairness, quality, and maintainability. Those rules will inevitably seem bureaucratic and opaque to people who haven't worked on a number of articles and then really considered the problem.

Deletion discussions are perennial magnets for non-participants who believe that they or their (friend|band|ancestor|website) belong in Wikipedia. They are inevitably upset. Worse, in Pauli's phrase, they aren't even wrong: they start with the premise the article should be kept and then say whatever they think will let them win.

In this case, the bloggy ranter doesn't get basic Wikipedia fundamentals. E.g. that Wikipedia isn't about what's _true_ , it's about what's _verifiable_ [1]. Suppose he thinks that his pal is the most important person ever. He might be right, but what matters is what can be proven from reliable sources[2].

Making deletion review more approachable to the personally outraged would certainly increase the number of reviews, but it wouldn't materially change the number of articles kept. What it would do is waste a lot of valuable editor and admin time.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V> [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS>

<comment><USER14> You have deliberately ignored the most contentious part of the Wikipedia policy regarding articles, which is the "Notability" rule. Why an _Internet- based_ encyclopedia with no editors, printed version, or quality control feels the need to limit articles to "notable subjects" is beyond me - it isn't like we're going to run out of electrons any time soon.

In this particular case, it was quite clear this person existed and that she worked in SEM. There were plenty of sources to back that up. That should be the relevant criterion for whether an article can exist in an Internet-based encyclopedia. There was no reason to delete this article other than "Ha ha, I know the rules of this bizarre system and will throw W:PDQXYZ links at you until you go away".

<comment><USER15> Why hasn't anyone taken wikipedia's content and put in it another mediawiki setup run without a deletionist policy?

<comment><USER2> It is frequently proposed (e.g, this from 2008: [http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/wackypedia-wikipedia- for...](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/wackypedia-wikipedia-fork)) but I don't know of any that are even mildly successful. There are plenty of mirrors and forks, though. Naturally, Wikipedia has a list of them:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/All>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters."

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

<comment><USER17> Flagged for removal. Notability?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2011_September_23)

Deletions include:

* The "vice editor in chief" of a Japanese anime magazine

* A list of episodes for a TV show that never aired

* Articles about a no-name iPhone game, and also a no-name video editing tool, presumably both written by the authors of the programs

* A promo for a not-yet-released book

* An article about "Rickstar", a musical artist who had apparently self-released one song

* A strategy guide for The Sims 3

* A bio of a junior league hockey player (albeit one with an awesome name)

* An article about a youth football team

... and it just keeps going on like that.

This particular article was motivated by the deletion of "Jessie_Stricchiola". Let's look at her AfD:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola)

Where we learn:

* This is an article about an SEO consultant.

* It contained a promotional link to the SEO consultant's book.

* That SEO consultant had been quoted in a number of stories, but never written _about_ in any of those stories; the only reliable information to be gleaned from any source about her was "once gave a quote about click fraud to a trade press journalist" (or in one case a reporter at WaPo).

It took _two weeks_ for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article --- the guy found out _how many libraries carried her book_.

Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. _In every one of those retarded articles_ , someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. _Every time_.

Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works.

Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia. None of you, not a one, expects Linus Torvalds to accept arbitrary contributions to the Linux kernel simply because that code could be disabled by default and wasn't going to bother anyone (unlike a bogus Wikipedia article, which taints the encyclopedia and also Google search results). People with experimental or long-shot Linux contributions (at least, people besides ESR) tend to set up Github pages instead of writing long-winded rants about the "deletionism" rampant in the world's most successful open source project. But Wikipedia kills an article about an SEO consultant, and you're up in arms.

 _Mostly, this comment I'm writing is just bitching_. So, to repay you the kindness of reading my own windbag rant, I offer you this gift: THE VERY FEW SIMPLE RULES OF THUMB YOU WILL EVER NEED TO AVOID FRUSTRATION OVER THE "Deletionism" OF WIKIPEDIA:

 _RULE NUMBER ONE: DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR COMPANY, PROGRAMS THAT YOU WROTE, OR YOUR UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL._

 _RULE NUMBER TWO: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FRIENDS' COMPANIES, PROGRAMS THAT YOUR FRIENDS WROTE, OR YOUR FRIENDS UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL._

They should just put those two rules on the edit box on the site, I agree; would make everyone's life easier.

<comment><USER18> The two rules you've outline are the primary reason i contribute very little to wikipedia.

I can put together a well-sourced piece outlining the importance of a variety of subjects which i am indirectly involved in, and give a dispassionate description of its relevance to the community it serves and the world at large.

Wikipedians, instead of saying "do that and have neutral 3rd parties check over your work", instead say "we do not value your contribution, and will delete your work".

As such, wikipedia isn't a place where knowledgeable people can contribute matters of expertise. And that really freaking annoys me.

Concrete example: The Knight Foundation's wikipedia page is incredibly sparse, and contains little or no information about the efforts they fund, or the substance of the work they do. This is unfortunate, because the foundation has been around for decades, is an integral piece of newspaper and journalism history, and currently funds a massive amount of the innovation taking place in journalism, including the project i work on, DocumentCloud (which the Knight Foundation entirely funded).

But, by the rules of Wikipedia, i shouldn't contribute to the subject. Meanwhile, there are plenty of startups and essentially irrelevant companies that already disregard the rules and write their own freaking wikipedia pages anyway. That's ultimately the real problem. Wikipedia is so capricious in the enforcement of the rules, and there's so little stopping people from breaking the rules, that deletions do seem arbitrarily and inconsistently enforced. I'm entirely unsurprised that there are so many cries of "injustice!" so often.

<comment><USER3> Even though there are cases where it works, I think those two rules are good heuristics that are fairly predictive of article quality/bias. _Most_ articles written by academics and businessmen on themselves, their own research projects, or their companies are just not good articles. On the other hand, articles written by someone on an area they know about but _not_ directly their work tend to be much better.

Part of it is intent, I think. I mostly talk to academics about it, and of those who don't regularly edit Wikipedia, some, when they hear that I edit Wikipedia, _do_ want to learn how to use it to promote their work, or a research agenda they're closely involved in. If you come at it with that mindset, it's less likely that a neutral article will result. On the other hand, if you think of an area you know a lot about but is _not_ directly tied to your work---i.e. is not the work of yourself, your supervisor, your specific sub-sub-field, or university---then it's much more likely that you might write a not-self-interested article genuinely intended to neutrally inform people.

That shouldn't be hard for most people to do. For example, there are such wide swaths of theoretical CS not yet covered well that, if your area is theoretical CS, there's no need to start with your own research or your advisor's research or the particular corner of the world in which you're personally involved in acrimonious within-field debates. Better to start with some important foundational work that you're closely familiar with but don't have strong personal investment in promoting. When I tell that to people, many lose interest, because to them, the self-promotion was why they were interested in the first place, while writing good articles about Theoretical Computing 101 (or 201) is just work. In which case, they may not have been coming with the right intentions...

<comment><USER19> Thanks for this comment... many thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality, everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure.

MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes are wiki pages that try to use other wiki pages as a medium for controlling the process of creating wiki pages.

<comment><USER20> Corollary: How well would the fundraising go if you could only make contributions by following a MediaWiki-based editorial process?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI.

Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make.

All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snowball into a frustrated response, which only aggravates and frustrates the editors who receive such responses. This, in turn, further snowballs things until everyone is aggravated, nobody wants to contribute, and Wikipedia stagnates.

So, fix Wikipedia's UI. It's in everyone's long term interests to do so.

<comment><USER2> > Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI > should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops.

That assumes that it would be beneficial to have people who don't understand anything about what makes an article worth keeping making requests like that.

It also assumes that requesting deletion review is Wikipedia's most valuable place to spend developer and designer time.

Neither is true.

<comment><USER21> No, it assumes that user task design should follow the tenets of good UI design.

What I'm hearing you say is that usability barriers are a good thing because they stop people who don't understand the system from using the system, which is the refrain of all defenders of bad UI design. We've seen plenty of disruption in the area of software UI design in recent years that disprove such a theory.

<comment><USER2> UI design is not a religion whose tenets are to be followed for their own sakes. It's a practical art. Good UI makes easy things that should be easy, and hard that which should be hard. (E.g.: [http://www.zen171398.zen.co.uk/Alien%20Page%206/Ian%20Wingro...](http://www.zen171398.zen.co.uk/Alien%20Page%206/Ian%20Wingrove- auto%20destruct02.jpg)) Your mistake is naive optimization of one part of the process.

In this case, the right system would be one that makes it very easy for deletion review to process requests. It would also make sure that only well- formed, well-thought-out deletion requests make it to the deletion reviewers. The UI of that submission process could be made easy, but it's an essentially hard problem. You're supposed to think carefully, come to grips with the careful balance that Wikipedia has struck around deletion, and then submit a reasoned argument.

It's not possible that someone will do that in 1 minute of reading. This is like a submission to an appellate court: you have to know what you're doing or there's no point.

<comment><USER21> I haven't made myself clear. I'm not saying that someone should understand what the CONTENTS of their submission should be with only 1 minute's worth of reading, but rather the ACTIONS the user must take from a UI perspective in order to go through the process should not take more than 1 minute's worth of reading.

If the content of the user submission should be carefully thought out prior to taking the action, that's fine, but you shouldn't be deliberately throwing obstacles in the way just for the sake of slowing them down. What ends up happening when you do this is that knowledgeable people (who generally happen to be busy) won't bother contributing. I've seen this sort of situation occur countless times on Wikipedia (in general, not just with the deletion process).

<comment><USER4> Maybe I'm a fast reader, so try timing yourself reading this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#Steps...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#Steps_to_list_a_new_deletion_review) . I don't find it to be much more than a minute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From the action deletion discussion:

"The result was delete. As far as I can tell, the numbers are split about 7-6 in favour of delete. That's not normally going to lead to a consensus to delete unless there are unusual circumstances, such as one side having significantly stronger arguments than the other, so much as that can be ascertained objectively. In this case, the final three unchallenged delete !votes—DGG, ItsZippy and Metropolitan90—demonstrate such strength.

DGG and Metropolitan90 highlight a number of fundamental misconceptions behind a number of the keep !votes, such as the inaccuracy of the assertions that the subject's work was covered significantly in The Google story and that The Google story is a Pulitzer prize-winning book. DGG also demonstrates with clear evidence that the subject's own book is not as prominent as asserted, without any evidence, by some on the keep side. ItsZippy is the only editor in the debate, on either side, to comprehensively discuss the sources on offer as opposed to making generalised assertions about the sufficiency of the sourcing.

That those delete !votes have stood for between 7 and 13 days without any challenge leads me to conclude that there is a consensus to delete"

More here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola).

Two thoughts: yes, the back pages of Wikipedia are tricky to navigate for non- experts, it took me a while to find that link. No, Wikipedians are not all unfriendly deletionists.

</comment><comment><USER23> I had similar experiences with Wikipedia. First time, I added some references and definitions related to a theoretical computer science concept and it was deleted for no reason.

Since then I stopped making edits unless something is incorrect.

<comment><USER24> I think a lot of the problem is that measuring editors by edit count is like measuring programmers by lines of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A more extreme example is the Amanda Knox article on Wikipedia. For years it was kept deleted by a cabal of British English speaking administrators and editors (Knox's murdered roommate was British). A deletion review finally overturned the deletion a couple weeks after Knox's conviction was overturned.

[http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_kn...](http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_knox_wikipedia_info_scr.php)

<comment><USER26> I didn't know about the Wikipedia issues around that tragedy, but found it interesting from a sociological standpoint. So I tried looking for similar cases of the line between fact & opinion blurring on battleground Wikipedia, and found this, in case anyone else is interested:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia>

(And it's on Wikipedia itself, natch.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps nothing can be truly 'open' to contribution given that everybody has a different opinion and everybody often believes that they are right. Probably a huge number of newbies who tried posting something on Hacker News, will also feel that HN is closed and unfriendly as well. Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience.

<comment><USER28> >Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience.

It's both. HN _is_ unfriendly to new users who are used to the kind of interactions that predominate elsewhere. It is in many ways a close reddit analogue, and yet even veteran redditors will find themselves downvoted to oblivion here. I certainly did, when I first signed up.

Like HN, Wikipedia requires getting used to. There is a "Wikipedia Way", which is very different from how people interact on other parts of the Internet. It can seem bureaucratic and neurotic, and it is, but it keeps things running relatively smoothly for the regulars, which is the important part. The people who take the time to learn the ropes are the ones who end up ensuring that the content is useful and informative. Yes, some people will be put off by the fact that only reliable secondary sources can be considered when determining the notability of a subject, but the restriction is there for a reason: it keeps the crap out.

None of this means that Wikipedia is not open. If you waltzed into the Linux dev channel and insisted that something be done a certain way, you'd be banned. Linux is similarly complex, and there is a "Linux Way" of doing things. Take the time to learn that way and contribute, and you'll be welcomed. Insist they're wrong and write blog posts about how wrong they are, and you'll be ignored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Slight tangent, but I can't understand why MediaWiki/Wikipedia is so resistant to a standard commenting/discussion system. Discussion pages are still just flat text anyone can edit.

I get the "simple is better" approach, but by now, there should be enough conventions, and there's certainly enough complexity, to warrant at least a basic structured forum.

<comment><USER30> It will not surprise you to learn that you are far from the first to complain about the flat discussion pages. They have a lot of advantages - they're just easier to work with for a lot of things like rearranging sections, creating new sections, etc. - all stuff that your random social news site (like Hacker News) simply does not let you do because it would be a UI and vandalism nightmare.

There was a nearly complete effort to rewrite talk pages: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads> But it turned out to have atrocious performance, and the few times I used talk pages on wikis with it enabled, I wished they really hadn't enabled it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It blows my mind that anything has to meet some arbitrary standard of notability in order to have a Wikipedia page. This is the Internet. Encyclopedia Britannica can't have a brief overview on every topic imaginable, because it's got to fit in a bound cover. The freedom to have information about absolutely every subject in existence seems to me the biggest benefit of putting an encyclopedia online, not the fact that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia - obviously, this is not true. Anyone can hypothetically write for Britannica, but only those that pass a certain muster actually do.

<comment><USER32> You're wrong. If Wikipedia didn't have spthese standards then every idiot including myself would be creating pages that are just spam. You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected.

Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap _at times_ but so far it's a total class act and it has a lot to do with these policies.

I'm sure you know that Wikipedia has to constantly police itself for large companies trying to mess with competitor's pages and how there are armies of political operatives out there trying to rewrite history through Wikipedia. This is why even experts like the OP are so scrutinized.

<comment><USER33> The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low... I have a hard time believing that there's any grave risk to throwing open the doors on Wikipedia, simply because not all Wikipedia articles are equal.

I've been on the other end of this. The shitty little start-up I worked on for many years somehow managed to squeak past the finish line of notability and keep its shitty little Wikipedia entry from being deleted (despite the fact that it was mostly written by the marketing department). And you know what kind of difference it made? Absolutely none. To the best of my knowledge, precisely 0.0% of the site's traffic came from the 'external link' in the Wikipedia entry. We got precisely 0 phone calls or emails from potential customers who heard about us on Wikipedia. VCs did not magically dump piles of money on us because we were listed on Wikipedia. Engineering candidates -- even bad engineering candidates -- never spontaneously sent us their resume after reading our Wikipedia entry.

Conversely, given that my startup benefitted not one bit from having a Wikipedia entry, I'm quite confident that if a competitor had wasted 15 minutes of his time to deface our Wikipedia article, it would have hurt us as a business not one lick.

<comment><USER32> Well that same thing also wouldn't hurt me either but I'm not Coca Cola. That's what I'm talking about. No one cares about small businesses or startups at all. If you're a company that no one even searches for on Google Places this doesn't apply to you.

It is a fact that these things happen and whether it's harmful or not it isn't right and it's the reason for these policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> " _I'm a notable person on Wikipedia, as well as an expert in search marketing. So for what it's worth, you're seriously questioning whether Jessie should have her own page? That's just crazy.

The page should be restored, and immediately. She's clearly notable._"

These lines make it clear enough what kind of clown we're dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER35> The thrust of his arguement is that since he believes Jessica is more notable than he is, and wikipedia has an existing article about him then his opinion should count.

However, an alternative conclusion could be that he isn't notable by wikipedia's standards and his article should _also_ be deleted.

<comment><USER36> That's not the point he's making, please re-read the article. He included the specific reasons he believes Jessica to be notable (with proper references).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information.

I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary source and started randomly changing entries.

His first (and in my mind best) work was when another friend who is very into music mentioned a jazz musician that he really liked. The professor friend said, "Oh yeah, he's the one that composed the background track to I Wanna Sex You Up". Then he rushed off to update that artist's wikipedia page to reflect that statement. My musically-inclined friend called back the next day and said, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!"

Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. However, seeing the unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia content has opened my eyes to the way that the system can be gamed or used to support lies or propaganda. Because a musician was wronged? No, its the principle. I now take everything I read on wikipedia with a colossal grain of salt. You should too.

<comment><USER38> You should, and we should.

I would question, though, whether that's particular to Wikipedia. You should take everything you read with a colossal grain of salt. Even if it's written in a printed encyclopedia, a textbook, or an article.

<comment><USER37> That is true, understanding what makes Wikipedia susceptible to biased thinking, scamming, or propaganda widens your view to understand that newspaper articles, government press releases, and technology journalism (to name only a few) are also to be taken with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The bigger issue with Wikipedia is the bad UI and tons of bureaucracy that make everybody except hardcore users beware of editing.

<comment><USER13> We go out of our way on Wikipedia to make everyone feel welcome to edit anything. If someone makes a good faith mistake, more often or not, you are sent a welcome message fairly quickly by either a vandal patroller or an admin. New users will get hit up after their 2nd or 3rd edit with a Welcome message too.

I have tools that help me help new users out quick in my dashboard. It's part of what I do. No body should feel afraid to edit Wikipedia. Ever. It's a public resource.

<comment><USER40> If it fails once, why aren't we fixing it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Yeah, I've had similar experiences with Wikipedia. In the end I just gave up trying to contribute. Some user even has a bot that now chases me around when I make edits...

</comment><comment><USER42> I can't agree with this post strongly enough. It's an amazing small insular community of bureaucracy.

I've tried to make a few minor edits and had my edits undone and squashed in a pretty unfriendly way, and encountered the same things that the author of this article did.

Bravo for calling it out and posting about it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Looks like Danny's article on wikipedia has now come under scrutiny:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist)>

"The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (November 2011)"

Personally, I think the notability guidelines are pretty outrageous and wildly out of date. I mean, how long before there aren't any "legitimate publications" by their standard?

<comment><USER44> Quoting from the talk page:

> Given the extensive list of sources covering this individual above, please > explain exactly how the subject does not meet Wikipedia's notability > criteria. If others agree, the tag can be restored - but you cannot tag an > article that meets the criteria simply because you don't like them. > --Jezebel'sPonyo

And the tag has been removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I made this site awhile back, partly to address some of Wikipedia's conceptual peccadillos (notability, navigability, less than full openness). It didn't get traction, and I found it hard to market a knowledge-sharing site, in part because almost nobody is actively searching for knowledge-sharing solutions.

The core idea was a bidirectionally weighted graph where users could set the weightings using slider controls. I've since moved on to another project. Anyhoo, the site is mobwa.com. Sooner or later I'll get around to taking it down.

</comment><comment><USER46> I love Wikipedia, both the idea behind it and the site it's self, and have contributed plenty of time and cash over the years. However I have to agree that the processes have become far too labyrinthine and unfriendly for the uninitiated.

We (the existing Wikipedia community) need to have a rethink of how we lay out our rules and guides and the process for navigating them, we also need to start being a smidge more consistent about how we enforce the rules.

Mostly though, we need to be a little more tolerant of the N00Bs. I get it's tricky, you're busy, hundred things at once and some muppet comes in asking the same question we've been asked 16million times before; it's easy to be a bit terse, but if we want Wikipedia to continue to succeed we need to take a deep breath in those moments and remember to that person, at that moment, we are Wikipedia. A bad impression that turns them away from the site means they're unlikely to ever come back and that's the last thing we want.

I get why everyone's being defensive, and yes, the article was written in a very combative style, but we also need to face up to it landing a few fair points, lets take those and get working on that instead of wasting time rowing about who's in the right.

How can we clarify the deletion process for someone looking from the outside in? How can we make it clearer who to contact in those sort of circumstances? Is there any way we can make talking to people easier?

</comment><comment><USER47> "About two weeks ago, Jessie Stricchiola let me know that her Wikipedia page had been deleted. Apparently, she wasn't notable enough."

Apparently, every fictional character from every forgotten TV show seems to merit their own page (see, for example, the amount of space that Wikipedia devotes to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and its cast of characters). It's hard to imagine why any real person wouldn't be "notable enough" by these standards.

<comment><USER48> Because a far higher number of people know about and have an interest in Buffy The Vampire Slayer than this Jessie person?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The reason why Wikipedia has these pages is because people push fringe science theories, jingoist distortions of history, and inflated product claims if you do not.

Even so, Wikipedia is effectively used to promote just these things. For example, the editor FT2 got promoted to ArbCom while underming efforts to eliminate pseudoscience. His philsophy he summed up "Writing for an encyclopedia is not the same as writing for an academic paper. It's more like writing the bibliography for an academic paper. We aren't trying to decide what is "true" and what isn't. To be honest, we don't care what "the truth" is, in that sense, because it's not what an encyclopedia is. An encyclopedia is a collation of multiple perspectives and views. It's more like the bibliography of a paper (listing all kinds of sources so long as they bear on the topic) than the paper and its conclusion itself. Every view of note is in there, represented neutrally. Theres no decision to make, few opinions to form, other than to observe which views seem to be more or less common views of note, and to understand each (and its sources) well enough to document. We care that we document each view fully and with understanding. That is the "truth" we work to here. "

[http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_Vi...](http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_View/Flavius_Vanillus#Dialogue_with_FT2)

If making WP more unfriendly would combat this kind of anti-scientific bullshit, I would be in favour of it. I don't, though. A decent external infrastructure for criticising Wikiedpia articles and groups of articles might be more effective, which is why I have hopes for <http://hypothes.is/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER50> If this guy had discovered the Internet in the early 90's I have confidence that he would have been single handedly responsible for inventing top posting.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm sorry about your case and the frustration that you had to face. However, they must be doing something right since Wikipedia has millions of user contributed pages? Also it might not be easy to administer a website of that size where anyone is free to go ahead and edit any of the hundreds of thousands of pages. Maybe they are settling for 99% satisfaction? That said, they do need our donations.

<comment><USER11> Turns out if you throw together a few thousand neckbeards and convince them to play status games around building an encyclopedia, you get an encyclopedia.

You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking, flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like "arbitration" have strange, Orwellian connotations. ("Arbitration" is Wikipedia's name for the process governing, among other things, removing administrator privileges and banning contributors for long periods of time.) Contributing to Wikipedia is a usability disaster because of all the red tape, process, policy, and other crap the core group of contributors has constructed.

But the project is big and popular enough, and the work is easy enough, that people still throw themselves into it. You start by just making a few small edits to something, or adding some sources and information to an article. Then it goes on a bit, and you learn some of the terminology and process, and you start feeling personally invested in it. I mean, it's Wikipedia! It has lots of information about everything! It's free! The human race needs something like this! Before you know it, you're in a "community" of core contributors. There are people with impressive titles like "arbitrator", "administrator", "bureaucrat". You start playing status games. You worry about your edit count. You try to get an article up to "featured article" status. You network. You try not to make enemies. You try to sound wise on "Articles for Deletion", or the "Administrator's Noticeboard", or a million different talk pages. Eventually someone nominates you for administrator. You answer a few questions and other contributors vote for you. Let's assume you played politics well enough leading up to this point. You win! Now in addition to all the crap you were doing before, you get to play with your administrator tools as well. Fun, eh? Well, for some people it is. But at that level, Wikipedia is 90% politics. There's an awesome encyclopedia there for sure, but man, you don't want to see how the sausage is made.

<comment><USER52> With a few changes this excellent description of Wikipedia politics and bureaucracy could accurately describe my social life.

<comment><USER11> I am so sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> My experiences are identical. Their notion of community is tragic.

</comment><comment><USER54> What most amuses me about all this is that it is the most famous Jessie Stricchiola has ever been.

</comment><comment><USER55> I wonder if the same thing will happen to stackoverflow? They have a number of levels of access, reviewing, meta-reviewing, administrators, etc. What level do you get to before becoming a bureaucratic place where everything is designed and decided by comitee?

<comment><USER56> Many (most? all?) of the Stackexchange sites are already overwhelmingly bureaucratic. The difference between Wikipedia and SE is that on SE, the problem isn't "deletionism" it's "closequestionitis." That and a generally unwelcoming / unfriendly attitude expressed towards n00bs. But, ya know, it's working for them (for now at least) so what can ya do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I would suggest Wikipedia needs a 'second page' site to host these types of 'less than notable pages' and they be eligible to be promoted to the main site.

But really I would just classify this as a #FirstWorldProblem

<comment><USER58> We have an entire web full of whatever unverifiable stuff anyone felt like writing. Why should Wikimedia beg for more resources to expend mirroring content that isn't reliable enough to contribute to their goals?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Don't get me started about the time I engaged in a revision war with the crazies over the Serial (Oxford) Comma. The Wikipedia page _still_ has an "example" of where the Serial Comma "leads to ambiguity", but which is grammatically incorrect. All I was asking for was a single grammatically proper example to back up the extraordinary claim that the anti-serial-comma folks were making. They couldn't provide it but why does that matter when the revert button is so easy to press?

</comment><comment><USER60> Can be summed up pretty easily:

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt>

</comment><comment><USER61> Wikipedia is a clique. But, the author is kind of a "clueless as to how to work with strangers, esp voluntary strangers" idiot.

The key to getting your way (in anything) is to work the system. Learn it's idiosyncrasies, etc. Complaining that it doesn't work the way you want it to is fail.

<comment><USER62> I love how you spelled "idiosyncrasies" correctly but failed with "its".

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Who's with me for providing a version of Wikipedia (there data is open right) that contains all pages that were ever deleted for notability reasons.

I fail to see how whether something is notable makes it more or less a fact that should be categorized.

<comment><USER39> It already exists and is called Deletionpedia.

<http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page>

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It seems like one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is the admin class. They often adopt this "us vs them" bunker mentality like one discovers with a few bad police apples. This especially true with new and unregistered users.

</comment><comment><USER65> I'm unable to view the article; on Firefox, it never loads, and on Chrome, there are two scrollbars, but none of them actually scroll, so I can't get past the first page. Anyone care to provide a working copy?

</comment><comment><USER66> <http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853> doesn't work in Opera web browser.

</comment><comment><USER67> A few years back, the list page for "gtd software" was deleted, the data was lifted, moved to a private web page, the "gtd" page was pointed at the latter as a reference! I (strongly) suspected the private company of arranging it via a wiki-fu but couldn't prove it. Perfect example of gaming the system.

</comment><comment><USER68> First they came for "the woman who was the pioneer in fighting click fraud"

Then they came for me

</comment><comment><USER69> bitter blogger is bitter.

<comment><USER70> Getting stuff rejected hurts a lot. I also skipped 1-2 donation rounds after that happened to me in the past. But then again I continued using Wikipedia so in the end I got over it ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like a lot of whining to me. The author's reaction to this made him lose all credibility with me.

First off, you think you're an expert? Maybe you are, maybe not but even experts aren't always right and just because _you_ think in your infinite expert wisdom that so and so should have a Wikipedia page, the majority of us obviously don't.

Secondly, so sorry the appeals process was so inconvenient for you. So far Wikipedia is doing just fine and your rant doesn't seem to be hurting them much. With all the garbage that people attempt to post on Wikipedia, there's a good reason for all the walls.

In the end this comes off like a know-it-all's childish hissy fit for not getting his way. The world doesn't have to accept your point of view. Your response to this whole thing probably played a large role in you not getting what you wanted.

Next time try to up think about _why_ some of these things are in place, know that you can't jump ahead of someone else in charge just because you think you're better qualified (it's first volunteer, first served on Wikipedia) and just approach the issue with a lot more tact and less childish kicking and screaming next time.

Some people love to talk about ideals like freedom, democracy, fairness, and all that but as soon as it inconveniences them they take the position that somehow those rules are for everyone else and they're somehow special. This guy doesn't fall in with the ideals thing I was talking about but he somehow managed to convince himself that everyone should just see thing _his_ way.

How dare a free, worldwide, not for profit, website with a 99% democratic submission and editing process not bend to your will! The audacity!

Welcome to Wikipedia on the WWW where majority rules (even if you think they're all stupid-heads). I hope Jimmy Wales sends you a personal apology. Now let's all go edit the Wikipedia pages for "Cry Baby", "Brat", and "Temper Tantrum" and cite the author as a living example.

<comment><USER71> What's with all the hate? The author has a lot of valid points.

1) If it's supposed to be the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", then it should be easy to use. If the "anyone can edit" is marred by insane levels of bureaucracy, making it so that, _technically_ anyone can edit, but _realistically_ , only those who know how to game the system can edit, than the system as a whole is a partial failure.

2) Who are you to judge whether he's an expert? Given that he at least claims to work in the field, that makes him more of an expert than almost all of the wikipedia editors combined. They just know their own bureaucratic guidelines, he actually knows something about the article in discussion. In the interest of journalistic integrity, they should at least attempt to listen to his points.

3) His points about how difficult it is to contest something is completely spot-on. There's no good reason why all the "contest this" or "discuss that" pages are simply huge text pages, other than because no one gave them a proper UI. For new users, it's confusing as heck. Given the status wikipedia has nowadays, and how widely it's used, they simply can't expect every user to know or care about their arcane systems. The system needs a proper UI for these sorts of things, making it easy to (a) file a complaint, (b) find a previously filed complaint, (c) discuss the complaint, and (d) find the resolution. His story about wading through talk pages isn't unusual, and it's kind of shameful for wikipedia that they haven't made it easier to use since their inception.

<comment><USER72> It is easy to use. It's just not mindless to use. It's easy to drive a car, but that doesn't mean there's no initial learning. Also, where you say 'game the system', you really mean 'follow the system'.

I've made tons of correctional edits and vandal reversions on Wikipedia, and a small number of new info edits. Only one of them has ever caused a problem - that was a revert done by a bot that didn't recognise I was fixing vandalism (some previous errant edit had blown the page of a seagoing vessel out to the longest page on wikipedia by far, with ctrl+c ctrl+V). The bot that wouldn't let me revert also wouldn't let anyone comment on the talk page, and the feedback link for it was broken.

But apart from that one experience, I've made probably somewhere between 100-200 successful edits. I don't even have an account, I edit anonymously.

<comment><USER46> Just because you find it easy doesn't mean others do, agreed there's an initial learning curve to everything in life but we (current Wikipedia contributors) could be doing a lot more to smooth that curve for less technically minded people who want to contribute.

We could also be doing more to make the basics of the rules clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk page. That's when I stopped contributing.

<comment><USER74> DO NOT move Orange (colour) to Orange (color).

The problem with Wikipedia is rather than consistency they go with, "who got here first and what is a large majority of the article written in? (British?, American?). All the other pages on color all use American English but apparently someone using British English got to Orange first. It's a huge mess but I suppose it doesn't matter since no one types in disambiguated names.

The problem with Wikipedia is its a very large bureaucracy, and the culture of Wikipedia seems to weigh heavier on confirming from 3rd party sources that a person is "notable"

What's confusing is that Wikipedia also wants to "welcome" anonymous edits, which leads to huge problems with vandalism, but editing Wikipedia has a high learning curve.

<comment><USER75> >The problem with Wikipedia is rather than consistency they go with, "who got here first and what is a large majority of the article written in? (British?, American?). All the other pages on color all use American English but apparently someone using British English got to Orange first. It's a huge mess but I suppose it doesn't matter since no one types in disambiguated names.

That's a problem? That's exactly the policy I use with the legacy codebase I manage. If you're making a change to an existing file, you should make the changes according to the file's existing style, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. It prevents files from becoming impossible to read when different people edit it over a period of months, or even years. Wikipedia enforces this policy for the same reason. It's pointless and distracting to have an article that changes from tyre to tire every paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction>

> Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who > use it.

There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start being Wikipedia.

<comment><USER77> I completely agree. I think Wikipedia should stop trying to be an encyclopaedia and start being a source of encyclopaedic information. The whole notability blame game detracts from it overall. Sure some elementary school in North-East Canada might seem useless now but in 500 years that entire area might be a huge city. History tells us that sometimes inane details from the past become our keys to understanding the past and our world. I think it is unfortunate that Wikipedia tries to assess what is important in the future by a clique's definition of what is important to them now.

<comment><USER78> It is a question of verifiability and maintainability. Why you would think that having broken windows would help is beyond me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Someone at Wikipedia recently requested speedy deletion for the article on Ilya Zhitomirskiy, two days AFTER he died. The vote was to keep:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy)

I was an early user and editor of Wikipedia. I greatly dislike cliquishness and clannishness so I didn't last. The above treatment of a dead young coder only solidifies my decision to cease my association with the place.

<comment><USER80> The article wasn't created until after he had died as is made clear by the discussion and the edit history.

People create articles all the time about their recently deceased grandfather who was an ordinary soldier in WW2. These usually get deleted unless the person was otherwise noteable.

If I request that such a "grandfather" article is deleted it is not cause I hate your grandfather or want to hurt you. It is just that there were millions of other ordinary soldiers in WW2 so your granddad wasn't anybody special in history even if he was special to you.

<comment><USER79> Wisely, the vote was to keep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> The Wikipedia's definition of "notable" is a heap of crap. Maybe somebody should donate Jimmy a dictionary, besides the cash he's looking for.

</comment><comment><USER72> Reading a lot of these and previous comments on HN, it seems:

Steve Jobs, harsh policies, shiny product: Good!

Jim Wales, harsh policies, shiny product: Bad!

</comment><comment><USER82> ... and they want $20 million for our work that they don't want. poor Wikipedia</comment>


We can only forecast the weather a few days into the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/21/we-can-only-forecast-the-weather-a-few-days-into-the-future/

<comment><USER2> We needed a statistic for this? I thought it was common knowledge, kind of like water is wet, fire is hot, (weather) predictions are getting more inaccurate the longer time scale they are predicting...

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you know that they're really only accurate a few days out? Despite the fact that most weather sites provide forecasts a week or two out.

<comment><USER2> Yes. You didn't? Because frankly I feel they get really inaccurate just two days out. No idea why there's 10 day forecasts. If you look at them every day you'll notice that 10 day forecasts change every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925777)

<comment><AUTHOR> Different post. :-) That post was about the accuracy/reliability of various weather forecasting services for predicting rain.

This one is about the accuracy of three weather forecasting methods and how far into the future they can predict the temperature.

<comment><USER3> Yes, my mistake, you're absolutely right. They're different articles.

But they are talking about the same problem, giving related data, posted the same day, and clearly related. So I think the cross-reference is valid, and the discussion on the other submission is appropriate.

But it's true that they are definitely different articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! That's valid. Just didn't want people to get confused. It's happened before. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Symfony Tips & Tricks II: Use gmail with swift mailer - <AUTHOR> http://www.solidwebcode.com/web-development/symfony-php/symfony-tips-tricks-part/ <comment><USER2> Keep in mind that gmail accounts have a 500 message per day sending limit ([http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22839)). You can get around this by creating multiple accounts and cycling between them. Gmail will also disable your account if you have too many undeliverable messages, so be sure that you verify all email addresses before adding them to your list.</comment>


Inside Google X: Google's Moonshot Factory - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/x-google-moonshot-factory/540648/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This marketing article fails to acknowledge where Google X routinely gets ideas: [http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/06/google-accused-of- rack...](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/06/google-accused-of-racketeering- in-lawsuit-claiming-pattern-of-trade-secrets-theftt/)</comment>


Ask HN: Moving to Boston need Hacker/Developer Advice - <AUTHOR>

So I'm planning a move up to Boston from Raleigh around Aug/Sept. I was wondering if any local Boston people had any advice on where to live (somewhere close to BU). I'm a software developer with front end, back end web and mobile dev experience so hopefully it would be close to an array of dev companies/startups where I can find a job. Also any advice on finding a job in Boston? Any help would be awesome!!! <comment><USER2> There are a lot of tech companies in Burlington/Waltham area, as well as the downtown Boston are (where I live and work). Honestly, the easiest way to get started is to join LinkedIn, build your network, join a lot of job groups and start networking with people working at those companies. Sites like indeed.com and developerauction.com are pretty good as well.</comment>


Modern Perl 4th Edition is out, ebook version is free - <AUTHOR> https://pragprog.com/book/swperl/modern-perl-fourth-edition <comment><USER2> If you want to understand Perl, spend some time on two things: 1) The ecosystem in which it developed and from which it borrows; 2) Larry's understanding of and perspective with respect to natural languages and the way they work.

Sometimes, Perl trades depth of knowledge for length and explicit minutia of code. It can be confusing if you are not familiar with the dialect, but terribly powerful if you are.

And behind the scenes, a lot of effort has been put into making DWIM (Do What I Mean) not only intuitive but often quite good at implementing an optimized solution (e.g. quite performant data representations).

P.S. Thank you, chromatic, for your continuing generosity and... I guess I will call it "belief", in the Perl community I encountered 15 years ago.

P.P.S. I never was a Perl "expert", and I'm woefully out of touch, these days. But the occasional bit I read leads me to believe that the above still pertains. And I'm curious to learn about version 6, which while a long time coming, really wanted to "take it to the next level". If and as it succeeds, it should be very interesting indeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember reading an earlier version of this, about 4/5 years ago (maybe the first edition?). It stuck in my mind as being fairly cleanly written, and also as being the tipping point at which I started to grok OOP in perl (and Moose).

<comment><USER4> Perl's greatest features (for me) have always been community and documentation/literature. In the beginning I thought every technical community was like Perl just because it was all I knew. I was quite surprised to find out how poor documentation was elsewhere and how disconnected the users were.

I owe a lot to random Perl community people for helping pull me up (literally since I was a child) to the point that I could get a job, then get better jobs, and eventually choose my own work and support a family.

Its been years since Perl has been the main tool in my toolbox but there is plenty in ~/bin and I plan to give Perl 6 another go. Still, I think of Perl often and fondly.

Has anyone else ever had that "If I am ever wealthy I will help __some open source community__"? More and more I realize life is passing by and being wealthy isnt important to me at all. So I better just say thank you here. ;)

<comment><USER5> The problem I've found in newer communities is they are so disconnected now.

Perl had p5p to guide them, and various conferences and very close knit groups which I was proud to be a part of.

I'm now more in the node.js crowd, which is huge, but feels like there's no good guiding group. I'm a mod in #node.js but the traffic there isn't communal. The node.js mailing list gets about 5 posts a day. I don't even know where people go to ask/talk about Node any more. Is it stack overflow? Somewhere else? Or do people just flail about not really knowing what they are doing? Sadly it feels like the latter.

And yes, the documentation of perl modules still far surpasses anything I've ever seen in other languages.

<comment><USER4> Yes! Close your eyes and flail your arms around and eventually you will hit something.

The way I use Stack Overflow makes me feel dirty. Usually it starts when I Google an error message because I'm using a new (to me) combination of language/framework/module/plugin. My mindbrain and fingers conspire to automatically select the Stack Overflow link even though it might be 3rd result and #1 and #2 might be from the official docs of whatever technology.

When I get to SO I read the answers first. That is often enough to shake something loose in my brain about my own problem. If that doesnt help I'll read the question to make sure I'm reading the right thread. I only comment or answer on rare occasion because it means that 1. I ended up on an inappropriate thread but actually know the answer and 2. it happens to be a fresh unanswered question. Seriously, I hope some of you are using SO the way they want it to be used and clicking on ADs or whatever. ;)

I used to answer questions in IRC channels just because I was already hanging out there, knew some people, and hey- I got answers from this group I might as well give back. But on SO I dont feel any attachment to a community, its just about Internet points. And for those who arent keeping score its just get-in- get-out. Maybe its just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a reason to learn Perl these days when we have Python?

<comment><USER7> In my case, I find the Moose ecosystem much preferable to almost any other OO system I've used. Better multidispatch would put Moose over the top.

The last time I looked at Python 3, Perl still had much better Unicode support. In particular, grapheme support in regexes, built-in casefolding, and easy normalization made a 100+ country project much easier.

The stability of the language, core libraries, and CPAN modules across major releases really helps with maintenance. Python's 2/3 break was a bummer for a lot of people for a long time that I'm glad to have (mostly) avoided.

<comment><USER8> What's your take on Perl6?

And do you plan to update the book to cover Perl6 some time in the future?

<comment><USER7> I have no plans to use P6. It's probably years away from having the ecosystem sufficient to support what I personally want.

I have no plans to update the book to cover P6; I think it does what it needs to do as it is now.

<comment><USER9> I'd bet Perl6 ecosystem will evolve very fast, I don't think you will need to wait several years

<comment><USER10> Anything that evolves fast also will have stability issues. Part of the draw of CPAN is the stability that comes from mature codebases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a really great book.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice work, chromatic!

</comment><comment><USER12> Talking about perl, how does CPAN etc work with perl6, are those modules mostly upgraded? or is it similar to the python2 vs python3 case?

<comment><USER13> Perl6 and Perl5 are two completely different languages, they have about as much in common as Python and Ruby.

<comment><USER14> I think it would be closer to say "Perl 6 and Perl 5 are two completely different languages, and have about as much in common as Ruby and Perl 5". All the languages in that sentence are Perlish languages, so to me it conveys the relationships better. Perl 6 definitely has a lot to do with Perl 5, especially the mistakes therein. If anything, it's the most Perlish of them all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The page says that there is no DRM on the ebook, yet every page of the PDF is watermarked with the name you used to order. Sounds like managing digital rights to me.

<comment><USER16> You can copy it as many time as you want, read it concurrently on any device that can read PDF, and you can use it offline. And if PragProg goes bust, you can still read the book.

I agree that it might be a bit ugly to have your name on it repeated but it is quite "discreet" nonetheless, and unless your name overlaps with a particular perl keyword, it should not impact full text search.

<comment><USER17> ...and if it really bothers you, it's easily removed. You could probably do that with Perl too.

<comment><USER18> It's not that easy to remove. To be completely sure all identification info including IDs and other generated differences are removed you would need two files sold to different people and remove everything that differs. I'm not going to buy two copies of a book just to get the clean file that they should be selling in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is the author named "chromatic"?

<comment><USER20> Yes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_%28programmer%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_%28programmer%29)

It's fairly common in hacker culture to use pseudonyms.

<comment><USER7> That Wiki page is so outdated and misleading, I'm tempted to ask for it to be deleted altogether.

<comment><USER20> Or you can edit it yourself.

<comment><USER7> The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, the Wikipedia Bureaucracy so dull to navigate....

<comment><USER21> Ah, Chaucer. Appropriate, considering this is about Perl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why perl 5? Perl 6 will be released in a couple of weeks. In what sense perl 5 is better?

<comment><USER11> Perl 5 has an extremely mature, diverse, and vetted ecosystem, with 20+ years of Perl 5 code out in the wild that people use, maintain, and continually develop.

Perl 6 does not. It will hopefully one day, but come Christmas time, we're not all going to just drop Perl 5 and start coding Perl 6 exclusively. They're Sister languages; Perl 6 does not deprecate Perl 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ah I remember when I was trying to learn Perl. Because I knew PHP at the time, I thought it was awesome, even better than PHP. Now I just use Ruby, but I'm happy Perl is still alive.</comment>


Does Broadband Need a Stimulus? - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/does-broadband-need-a-stimulus/?hp <comment><USER2> The real question is how much did a PR firm pay to have a NYTimes article written about their client who is looking for favorable treatment (and some spare federal money) from the new administration.</comment>


How GitLab Abandoned the Unix Philosophy - <AUTHOR> http://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2017/06/21/how-gitlab-abandoned-the-unix-philosophy/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that they supposedly "abandoned" the Unix philosophy, when as far as I'm aware, they never followed it. Seems this article's title is simply clickbait.

GitLab is not just a program, it is both a collection of programs, and a cloud SaaS, neither of which the Unix philosophy is applicable to. The _entire_ purpose of GitLab is to do multiple things, extending git's functionality with issue tracking, wiki etc.

If you want to do one thing and do it well then you should be just using the git CLI.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a fairly logical (and consistent) place to abandon the Unix philosophy: a complexity hub.

That is, some nexus at which a large number of elements come together and are either controlled under direct user input, or a large number of frequently divergent-protocol systems come together. Shells, databases, email, remote filesystems, IDEs, udev, and firewall rules would be among the examples I've previously compiled. Test environments certainly fit that bill.

GUIs are another case.

ESR, in his babbling dotage, still occasionally makes a cogent point, and has noted that elements which don't simply _pipeline_ elements, but have to create a complex structure or connection (which is to say: they don't fit the Unix pipeline model) are another general exception class.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/)

</comment><comment><USER4> At a previous company, manager X wanted to adopt a new monolithic proprietary software suite, and have us write feature drivers for it.

I said, "OK. So we should write these drivers in way that makes them independent from the software suite, so that when this software suite is obsolete and we start using something new, we can still retain and reuse our developed features. Right?"

His answer: "Well, we're going to invest a million dollars in this software suite, so clearly it's not going to be replaced! Just write the drivers as quickly as you can."

Two years later, the project was obsolete. The driver features were rewritten for a new software suite.

A UNIX-style design is less simple than a monolithic one, but it gives you real-world benefits: saving time and money on not re-developing features, the ability to adapt quickly to change, flexibility/compatibility. I think the reasons for abandoning it are often short-sighted.

<comment><USER5> Can I know what happened to manager X?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you've tried setting up a self hosted GitLab install, you quickly understand the wisdom of that abandoned philosophy.

<comment><USER7> You mean, `apt-get install gitlab`? Yeah, I think I can live with that :)

<comment><USER8> or even faster [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- use-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the- gitlab-one-click-install-image-to-manage-git-repositories)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >The best packager in any tech wave wins though, and wins big.

Since this feels the like main point of the article: what makes the "best packager"? The only complete stacks I've ever enjoyed using broke their own philosophy and let you integrate external tools, because that's what you're already using. Does the "best packager" somehow produce a package which is the best in all aspects, or do they make the most widely-used package - in which case, they'll shatter the monolith more often than not.

The example that comes to mind is Microsoft's VCS built into their TFS stack. It is a pain to use from personal experience, but the most grating thing was the centralisation - if you need a decentralised solution, you'll probably end up using Git, and MS support it for that reason. Does this make TFS good for being useful, or bad for failing to meet needs?

<comment><USER10> With TFS, integration seemed to be about the only selling point, every single component was mediocre at best. But the sales model of TFS was a bit different, they weren't selling to devs, they were selling to management, who only look at the big picture.

Rather than being a better SVN, MS seems to have tried to build a better clear case. They weren't trying to be the best packager, they were trying to create the best monolith from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Adherence to Unix Philosophy isn't a prediction of success. Look at the popularity of Slack. The kitchen sink approach can be very profitable as long as _most_ of said features work.

</comment><comment><USER12> TLDR; Gitlab are using internally/community developed, better integrated tools vs. creating a marketplace for integrating external tools. Nothing really about the Unix philosophy other than the title.

<comment><USER13> Do one thing and do it well, vs do many things and do them just okay.

<comment><USER14> the reason people use git hosting tools is because they do many things(version control, issue management etc.). Just because gitlab does CI/CD also, doesn't mean they will automatically do it "just okay". This article has nothing to do with unix philosophy. Using a sophisticated code hosting tool is like using unix itself where all parts work with each other well.

<comment><USER13> By "just okay" I meant that GitLab is a good example of the "worse is better" Unix philosophy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eric Wahlforss (soundcloud.com) on 'Bootstrapping' - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/11420397

<comment><USER2> Great stories. The party story especially is very valuable.</comment>


U.S. Judges Admit Enhanced Interrogation Is Torture - <AUTHOR> https://bostonreview.net/law-justice/joseph-margulies-us-judges-admit-enhanced-interrogation-torture <comment> java-man Could we expect the war criminals responsible for this be prosecuted now?

<comment><USER2> Nope! Because the Office of Legal Counsel made a good faith effort when they (incorrectly) opined torture was legal, none of the torturers will be held liable. After all, the government told them it was legal. It doesn't matter that the OLC later decided that torture is in fact illegal. The "torture memos" article on Wikipedia has more details. tl;dr blame John Yoo

<comment><USER3> Ah the good old days, when state crimes required a facade of reasonability, an abundance of ass-covering, and the assurance of good-faith.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is super important. The west can not claim moral high ground if we torture people.

<comment><USER5> Too little, too late. After Iraq, Lybia, Syria, and soon Iran, the West has lost any moral clout whatsoever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just in time too.</comment>


Ask HN: How does Facebook know my Google searches? - <AUTHOR> I was doing some work on a side project earlier today and Googled "pug" for pug.js. Google returned results about dogs instead, so I clarified my search to pugjs and thought nothing more of it.
I've just logged into my Facebook account tonight and it has two suggested groups on the right hand side. "Pug Crazy" and "Passionate about Pugs", both dog related.
How the hell has Facebook linked my Google searches to my Facebook account? I just mentioned it to some family that said they've experienced the same thing from searching a camping spot. Is it time to nuke all my accounts from orbit?
---
EDIT
I used two Chrome profiles with the following extensions:
dev - 1Password, Adblock Plus, Click&Clean, Privacy Badger
personal - 1Password, Adblock Plus, Chrome Remote Desktop, Click&Clean, cookies.txt, Privacy Badger, Save to Pocket <comment><USER2> Several businesses paid Google to show you advertisements for canine pugs. Note that Google did not collect revenue from the purchasers to show canine pug advertising to _someone_. Google charged to show it to _you._

The advertisers spent the money and got the data and correlated it with all the other data they have...including things like the fact you use Chrome and have four specific extensions and which country you are in and probably your ISP and the state of your microphone and whether you have a GPU to perform WebGL and if so how fast it is and the round trip latency to some CDN and a bunch of other stuff and all this anonomyzes you down to a market segment of size = one.

Really smart people have been sitting around all day year in and year out for decades figuring out how to track consumer behavior because there is big money in it. It wasn't invented with the cookie two decades ago. The cookie was an implementation detail of work credit card companies started two decades or more prior.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm assuming you're referring to browser fingerprinting.

If you want to know how unique you are you can check EFF's Panopticlick [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

Next question: How does anyone guard against this? My canvas fingerprint is 12 bits of identifying info even though I have what I would consider to be a fairly common MacBook Pro. Between this and my WebGL fingerprint (11 bits) I'm most likely uniquely identifiable.

<comment><USER2> IP addresses probably have three or four bits of entropy at best: home, work, mobile, school, a few free wifi locations. Browser fingerprinting is an alternative when the data isn't already available. I just riffed on it as an example of the asymmetry of the information conflict between individual and organizations armed with many many data centers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My theory: one of the pug.js related websites had a Facebook like/share button. Facebook took the hint that you're interested in something pug related because it mis-classified the domain/page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use Privacy Badger on Chrome, which should block all social widgets by default. I'd be surprised if this was the vector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just looking from outside the square, is it possible that the Facebook cookie on your machine is interrogating the Google cookie or your browse history?

<comment><AUTHOR> From memory I logged in to Facebook using my personal Chrome profile and I searched for pug.js on my development Chrome profile.

I'm fairly sure I opened the pug search on my dev profile but it's possible I opened it on my personal one by mistake.

Every time my chrome Profile window is closed it wipes all cookies/history/local storage etc. using Click & Clean. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickclean/ghgabhi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickclean/ghgabhipcejejjmhhchfonmamedcbeod?hl=en)

Either way it seems Facebook is acquiring user data in a really creepy way.</comment></comment>


Appcelerator comments on iPhone 4.0 ToS Sec. 3.3.1 - <AUTHOR> http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2010/04/apple-4-0-and-titanium.html

<comment><USER2> They've posted an update, here: [http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2010/04/iphone- os-4-0...](http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2010/04/iphone- os-4-0-announcement-and-our-commitment-to-you.html)

Ansca think their Corona is fine, but no formal announcement yet. This might have been posted before the SDK news hit though. <http://twitter.com/ansca/status/11838677252>

I also wrote a blog entry listing some more of the SDKs/apps affected, [http://gen89.net/2010/04/09/collateral-damage-the-iphone- os-...](http://gen89.net/2010/04/09/collateral-damage-the-iphone-os-4-0-sdk/) (THQ's Star Wars Trench Run is Unity based! They're going to annoy a lot of big developers with this news.)

</comment><comment><USER3> It was 503'ing for awhile, but for the moment it appears that the entire <http://developer.appcelerator.com/> subdomain is down.

</comment><comment><USER4> They take it down? Anyone copy the text?

<comment><USER5> From @appcelerator: "we're trying to get a new set of EC2 servers online to handle new load in traffic. please bear with us for a few more minutes."

Till it's back up, here's a snapshot of the blog post: <http://grab.by/3CUT>

<comment><USER4> thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Did the Italians Teach the French the Art of the Vinaigrette? - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/did-the-italians-actually-teach-the-french-the-art-of-the-vinaigrette/ <comment><USER2> The Italian influence on France since the Middle Ages has been vast and underappreciated. I speak French and I like learning the etymology of words with a good dictionary, and I am astounded at how many ordinary French terms are actually borrowings from Italian.

<comment><USER3> Italy was the cool culture (or rather, the cool cultures) to emulate during the Renaissance; some borrowing is not that strange. A lot of artists and intellectuals felt they needed to travel Italy at that time and until the romantics in the 19th century, so they were lots of contacts besides the Italian wars.

Purely out of curiosity, which words surprised you the most? AFAIK etymology for a lot of them are quite murky, but off the top of my head, "quarantaine" is a nice one. Even though they prefer "quatorzaine" these days...

<comment><USER4> > Purely out of curiosity, which words surprised you the most?

Bank (banque) is a fun one. It comes from the Lombard money lenders who used benches as makeshift tables. That's also why the root of the word is germanic despite coming from Italy.

<comment><USER5> The word "bankrupt" comes from the process of ritually breaking said benches of a merchant who couldn't make due on their debts.

<comment><USER6> That's especially a fun one because it's true even though it _sounds_ totally apocryphal.

<comment><USER7> Wikipedia and Etymonline label it as a probably folk etymology.

<comment><USER6> Shucks. I went for a quick google which seemed to confirm, but oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gads, with all the OP, no actual modern, _actionable_ recipe for Vinaigrette!

[Uh, safe to say that currently Vinaigrette is not a stew with all four stomachs of a cow!]

Here's my current standard: In a bowl of 1+ quarts, combine all but the oil and with a French style wire whip mix:

2/3 C (cup) red wine vinegar

1 1/2 T (tablespoon) finely minced garlic

3 T Dijon mustard

1/2 T dried basil

1/2 T dried oregano

2 T dried parsley

1/2 t salt

pepper (to taste)

2 C olive oil

While whipping, dribble in the olive oil to make an _emulsion_ , held together by the mustard.

For a more delicate flavor, for the herbs, use only thyme.

Use on green salads, cooked, cold vegetables, e.g., green beans, artichoke hearts, sliced cold meats, maybe some more.

What can be somewhat better, make a Vinaigrette for a Caesar salad by including with the above and before the oil:

1 egg boiled 10 seconds (to sterilize the outside of the shell), make a better emulsion, and add some flavor and viscosity

1 T Worcestershire sauce

One 2.0 ounce can flat anchovies packed in oil, minced, with oil

Toss with washed, dried, chilled Romaine lettuce and top with croutons (flavored with garlic and olive oil) and grated Parmesan cheese.

Can serve both with French bread, maybe also with curls of sour cream butter.

Either can be good.

Indoors can show off a nice table setting. Outdoors can just make a big show!

For still more, can serve the Caesar salad with chunks of, say, grilled chicken.

Since recently moved, have not done either Vinaigrette in a while. Have accumulated nearly everything needed. Sooooo, time to do it again.

Ah, "One of the good old-time flavors left to enjoy!".

<comment><USER9> You can always tell an American salad dressing, because it has _way too many ingredients_.

A vinaigrette consists of olive oil (3 parts) and good vinegar (1 part), shaken well. That's it. Maybe a dab of mustard, a pinch of salt, a twist of pepper. My mom -- controversially -- add a pinch of sugar. But dried herbs, garlic, mon Dieu, no.

<comment><USER8> IIRC there is a remark in the first movie _Indiana Jones_ "Americans always overdressing for the wrong occasion."!!!

I did use the 1:3 ratio!! :-)!!

For the garlic, and as for another response here, maybe just cut one clove and rub the inside of the salad bowl with the cut surface!! Isn't there a remark in Julia Child that in French cooking there is usually some garlic in there whether the recipe says so or not? Yes, yes, I know, Child was not French! :-)

I should have included that the strength of the garlic and herbs can vary a lot.

I should have included that, at least in the US, the concentration of the acetic acid in the vinegar is a standard, except for photographers!

I just said "olive oil", and that is what I use, but, sure, could consider extra virgin olive oil and then be open to a huge range of additional flavors.

If use my thyme option, my recipe is close to yours!!!

For the red wine vinegar, there are some rumors that, shockingly, such vinegar from native American red grapes is actually better although I have yet to compare with vinegar from _Romanee Conti_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes. And not only that.

(I'm italian)

<comment><USER11> Still, the art of bidet seems to be less sexy to them.</comment></comment>


Iron Maiden: Ed Force One – 2 engines replaced in Chile earlier this year - <AUTHOR> http://ironmaiden.com/news/article/ed-force-one-repaired <comment><AUTHOR> Another article [https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/putting-ed-force-one- back...](https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/putting-ed-force-one-back- together-again/)</comment>