[ncolug] Re: NOTACON highlights
- From: larry <larry@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ncolug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Judi Malec DiGioia <judi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2006 10:24:19 -0400
Here is the actual Wikipedia entry for him, which seems surprisingly
accurate, considering...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott_Sadofsky
Here is the page from his site that explains the entire substance of his
talk:
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000060.html
Some excerpts:
To understand Wikipedia, it helps to understand the Usenet FAQ and its
unique place in history.
The Usenet FAQ was (and is) to me, one of the true great advantages and
creations of the Internet age. Previously, it had always been the case
that the same 5 or 10 questions plagued a subgroup, cultural icon, hobby
or occupation. These questions, while quite valid, quite reasonable,
would be asked so many times that it would eventually be the case that
no-one was willing to step up for the thousandth time and explain them.
This led, inevitably, to speculation, wrong information and misquoting
that would come back to bite everyone later. For no good reason! But the
Frequently Asked Questions list fixed that. It allowed all the common
questions to be answered, and even for the common controversies to be
addressed even if no firm conclusion had been reached. These things grew
like crazy in the 1980s and there's massive collections of them out
there, still with good information (as long as its a general subject,
and not a pop star or the like), and the work of many people coming
together to build something good. Like Wikipedia is supposed to be.
I would attest that the reason for the success of the FAQ was a lot of
collaborators but a short list of people maintaining it. A very large
amount of maintainers leads to infighting, procedural foolishness, and
ultimately a very slow advancement schedule. There's an interesting book
called /The Mythical Man-Month/ that goes into this in some detail, but
the basic idea is: the more people you slap into a project that's
behind, the /more the project will fall behind/. Unintuitive, but true.
Even in the case of raw horsepower, this becomes the case; you would
think that if the basic job (photocopy this paper) was simple enough,
the job would go faster with more people, but it doesn't. You end up
with people photocopying stuff wrong, collating wrong, bending pages
badly, skipping pages... and the errors increase as you smack more
people on. And you fall behind.
Now, at the risk of sounding a tad elitist and exclusivist, a low
barrier to entry leads to crap. Maybe not initially, but with any amount
of quality attached to a project, once it gains some respectability and
perhaps fame or infamy, it is then beset upon by crap. By making it
really, really easy to change, fundamentally, the nature of a project,
you run the risk of the project becoming a battleground. A really,
really crappy battleground.
...
I often get myself into trouble and lose my audience with my metaphors,
but so be it. Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build
any car you want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are
there, and you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every
one else, and I mean /everyone else/ in the garage can work on your car
with you. There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no
anything. In fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can
completely disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown
in from Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't
read the manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it.
And leave it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and
you can easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to
something resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see
there's no problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time
you're traipsing down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.
Henry Keultjes wrote:
Did you or BethLynn invite that Jason Scott tp Ohio Linux Fest 2006 so
he can buy pizza for all of us
--
A lot of people who have kids should have had dogs instead.
Dev
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