New subject: Obituary for Michael Hart

9 Sep 2011

      jon richfield has some points, but since he is a person
who "contributes quite actively" to wikipedia, he might
not be able to see the border of the circle he is inside...    :+)

so it might not be as constructive as he makes it sound.

(from "the office" t.v. show:   "there is no inner-circle;
i can say that for sure because i'm in the inner-circle.
...which does not exist.")

you might remember that i explicitly asked if there were
any wikipedia insiders here.   because that's what it takes
if you want to edit a page and you want the edit to stick.

if jon is such a person, and he is offering to do an edit,
then by all means, we should take him up on his offer...

***

jon said:
...
Edit war is a 4-letter matter in those circles
well, let's go take a look at how wikipedia defines it, ok?
...
An edit war or revert war is a situation that sometimes
   arises on websites which are run on wiki principles, 
   such as Wikipedia, where users repeatedly 
   re-edit or undo or reverse the prior user's edits
that doesn't really sound like "a 4-letter matter" to me.

of course, some edit wars escalated to heights that are
truly ridiculous (far worse than a mere "4-letter matter"),
such as the ones on hot-button issues like abortion, but
i certainly didn't imply that such heat would happen here.

at the time of my first post, we just had one single edit...
at the time of my second post, we had only the one revert.

still, if theo10011 had reverted the revert _and_ it would
have prompted _another_ counter, that'd be "an edit war",
as defined by wikipedia itself, in the passage i just quoted.

but...

i have since gone back and looked at the edit-histories of
the two parties, so i now suspect no "edit war" will occur...

that's because one person has fewer edits than the other.

and the one with more edits (50+ since just september 5)
is also an employee of the wikimedia foundation, meaning
that if the other editor doesn't want to get into a fight that
he can't win, he'd better just smile and accept that revert...

because yes, that _is_ the kind of political power-struggle
which wikipedia editing has devolved into, over the years...

luckily for us, and michael, the editor with more power is
the one who calls michael "the inventor of the e-book",
and not the one who called him "an inventor of e-book".

but even if it was the other way around, and the page
ultimately settles on "an inventor of e-books", so what?
who cares?   if anyone bothered to ask who the "other"
inventors of e-books were, what would the answer be?
vannevar bush?   so, how many books did he put online?
jeff bezos?   oh really?, so what year did he "invent" 'em?
won't be no "war" because there's nothing to fight over.

but -- for the record -- the person with fewer edits has
50 edits since june 4th, so s/he isn't an outsider either.

if you haven't made any edits in the last year, or _ever_,
you darn well better not go try and edit michael's page.
...
Perfect?   Not a hope.   Important?   Hugely.
   As important as PG et al?   In the long run certainly;
   at present?   Dunno.   You tell me.
wikipedia is not perfect; by far.   but it is hugely important.

indeed, it's probably even more important than "hugely"...
(although then we'd just get into "an adjective war".)    ;+)

is wikipedia as important as project gutenberg?   certainly.
it's far more important, already, and the gap grows daily...

wikipedia grows in stature more and more every moment.

project gutenberg's importance has largely been eclipsed,
by both google and the internet archive scanning efforts.

michael's contribution is that project gutenberg was the
_impetus_ that convinced the world e-books were viable,
thus becoming the _spur_ for those big scanning projects.

kickstarting that contribution was an important sub-plot,
namely that -- if the powers-that-be refused to take on
the task -- _we'd_do_the_job_ourselves,_as_individuals_.

on the one hand, it's silly to call michael "the" inventor.
thousands of people -- including me -- had the idea,
and we got it all by ourselves, not from michael hart...

heck, thousands of people _heard_ the idea _from_me_,
originally, because i was busy telling everyone i knew...

the thing is, i considered this to be a _big_ task, one for
the librarian of congress, or an entity at a level like that.

i'm guessing that michael would have been _delighted_
if the librarian of congress would've taken on the task,
but what made michael different -- the thing that finally
made me willing to grant him the honorific exclusively --
is that michael was willing to do the job _all_by_himself_,
if he had to, a mentality going all the way back to 1971.

michael grabbed the power himself, and refused to allow
any of the big entities to tell him that they wouldn't do it.

which is why, on the other hand, it is _not_ silly to give
him the distinction and the title of being "the" inventor.

michael refused to let the universe say "no" to his dream.
he broke it down to the "one-book-at-a-time" level, and
that made it possible for him to do it, and then he did it.

and, by doing it himself, he became the model for others
to do the job too -- one-book-at-a-time -- and after a
period of many years, the effort cumulated to a _library_.
it became an accomplishment that was worth celebrating.

thus manifests the third wrinkle in michael's contribution:
the fact that his individual effort attracted other people,
such that the combination of their individual efforts soon
cumulated to the clear reality of a dedicated community...

and the emergence of distributed proofreaders is merely
icing on the cake, in the sense that "one-book-at-a-time"
naturally extends itself to the "one-page-at-a-time" idea.
(this doesn't discount at all the brilliance of charlz franks
in bringing about the _tech_ for distributed proofreaders;
it merely acknowledges the genesis of the idea behind it.)

i've just described them in their reverse chronology, but
it's important that we understand the causal sequence...

1.   michael says "i'll do this job all by myself, if i have to."
2.   other people say "i'll help too", forming a community.
3.   the resultant library proves e-book viability to google.

(in case it rings a bell, yes, this "we'll do it ourselves" is
precisely why napster was so important to digital music;
it said "you can't pretend this capability does not exist";
of course, it's much easier to rip a c.d. than scan a book.)

jimbo did the exact same thing with wikipedia, of course,
except he had project gutenberg as a "proof-of-concept".
still, the idea that individual efforts can cumulate into a
synergistic whole creating an unbelievably large product
that is extremely useful to society at large is _important_.

of course, the end-note on both stories is a touch sour...

project gutenberg has now become almost totally reliant
on distributed proofreaders -- it lost its own community.
and, of course, its library has been completely dwarfed...

and distributed proofreaders is trapped in a distant past;
it's now being controlled by a pack of technocrats which
is entirely incapable of changing its obsolete workflow,
so it has stagnated at a book-digitization of 2500/year;
it'd take d.p. 1000 years to do google's 25 million books.

the scenario at wikipedia is a little different, in that it has
been taken over by the politics of trivial power struggles,
rather than technocrats, but the end-result is the same:
the vibrant community of volunteers which it once was
has degenerated into a relatively small group of people. 

perhaps future visionaries will sidestep these problems,
and be able to prevent the capture of their communities.

we'll have to see.

on the other hand, facebook might instead be showing
how a clever puppeteer can manipulate a community for
the purpose of renting them out to the highest bidders.

-bowerbird

Re: Obituary for Michael Hart

Bowerbird＠aol.com

Ricky Wong

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