Sunday, February 27, 2005Jef Raskin, May You Rest In Peace
Doc Searls weblog does not have permalinks, but here's his note about Jef R.'s passing (links reinserted by me.) Being a long time Apple user, I can't help but feel some gratitude towards Raskin and sadness at his passing.
Doc Searls writes, "I just learned that Jef Raskin has died. Never met him, but always wanted to. Jef launched and named the Macintosh project at Apple. Dave writes, He struggled to see his vision implemented, and in the end it was a compromise. Raskin wanted computers to be radically simpler, not just evolutionarily simpler. The Macintosh, a project which he started at Apple, morphed when Steve Jobs took it over to become the evolutionary computer it is. Not sure who was right, but Raskin didn't live to see his vision implemented.It was Jef who said,"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining."
No details from the majors yet. As of 12:05pm PST today, Technorati sees 157 posts, mostly (far as I can tell) pointing back to Digibarn as the first source. Google News has three items, two crediting Digibarn, one — digital divide network — crediting Dave Burstein, who sent an email via Dave Farber's Interesting People list, which I get but don't read right away because I'm too busy hanging out on the Web/Aggregator sides of things. We lost one of the great ones today, a good and generous man., the email begins. Read the whole thing.Now I'm downloading DigiBarn's pile of MP3s just recorded with Jef a few weeks ago, for listening on the road tomorrow."
- Posted by William A. Riski - 3:45:04 PM - comment []
Encylopaedia Britannica versus Wikipedia: Which is 'Better'?
Great Boing Boing link to a set of point-counterpoint articles where the former Editor in Chief of the Encylopaedia Britannica Robert McHenry denigrates Wikipedia; and Aaron Krowne does a pretty good job of refuting McHenry's points. Along the way, Krowne does a nice job of explaining the logic behind Commons-Based Peer Production projects, like Wikipedia.
By way of disclosure, I use Wikipedia fairly regularly, have been a contributor, and own a set of the Encylopaedia Britannica. Most of Mr. Krowne's points about the value of Wikipedia resonate with me. But I wish he would summarize all of McHenry's arguments against Wikipedia and show his counter-point arguments - all in one side-by-side table. In any case, I think this is an example of a free on-line resource (i.e., Wikipedia) growing in common use and value to the point that it is threatening an established resource (i.e., Encylopaedia Britannica.) McHenry tries to fight this rising tide, and does a poor job of it IMHO.
Why Wikipedia works, and how the Britannica bully got it wrong. Cory Doctorow: Robert McHenry is the former Editor in Chief of the Encylopaedia Britannica who gained notoriety when he wrote a self-service, virulent attack on Wikipedia called "the faith-based encyclopedia." McHenry's claims were ludicrous, pejorative and childish, but they captured the imagination of a lot of people who were drawn to believe that if the EiC said that Wikipedia didn't work, it must be true, even if Wikipedia did, in fact, work.
Now Aaron Krowne has written a stunning refutation of McHenry's piece and published it in Free Software Magazine. This thoroughgoing debunking not only shows how shoddy McHenry's reasoning is, but it actually goes some way toward a general theory of why and how Wikipedia-like projects fail or thrive. Best article I've read all week.
The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him...What would McHenry’s metaphor apply more fittingly to?
Why, a traditional print encyclopedia, of course. If I wanted to analyze an arbitrary Britannica article’s evolution over time (for example), I’d have to somehow acquire the entire back catalog of the Britannica (assuming older editions can even be purchased), presumably reserve a sizeable warehouse to store them all, and block out a few days or so of my time to manually make the comparison.
Even the electronic forms of traditional encyclopedias are sure to be lacking such reviewability features. This makes sense, as public reviewability would be embarrassing to traditional content creators.
(via /.) [Boing Boing]
- Posted by William A. Riski - 9:52:16 AM - comment []
