Talk:Dave Winer

Some threads below include quoted text with references.

These threads are not currently active, but are relevant to the ongoing dispute. Since this talk page is getting large, I am putting a collapse box around them. --Random832(tc) 20:15, 7 February 2007 (UTC) Reply

The article has nothing on the subject's connection to OPML. I'm not knowledgeable on the subject but I think a sentence or two would be in order. Cardiffman 23:29, 6 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I have just re-added part of the earlier Weblogs.com info that I think is particularly relevant to Dave Winer as opposed to material that belongs only to the Weblogs.com article.

First, the flame war surrounding Dave's ending free hosting at Weblogs.com keeps getting re-visited ( e.g. [17] )--so we might as well try to frame it in enclopedia-quality terms with a direct quote from a contemporaneous encyclopedia-quality source.

Second, Dave's sale of Weblogs.com for $2.3 M made all the major trade papers at the time, and quite a few of those stories are still online: [18], [19], [20] and more. In the small world of blogging and software design, so few of anyone's achievements or successes get such recognition--surely when something rises to this level we shouldn't let Nirelan succeed in deleting it from Dave's biography. betsythedevine 03:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Listen, you said we have to agree that what goes on that article is correct and everyone agrees on what I put there. We all know that some of you are Dave's friends and if you put something like he pioneered RSS you can tell someone that knows the truth that you didn't say he invented it, but you can tell people that don't know the truth that he is responsible for it. You are trying to give things vauge wording so you can associate things with him that he may support. He cleary did or did not do the things I put in the article theres no vauge opinions. --Nirelan Nirelan

What is true that you "put on there"? That Kevin Marks invented podcasting in 2003 at Bloggercon? When the history of podcasting goes back to 2000? Question: what was RSS 2.0 released? What's the difference between, Rich Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication? To say that enclosures existed in another syndication format is true, but ti doesn't change that fact that we all use RSS 2.0 which was initially released as an update to previous versions created by both Winer and others, and RSS 2.0 is what we're all using? He's not "responsible" for podcasting, he didn't invent it, no one person invented it, I think that is why it is both important to keep it that way, and cool that it really is that way! You keep referring to things you "put in the article" well Nirelan, here is something you "put in the article",

I didn't remove the line, but it is inaccurate and misleading and should be removed, or at least substantially modified. The RSS 2.0 enclosure element is neither necessary or sufficient for podcasting (the same role is covered in Atom and for that matter RSS 1.0). Winer did add this element to RSS 2.0, but the facility it provides was already available in web standards (any URI/link can potentially have a media object representation, and hence act as an enclosure, this can be determined using HTTP content negotiation). The promotion of the podcasting mode of media delivery (in which Winer played a major role) was considerably more significant than any implementation detail.

Why would anyone put this in the main article and not on the talk page? Plus it was posted with a bogus name, no sig like someone else I know who likes to edit this article. ;)

To say that you don't get it, would be more than fair. It's a disappointment that you seem to think that some of us are Dave Fanboys. I think that anyone who reads Dave disagrees with his strong opinions as often as they are inclined to agree. You may not know this, but this article is quite old, it's history has been troubled because he does tend to be a polarizing figure. In fact, in much earlier versions of this article existed about a 1/2 dozen quotes by famous people about Dave Winer. Half of them were positive, half where quite critical. That was a great way of dealing with the subject of this article in a real and human way, inherently ref'd by the people who said them themselves.

Obviously you are not a fan of Dave Winer, maybe he's even posted about you and you are upset? Seriously though, stop wreaking havoc on this article because you think it gives him undue credit. I implore you, I think others do also. Read the articles for Adam Curry, Kevin Mark, hell look at what is says for Tristan Louis

"In the early 2000s, Louis was involved in the development community surrounding RSS and podcasting, proposing a number of amendments to the specifications of the time. The proposal included creating a date element for every item in an RSS feed and provided the theoretical framework to distribute data files over an RSS channel, anticipating what is now known as podcasting."

Many people worked on what would become podcasting, nowhere in this article does it say he is the one guy who is responsible for it. You say that Kevin Marks invented podcasting, how could you give him all the credit if RSS was invented by Guha? This article didn't even have the graduation year of his High School at Bronx Science, if you go to that page, he's not listed as Alumni. There are too many big holes in this article to argue over the degree to which he helped/pioneered/created/developed/assisted in the evolution of podcasting, but he did release the 1st RSS 2.0, yes, the spec has evolved with help from him and others, who are fairly credited, but we're all still using RSS 2.0. Please sign your post. 4x~ :) Testerer 06:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

And can someone who knows the history of both, please do major edits to include detailed information on Winer and BloggerCon and the impact and Winer related history regarding OPML, someone should definitely also expand the article for Radio Userland. Thanks to Betsy and others who help improve this article.Testerer 06:14, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Tester I have no problem saying he supported RSS or something ,but you are making him sound more important than he was. In the opening paragraph it says "Winer was the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature, one of several necessary ingredients for podcasting at the time it first emerged[3]" then in the podcasting section it says "special "audio" and "video" tags in RSS Feeds to link to specific file types was proposed in 2000 in a draft by Tristan Louis." Tristian Louis cleary did it before Dave. - Nirelan

<Sigh> If you read it again, it says Dave is the one who wrote and released RSS 2.0 incorporating older versions. We all still use RSS 2.0. Tristan Louis proposed the idea yes, but in 2000, not until later, Summer of 2002 was RSS 2.0 released. Sorry but, why haven't you been blocked from impeding the progress of this article? Testerer 17:14, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

OPML the article says "Originally developed by Radio UserLand as a native file format for an outliner application, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of RSS feeds between RSS aggregators." Where is the proof that he was the one that made it there? -- Nirelan

the OPML article also mentions, e.g., his proposal for validation, etc - why doesn't that at least qualify for "contributed significantly"? --Random832(tc) 16:43, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

He's got a point, at least as it stands. Can someone get a reference on Winer's personal contribution to OPML so we can put it in there? (note to Nirelan: a less controversial way to do this would be to write {{cn}} after the OPML statement (and, maybe, delete it after a week if no cite is provided) , NOT to delete it with no explanation.) --Random832(tc) 16:52, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

OPML was created in 2000 by Radio Userland , during which time Dave was CEO^[8] working on centralized RSS news aggregators and content management. He also released a beta OPML validator.^[9] and wrote the first OPML 2.0 spec available for public DRAFT.^[10]. It should also be noted that in the main article for OPML the 1st "see also" is guess who? Nirelan, "prove to us" who else, besides David Winer created OPML. I mean, Winer does own OPML.org and FWIW- OPML is about outlining content in structured trees, to say its about lists of RSS feeds is not entirely correct. Random He didn't just "propose" validation, he wrote the beta validator^[11]. Not mentioning alot about OPML in this article is like leaving out the podcasting stuff. Testerer 17:11, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I agree it needs to be mentioned, I'm just saying that cites are necessary since this is clearly a contentious article, even if Nirelan's gone someone else will just come along in six months and it's better to have cites. I did put back in the mention of it with {{cn}}, and it should be fairly easy to find a cite - someone also needs to write a section about it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Random832 (talk • contribs) 17:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC).Reply

I can't believe Nirelan is seriously proposing that Dave Winer is not the author of OPML. That's such a ridiculous claim. The 2.0 draft spec claims authorship by "Dave Winer, Berkeley, California". "I am both the designer of the OPML format and the author of this specification." Both specs http://www.opml.org/spec and http://www.opml.org/spec2 are signed "DW". The claim that he didn't create OPML seems to me to require some extraordinary support. Is there anyone else who claims to have created it? I can't find any such thing. (I wouldn't be surprised if Nirelan claimed that "DW" might not really be Dave Winer now. That seems to be the level of argument here.) 207.180.187.46 18:32, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I completely agree with the above comment. Dave created and named OPML during his time at Userland Software. Period. I also don't think he can fairly demand that we prove this and that, everyone but Nirelan seems to be citing sources that are publicly accepted and available. Nirelan, if Winer did not author OPML, who did? It dawns on me that all of this technical "Who wrote what" discussion is really tolerant of Nirelan, I mean, let's discuss it sure, but if you go to the publicly available CV for Dave Winer it lists all of his major accomplishments as well as vocational experience, education etc. Very few people as public as Dave Winer are going to claim credit for the kinds of things he does in his CV knowing full well that it can be disputed and cause irreparable damage to both credibility and reputation. All of it can be proven or he'd never post it so boldly, this may be my opinion, but I think it is worth noting.

• 2002: RSS 2.0, sole author.

• 2001: RSS 0.92, sole author.

• 2000: SOAP 1.1, co-author, with Microsoft and IBM.

• 2000: OPML 1.0, sole author.

• 1999: RSS 0.91, co-author, with Netscape.

• 1998: XML-RPC, co-author, with Microsoft.

Pretty cut and dried, and all of this matches up with his work history as well. I do think that Netscape's Rich Site Summary get's a bit shafted in this, but only because Guha, and not Netscape inclusively is given so much credit in this area. Betsy had a great point before about this very issue.Testerer 18:57, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

"© Copyright 2000 UserLand Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved." That is from the OPML 1 page. I'll admit that the second one says he is the sole developer, but It was clearly copyrighted by Userland before Dave claimed to be the sole author. --Nirelan

I don't think it's appropriate to shift the focus of the lead paragraph of Dave Winer's own article to other people's accomplishments. This should be mentioned briefly in the section of this article about each respective thing, and of course, the RSS article itself (etc) would tell the whole story. --Random832(tc) 16:43, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

If working on it and not only inventing it is important why can't we list the inventor's name? It seems that someone is just trying to promote Dave. -- Nirelan

The inventor's name can be and is listed at the RSS (file format) article, and could be added to the section in this article further down that deals with Winer's contributions to RSS. Listing it up top just bloats the lead para with information that's not directly relevant to the subject of the article. --Random832(tc) 16:49, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

It seems like such a short time ago that somebody else was trying to insert into this article the information that Dan Libby "really" invented RSS at Netscape. With all respect to Libby, and to Guha as well, where is the verifiable, encyclopedia-quality source stating that either of them did. I look at the Wikipedia article for Ramanathan V. Guha and I find the only source given for the statement that he invented RSS is his own claim made to Marc Andreessen. This seems like a very slender basis for trying to insert that claim into this article even once, let along every time RSS is mentioned. betsythedevine 17:19, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I took the RSS article at face value - I've added {{citecheck}} so people there can check these and find more appropriate references if applicable, or otherwise remove the claims --Random832(tc) 17:28, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

More on the "inventor" of RSS--here's Dan Libby in August of 2000 saying "I was the primary author of the RSS 0.9 and 0.91 spec." [21] Libby makes no mention of Guha's being the "inventor" of RSS, although he does mention the usefulness of "guha's RDFDB and similar tools". To be clear, nobody is claiming that Dave Winer single-handedly "invented" RSS. But the claim that Guha or Libby "invented RSS" is a not-very-well-documented oversimplification of events that took place long ago, at the very beginning of the complex history of RSS. betsythedevine 19:40, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

"I don't think it's appropriate to shift the focus of the lead paragraph of Dave Winer's own article to other people's accomplishments." Maybe you should list things that he was more than just a "contributor" in the lead paragraph.-- Nirelan

That would be not accurate Nirelan. He was in fact the sole author of many of the formats so to say merely contributor would not be accurate.Testerer 18:59, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I just remove the word "Microsoft's" before XML-RPC in the top of the main article because it is not accurate. XML-RPC was "first created by Dave Winer of UserLand Software in 1998 with Microsoft." This has been understood for quite some time, thus XML-RPC is not "Microsoft's" at all. That's why I removed it. I also added OPML back in with a ref to the article in Wikipedia on OPML that clearly states its origin also. I think Nirelan should stop blanking out data if cannot prove it is false or somehow not accurate.Testerer 19:13, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Tester, how can you say something like that? Even Dave's site disproves that. "That's not exactly true. Before folklore becomes reality, XML-RPC was originally, privately, called SOAP, when Don Box and I were working with Bob Atkinson and Mohsen Al-Ghosein at Microsoft, in early 1998.

UserLand had a protocol before that called "RPC", I announced it in DaveNet, and they asked if I'd like to work with them on this. " http://www.xmlrpc.com/stories/storyReader$555 You can cleary see that Userland had a protocol called RPC ,but XML-RPC is something that Micorsot invited other people to help them make. -- Nirelan

Would users, including Nirelan if he wishes to do so, please add their own comments to the RfC page [22]. betsythedevine 20:55, 8 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

After the IP address 70.104.126.193 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) got a final vandalism warning, Nirelan has re-started the clock by making edits using a different IP address, 71.244.175.212 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log). In order for anyone to act on the RfC, some user other than me has to add information regarding these incidents and how we have tried to resolve them here. Otherwise, the RfC gets deleted 48 hours after it was filed. betsythedevine 01:02, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Besty, please tell the truth. I was cleared of the vandalism by the first admin you went to ,who is obviously your friend btw, and instead of talking in the discussion tab you have gone from admin to admin in a desprate attempt to block me. -- Nirelan

Nirelan, please tell the truth. User:Ganfon was approached by User:Testerer and not by me. I only learned later that this interaction occurred and that you had succeeded in persuading Ganfon that you were just trying to "improve" the article--you claimed that those of us who oppose you are just "fanboys" of Dave Winer. [23] Ganfon later admitted on my talk page that he/she looked at just a few of your recent edits where you had just changed a word or two without knowing about all your page-blanking, multiple reverts of other users' consensus, etc. I don't know Ganfon or Testerer or anybody else here--friendliness and civility between editors is supposed to be the norm here. What you are doing is against the policies of Wikipedia and also against the spirit of Wikipedia and I will keep on trying to stop your vandalism. betsythedevine 16:44, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Update on RfC: Nirelan (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and his two sock-puppet IPs 70.104.126.193 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) and 71.244.175.212 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) were blocked from editing Wikipedia for 96 hours. [24] Less than 12 hours after Ryulong blocked all three, Nirelan has registered yet another sockpuppet to continue vandalizing this article. betsythedevine 16:44, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

When you insist on giving Dave credit for things he did not create ,like RSS, and will not even make an article about a company he created you are clearly biased. -- Nirelan

When you persist in violating WP:NPA and WP:FAITH by accusing everyone here of being biased, I hope you don't mind if I post here the comments you yourself wrote on Dave Winer's blog on the very day you started vandalizing this article, January 23 ( [25] )

I would like Dave to admit that he did not create or play any part in the creation of RSS, blogging, outliners, or podcasting.

Dave I have listed your wikipedia entry as an article proposed for deletion. You got an audience by implying that you either created or played an important role in the development of the technologies I listed. However, many people can show that you did not.

For example, today you implied that podcasting has some connection to Harvard when it clearly does not. You have been trying to tie yourself to that technology since Adam Curry invented it.

This is the POV you have brought to this article, wasting the time of many hard-working edits as you try trick after trick to carry out some personal feud against Winer. And I might add that, judging from your contributions so far, you don't seem to know or care much about the history of "RSS, blogging, outliners, or podcasting." Your only interest in any of these seems to be to try to find some obscure blogpost somewhere suggesting that someone other than Dave Winer should get the entire credit. betsythedevine 17:03, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I have reported Nirelan for sockpuppetry. --Random832(tc) 16:59, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Random I never said that wasn't me. Besty broke the rules by going to a different moderator after the first one said I was trying to contribute to this article. -- Nirelan

You lied to that first moderator and he admitted his mistake. And, the appropriate action to take is NOT to create another account, but to post {{unblock}} on your user talk page. --Random832(tc) 17:19, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, Random832. betsythedevine 17:36, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

What a shame we have to deal with this instead of just focusing on a simple and accurate Bio. Thank you Random, Betsy, others who've vastly improved this article, even over the last week. And yes, it was I who 1st contacted Ganfon for help, not Betsy. All in all, I think this article is better today than it was a week ago, hopefully it will improve next week and...Testerer 18:16, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I have cited what I put there. You guys have broken many rules including removing information that was proven to be true because I cited the sources and you went from moderator to moderator. -- Nirelan

Nirelan, nobody is removing "information" but you. Way more than 3 reverts have been done by all of us on your repeated attempts to put "Microsoft's" in front of XML-RPC and "Netscape's" in front of RSS 2.0. When you keep re-inserting those claims, you are trying to add POV, not information.

Your "citation", which does not support either of your additions, and with which you attempted to replace an encyclopedia-quality source, is a commercial page of unknown authorship with no footnotes, no authority, nada. [26]. I might add that your citation gives much more credit to Dave Winer for the history of RSS than you do. People here have cited many different rules that you and your sockpuppets have broken, most trivially the WP:NPA and WP:3RR. Wikipedia has many different resources available for trying to get admins to deal with a disruptive user--in fact, those pages are a bit of a labyrinth that I'm having a hard time finding my way around. Trying to defend Wikipedia against POV vandalism and sockpuppetry is not against any rules that I know about. betsythedevine 19:04, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Betsy one of the pages I cited is from Dave's company!-- Nirelan

Nirelan, Wikipedia has rules and policies about what kind of pages are "encyclopedia-quality" sources and what kind are not. But I don't want to break the 3RR myself, so I will leave your latest reversion for somebody else to deal with. I must add, however, that the changes you keep re-making amount to your many-more-than-three times reversions of corrections that other users have made to your misstatements. betsythedevine 19:25, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Besty, there are other links to Userland sites in this article. Why is my link from the site not encyclopedia quality when the same company's content has clearly been used before? -- Nirelan

Nirelan's latest sockpuppet Nirelan2 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has already made 6 reverts with this new username to Dave Winer:

• 1st revert:22:24, 8 February 2007
• 2nd revert: 16:09, 9 February 2007
• 3rd revert: 18:40, 9 February 2007
• 4th revert: 19:08, 9 February 2007
• 5th revert: 20:20, 9 February 2007
• 6th revert: 20:45, 9 February 2007)

With all these reverts, Nirelan2 keeps trying to make three changes to the summary of Dave Winer's bio, all three of these changes calculated to reduce or remove credit to Dave for technologies he has been part of.

Item 1. The summary already very much understates Dave's role when it says he "contributed" to RSS. But Nirelan keeps trying to reduce that credit even further, so that Dave is said to have contributed to "Netscape's RSS". Even if RDF and/or RSS .91 were invented at Netscape, which abandoned those technologies 15 years ago, there is no reason to describe RSS as "Netscape's" --except if your goal is to muddy technology history and to give all credit to anybody but Dave Winer.

Item 2. Dave did major work toward creating XML-RPC and so did some people at Microsoft. But there is no reason for Dave's bio summary to refer to XML-RPC as "Microsoft's XML-RPC." It isn't, in any sense, the creation or the possession of Microsoft. So why insert "Microsoft's" into Dave's bio summary? No reason, except to muddy the historical waters and make Dave's technical contributions look unimportant.

Item 3. Dave's contributions to podcasting have been many, but the one that got into his bio summary was that he first "implemented" the enclosure tag. That is, he modified RSS to use it, his company modified its blogware to enable it, his company modified its aggregator to let their users access audioblog posts. Nirelan and his sockpuppets have removed, many times, a simple sentence saying Dave first implemented enclosure tags. Their argument--somebody else proposed "sound" and "video" tags, therefore Dave made no contribution to podcasting.

Well, these are only the latest of the changes Nirelan has been trying to make here--aside from his early antics of blanking pages, removing sections, etc. This is not a content dispute. This is an effort by a multiply-banned user to insert his POV into the article about somebody with whom he has a feud, and to do so in such a way that he will be able to damage that person's online reputation. We should never let Wikipedia be used as a weapon this way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by betsythedevine (talk • contribs) 21:36, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Sorry I left off my sig, I must have forgotten to add the right tilde-ness. betsythedevine 21:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

User:MarkBernstein speaks for most of us here, in hisresponse to the RfC on Nirelan [27]

Any reasonable reader, reviewing the history of this page in recent weeks, would conclude that Nirelan is eager to minimize Dave Winer's accomplishments, rather than to report them. If the page can be erased: good. If not, can entire sections be erased? If not, can each sentence in each section be erased? Can any other contributor be assigned credit? If so, all credit be assigned to the collaborator. The community has been more than patient with Nirelan, who is clearly willing to pay any price and expend as much of the community's time as possible, in order to accomplish an essentially negative result that clearly seems to be based in some personal grievance or grudge. MarkBernstein 15:23, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

betsythedevine 20:09, 9 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

"Any reasonable reader, reviewing the history of this page in recent weeks, would conclude that Nirelan is eager to minimize Dave Winer's accomplishments,"

Exactly. This is what all of us, who (imho) are being far to diplomatic in this situation must feel. This article is full of this kind of vague language 'He created some and contributed significantly to the rest of these popular dialects'.

With all due respect to everyone helping, who wrote this dung? This says nothing, dialects? How is it possible that one user can entirely ruin an article. Dave was the sole author, creator and inventor of many things. He, like many, many others on the internet is also an opinionated loudmouth. This divisiveness and his often polarizing vibe have been characterized well in this article with real life quotes from associates and people who can say it better than any of us can. Yet, we've all allowed Nirelan, Nirelan2, Danja, various IPs all equaling one, very determined person to destroy what should be an informative and easy to write wiki. Winer is a very public figure, his CV is easily found and verifiable. Yet Nirelan and his various masks have essentially raped the experience, and though he never is able to offer any proof of anything, I'm desperately trying to use work safe language here, he's a troll. That's it. A Troll and I have a feeling if he were to be blocked somehow, this article would sort itself out just fine. Testerer 07:35, 10 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I am not Nirelan! As far as I can remember I have only made one constructive edit of the entry, which was promptly reverted. Since Betsythedevine disputed my neutral pov, I won't attempt any more edits. Danja 08:44, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

It could also be said : "Any reasonable reader, reviewing the history of this page would conclude that certain editors are eager to maximize Dave Winer's accomplishments". While it sounds like Nirelan has been committing acts of vandalism, the fact remains that this page still reads like a piece of PR. Attempts to correct inaccuracies associated with Winer's contributions are generally met with reversion. Sure, block Nirelan, but until Winer's personal friends (and sycophants) acknowledge their bias and back off, this entry will remain poor quality. Danja 08:44, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Nirelan aka Nirelan2 aka Nick Irelan aka Nick Irelan aka a couple of sock IPs has been blocked from editing for a few days. In one of those edits, he replaced the entire Dave Winer article with a talk comment previously made and signed by Danja aka Danny Ayers, hence Testerer's misapprehension. What Nick Irelan and Danny Ayers have in common is the belief that Dave Winer's bio should be modified so that his contributions, no matter how many encyclopedia-quality references vouch for them, should be made to sound as unimportant as possible. What I would like to see this article contain is an accurate and well-sourced account, not an inflated one. It's understandable that an accurate bio reads like inflated PR to people who have a strong anti-Dave POV. The inclusion of a short section devoted to criticisms of Dave Winer, balanced (as is Wikipedia policy) by statements of the opposite POV, was intended to satisfy people who wanted the anti-Dave POV to get included. But surely the most interesting and notable stuff about Dave Winer is what he's done, not what people said about him. betsythedevine 11:42, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the (partial) correction Betsythedevine. However the statement that I hold the belief that Dave Winer's bio should be modified so that his contributions, no matter how many encyclopedia-quality references vouch for them, should be made to sound as unimportant as possible is a blatant untruth, and does little for your own credibility. Danja 00:22, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

This viewpoint may be worth considering:

My overall view of Dave Winer is that he has brilliant ideas ahead of their time and then does such poor implementation that other people must send years cleaning up the mess created by the early adopters on the basis of his half-written, barely-thought-out specifications. Atom cleans up his broken idea of RSS. SOAP was supposed to clean up XML-RPC although it made the situation worse… As Don [Box] says in the talk you referenced: “The whole world is living with the arbitrary decisions that Dave Winer made when he rolled out of bed that morning.”

http://www.kintespace.com/rasx37.html

Danja 09:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

That would be neat and anecdotal if 1) it wasn't just some random blog comment or 2) if the blog itself was perhaps even in the top 200,000 over at Technorati? Which it's not.Testerer 18:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Yes, if only more people could come up with brilliant ideas and then code them in such perfect shape that nobody ever criticizes the work or wants to implement it differently. betsythedevine 11:42, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

In fact, if we match up the viewpoint that Dave is a brilliant but too-quirky creator whose ugly creations require major rescue-work -- against the viewpoint that Dave is nothing more than (to quote Danja) than "a contributor to several popular XML dialects", with the clear implication he played a major role in none of them [28]-- isn't there some kind of contradiction here? betsythedevine 14:23, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I think there are definitely contradictions in the double speak. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Testerer (talk • contribs). 12 February 2007.

If this were a normal Talk page, untroubled by furor, we would probably be discussing with User:Danja how to get more information about Paul Prescod's comment, reported in the page at kintespace.com that he referred to above [29]. As it stands, there's nothing more we can do here, until we find out what 'broken ideas' in RSS (file format) Prescod feels have been cleaned up in Atom. If there are documented weaknesses in RSS, and they are described in reliable sources, we could discuss them. EdJohnston 18:20, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

It's entirely possible for the rivals and detractors of almost ANY software developer to make the argument cited here. I have personally heard this argument advanced against both Tim Berners-Lee (who contributed to the popular dialect known as the Web) and Ward Cunningham (who invented the wiki), not to mention Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, who invented hypertext. This is an absurd standard, impossible to meet. Just as, in retrospect, some aspects of the Web and the wiki might have been designed more cleverly or implemented with more grace and style, not all of Winer's designs were perfect. That they were important and influential is, I think, incontestable. MarkBernstein 19:25, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

EdJohnston, the issues with RSS 2.0 are well documented on the web (e.g. how should you treat markup in titles? No-one knows.) Mark - fair point. However I personally think the quote above is noteworthy, firstly because the views expressed were made on the public web, and secondly that Prescod and Box are highly respected figures in the Web/XML development community - Box having worked on SOAP alongside Winer. A bizarre aspect of the discussion here is that while Winer has been responsible for imaginative, hugely influential and original technical work - such as Frontier - there's an awful lot of effort going into inflating his technical role in developments like RSS where his contribution was primarily promotional. The quality of this entry really isn't going to improve while it's protected by the subject's friend and assorted (ill-informed) sycophants. Danja 00:13, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Assume good faith? Civility? MarkBernstein 16:00, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Danja, I agree that Dave's "promotional" contribution to RSS (over some 15+ years) outstrips his technical contribution to it--and everyone else's technical work on it also. Just about any stripped down system of tagging *could have* enabled the form-free content-repurposing that lets Robert Scoble read 10 million blogs per day. Even setting aside aggregators and ping-server search tools, how about convincing the NYT to let us bloggers create un-vanishing RSS links to their older content, previously all tucked away under pay-per-view? But that's my POV, and doesn't belong in the article, any more than your POV does.

What I don't understand or agree with is the efforts by many to edit an article that's labeled "Dave Winer" so that, instead of describing Dave's contributions, it skimps them while naming all those who came before or after him. The biography of Albert Einstein, for example, doesn't include praise of Isaac Newton, Ernst Mach, or the Michelson-Morley Experiment. Surely it makes more sense to describe what Dave Winer did in this article, meanwhile referring people who want more history to articles such as History of podcasting or RSS (file format)#history? And those historical articles should indeed, I agree, contain a full and well-sourced account of the many people who made contributions to technical innovation as well as to those format's popularity.

I am at peace with being called Dave Winer's friend (although it would be more telling if you could cite one of my edits that tries to inflate his bio as opposed to my edits aimed at deterring vandalism) but I doubt that the Wikipedians who have been outraged by Nirelan's antics are all "sycophants" of Dave Winer. betsythedevine 01:46, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Betsythedevine, it sounds like we're actually in agreement over something! This entry shouldn't be about RSS or podcasting or whatever, but Winer's contributions to the field. The problem I suppose is the tendency of people to focus on the technology (and look for a sole inventor), and it's easy to miss the persons actual contribution. While it would be accurate to say that Winer was the author of the RSS 2.0 spec and Einstein wrote a couple of pieces on relativity, their contributions to the respective fields is substantially different. There isn't any real innovation in XML-RPC or OPML, they're both just well-known ideas (RPC and outlines) expressed using a particular format/protocol (XML/HTTP). The ideas in RSS were well-established by the time Winer got hold of them. Even the technical aspects of podcasting don't represent any real creative input - if you trace back the history, you'll find Marc Canter begging Winer for tags to deliver media back in 1998 - and implementing that is a no-brainer in XML. But Winer has contributed significantly to the web, through Userland's applications and his clever evangelism, to the current generally easy-entry approach to content management and delivery. Would all this have happened without him? Probably, and it could be argued even quicker. But that's hypothetical, not historical. This is considerably more important than the markup he used. So while he didn't invent syndication or blogging (or outlines, or "the two-way web"), he has played an influential role. This should be acknowledged in this entry, along with his personal history. An accurate biographical piece wouldn't be complete without noting his gargantuan ego, eccentric and somewhat bipolar personality and the clashes that it's caused. Anyhow, I've got things I'd rather do than argue about someone's biography (it's remarkably easy to get sucked into this), so I'll leave this entry in your capable hands ;-) Danja 08:48, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

The final sentence above is wildly [WP:POV] and intrinsically unverifiable. There is no reason for the biography of a living computer scientist to discuss his personality, any more than Einstein's biography should discuss his cooking or his painting. MarkBernstein 16:00, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Ok, I accept the (penultimate) sentence is [WP:POV], but don't think my opinion is exceptional (Google is your friend). If Einstein's cooking or painting had a significant impact on his life and work, then I would expect them to be mentioned in his biography. Danja 16:48, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Sometimes you can't argue with a picture.

From Yesterday's SN

"Here's a screen shot of the RSS enclosures prefs page from Radio 8. As you can see from the timestamp at the bottom of the page it was last modified on 11/24/2001. It was created some time before that. Adam Curry, who wrote iPodder, three years later, was an avid user of this software."

I know it is (for some reason) fun to go round and round with people you call "fanboys" over what Dave Winer did and didn't do. But just for a moment, let us ask ourselves; what if Dave was a part of this conversation? How easily would people try and discredit his work or diminish the roles he has played in Blogging, syndication and podcasting? I posted the quote and pic from yesterdays SN, because it's Dave Winer trying to help others fill in the gaps that they may have and perhaps answer some questions. It really is true, sometimes you can't argue with a picture.Testerer 18:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I rest my case. Danja 23:26, 12 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

What Case? That we should consider what we write about real people, and how they perceive it's accuracy? I think we all know that you and Nirelan, if not the same person, seem to want to dicsredit and strip Dave Winer of any credit he might possibly deserve. We all are working on this article because, obviously we are interested in the subject matter, I'm not working on the wiki for tangerines because frankly I don't care. To criticize editors for being readers (which is what I think your point is) is absurd. Can I not fix information about the launch of Gizmodo because I'm a reader? I don't really even like that blog, it may be one of 300 feeds I subscribe to.

You rest your case? What case? That Radio 8 and the SS posted sorta proves that in 2001, Radio 8 used earlier versions of RSS w/ media enclosures to enable the automation that many associate with podcasting? Testerer 06:23, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I don't dispute that a product from Winer's company was able to do the automation that many associate with podcasting back in 2001. What I dispute is this being framed as "Dave invented podcasting". The use of the enclosure element in feeds is the implementation that became popular, and Radio 8's support obviously helped this - sure, both aspects involved Winer in a big way. But there were (are) many other ways of implementing the same functionality, and it wasn't until around 2004 that podcasting really took off. This suggests there were other factors involved. Winer's blog may not be the best place to look for reliable information on the topic as he tends to spin such things (e.g. his Dave-centric RSS history, his refusal to acknowledge that Ben Hammersley first coined the term "podcasting" - Hammersley being on Winer's paranoic "monsters" list). For what it's worth I'm not especially interested in the subject of this entry, but did spend around a year researching RSS and related technologies for a book. When I encountered this entry I noticed that not only was it inaccurate on many technical points, it also gave exclusive credit to Winer for developments which involved other contributors. I now attribute this to naive, unskeptical piping of material from Winer's blog by his followers - exactly as you appear to recommend. Danja 11:09, 14 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Danja, this article does not say, did not say, and should not say "Dave invented podcasting". And although the NYT among others have referred to Dave as the "inventor" of RSS, I also think that's misleading. (And it's even more oversimplified and misleading when people claim that "Ramanathan V Guha invented RSS." )

But if you look at the pre-Nirelan state of the article on January 23, it doesn't make either of those claims! It doesn't say Dave "invented" podcasting. It doesn't say Dave "invented" RSS. The only occurrence of the word "invented" is in a direct quote from Tim Bray, which Bray himself added: [30].

There's an urban myth out there, like the myth that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet [31], that Dave Winer claims he alone invented RSS, which Dave doesn't claim, and that Dave Winer claims that he alone invented podcasting, which he also doesn't claim. Does Dave get upset when people write about the history of these important technologies and imply that somebody else deserves all the credit? That's something entirely different, don't you agree?

What I see as our problem here is that this article tries, as Wikipedia articles should, to describe the contributions of the person whose bio it is. I agree with Danja that piping the details in from his (or anybody's) blog would be a bad idea, but looking at the long history of this entry I doubt that's how it got written.

I can appreciate that someone who comes to this article and expects a detailed account of the history of RSS or podcasting will feel this article is way too Dave-centric. I think we should find a more forceful way to send such readers off to the appropriate article where these things are discussed in depth.

I can also appreciate that someone who comes to this article with the hope that this article will contain some juicy sneering at Dave Winer's "claims" to invent RSS and podcasting will be disappointed. I have less sympathy with that expectation. It's not what Wikipedia is or should be. betsythedevine 14:23, 14 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Again Betsythedevine, I largely agree. But re. the urban myth, like many there is a basis in fact. Winer may not have made those claims explicitly himself (he has come close), but he'll link to other people making such statements, without offering any correction. What's more his own history of RSS begins with one of his formats, and on his blog sidebar he has a blatantly incorrect quote (from O'Reilly) which suggests the same. On the other hand he's quick to talk of credit when his name is left out. Incidentally, the current entry text here is such that anyone assuming he did invent RSS would keep that illusion. Danja 15:46, 14 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

"Incidentally, the current entry text here is such that anyone assuming he did invent RSS would keep that illusion." Er, well, anyone assuming that Dave invented RSS might kinda wonder why the entry doesn't claim he did. What would it take to satisfy you, Danja? A sentence like "Dave Winer is not the sole inventor of RSS, blogging, podcasting, the Internet, Web 2.0, sliced bread" ... wow, long sentence, now that we come to think of it.

The urban myth that Dave claims he's the sole inventor of RSS is false. Dave claims (and others agree) that he was working on RSS and on similar stuff back in the late nineties. That claim is true. That claim is all that the quote from Tim O'Reilly is meant to suggest. That claim is not adequate grounds for the kind of loud-mouthed meanness that keeps getting showered on Dave by people who believe the urban myth that Dave claims full credit for RSS and podcasting. betsythedevine 16:48, 14 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

One last counterexample to the statement that Dave "comes close" to making claims about his role by quoting and linking to excessive praise by others: here's a very juicy example of the NY Times referring to Dave Winer in 2004 as "the inventor of R.S.S." [32]. Now look at the sidebar of Dave's blog [33] and notice that Dave does not quote that statement in the NY Times nor does he link to it. But if he's trying to establish such a claim through the words of others, then why not quote those words in the NY Times itself? Answer: the urban myth that "Dave Winer claims he invented RSS" gets passed around and re-justified when it flunks a serious truth test by people who heard it from people who heard it from people who have the same kinds of motivations as the guys who passed around "Al Gore claims he invented the Internet". betsythedevine 15:00, 18 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Betsythedevine, while that particular quote might not appear in Winer's sidebar, he certainly did link to it: [34] and what's more he thanked the NYT specifically for the "inventor of R.S.S." line :[35] !!. Did Al Gore create such screenshots? Danja 09:17, 19 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

In his comment above, Danja refers to a posting by Dave as a 'Dave-centric RSS history'. This might be read as claiming that Dave overstates his own role in the creation of RSS. If you read the cited posting, it's hard to get anything like that. Every item in the list appears to be a bald statement of fact about the appearance of certain specifications. Perhaps there are other facts that could also be added to the list, but the ones listed there seem innocent enough, unless you have a reason to think some of them aren't correct. EdJohnston 18:51, 14 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

EdJohnston, my point is not that Winer's list isn't factual*, it's that it's selective and misleading : if that is the history of RSS, then RSS began with <scriptingNews> format. Compare with this history. (* although his remarks about the "RDF header" are fairly nonsensical - that isn't how XML namespaces or RDF/XML work). Danja 22:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Danja, I looked over the new link to goatee.net that you provided above. It's hard to get anything dramatically different out of that link. I did not find myself changing my opinion very much. Curiously, the nuances of the specification stuff (and the truth about who proposed what) are actually interesting, but it's hard to sell that kind of thing as a meaningful addition to any current articles. For example, the RSS article (to which I've made some contributions) has Winer-related items, and is reasonably fair so far as I can tell, but exactly 'who-invented-what' is hardly important to an actual reader of the RSS article. They would mostly care if there were leftover ideas from the 1990s that would be truly beneficial today, and it's not clear that there any such ideas. Do you want to propose a History of RSS article?

I think that the large group of us who've been recently working on this article have done a fine job dealing with a prolonged editing war, extended, archived discussions, and wild unreferenced allegations. We've encountered many unfounded arguments that could not even be categorized as conjecture as well as dealing with trolls and we've all been very patient. Yet this article is still in bad shape thanks to a few people who'd rather stymie rational, referenced improvement to this article than offer up any real counterpoints that would bolster their argument. When can we get on with improving this article and put aside the obtrusive and get on with the progressive. If someone wants to write a History of RSS article, do it, it will probably be merged with the main article in due time. And bogus claims made within the article or section will surely be deleted by responsible people. If you make wild claims like, Kevin Marks invented Podcasting at Bloggercon in 2003 or say that in RSS, media enclosures are no big deal because they've long since been a part of other Markup languages then that too will be deleted. If you'd rather speculate on the importance of this or to what extent someone invented a part of something, you will invariably attract some people, not unlike myself, who will take you seriously enough to discuss things to no end, but after a while they'll too get the idea that some people are just trolling, for what reason does not matter.

If someone would like to say Dave Winer came "close" to saying bla bla bla, I say to them, almost saying something doesn't count. In fact, saying someone came "close" to saying something is a rather asinine argument. At the risk of sounding heavy handed, what must we all do, the logical majority that is, to "get on with it"? Thanks to all those who've spent countless hours being patient and discussing this to such an extent that glue factories all over world are beaming at the horses being sent their way. I really think its a simple matter of a few trolls. So how can we leap over this hurdle and progress? Testerer 05:28, 16 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Tester, the "close" sentence I included parenthetically, it had little bearing on my main argument. I don't personally think Kevin Marks invented Podcasting at Bloggercon in 2003 or that media enclosures in RSS are no big deal, but nor do I think these are "wild ideas". If you define podcasting as the full chain right down to the iPod, then Kevin Marks probably did implement first. If you consider media enclosures in RSS solely from a technical pov, then they are fairly trivial. If you want to "get on with it" then find some fresh material that sheds more light on the subject, or offer some text that is likely to get consensus support. (Funny you should mention the word troll, I get a strong feeling I'm feeding one right now). Danja 14:27, 16 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I think your suggestion of a "History of RSS" article is excellent. There already exists a separate History of podcasting article, as a way of separating out the "who gets credit for what when" arguments that interest only a tiny number of people from information that interests a lot more people. Because the tiny number of people who care about who gets credit really do care about it a lot--and understandably so. Or maybe those sections should have names like "invention of RSS" or "early history of RSS"? By the way, this Dave Winer article could use more detailed info about his RSS role. betsythedevine 13:15, 16 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Update--I created an article for History of web syndication technology and re-directed History of RSS there. I then moved a bunch of stuff from the RSS and Atom articles there. I'm going to go back to those articles now and try to put a summary of their history there with a link to the history page for more details. I don't look forward to getting flamed for this, but I see it as a way to improve the articles. betsythedevine 14:02, 16 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Brave move! It is likely to be a battlefield, but at least it should help decouple the controversial stuff from entries such as this one. (btw, it does seem rather format-oriented, I haven't time myself, but it might be worth looking into other use of polling over HTTP, i.e. the protocol side of RSS). Danja 14:34, 16 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Since you still have technologies that Dave did not invent under the word "created" in the lead paragraph, I am going to add the inventors names once again. --Nirelan

Footnote--soon after leaving this comment, and reverting the text of Dave Winer three times to reflect his earlier edits, Nirelan was blocked indefinitely for his edit-warring on this article. betsythedevine 15:06, 18 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Tristan Louis created enclosures. That means Dave wasn't the first to implement them. -- Nirelan

Tristan Louis *suggested* using a tag called "sound" to link to a sound file. I don't think many people would agree with you that this hypothetical suggestion of something named X means he has to get credit for "creating" something similar named Y. To "implement" something is to put it into practical effect. This is what Dave Winer did when he added a tag called "enclosure" to his RSS and made it possible for his company's blogware and aggregator to recognize therein a link to (among other types of files) a sound file. betsythedevine 00:19, 18 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

"- Using special "sound" and "video" tags in RSS Feeds to link to specific file types was proposed in 2000 in a draft by Tristan Louis. [13]"- Prove that Dave implemented them before that. -- Nirelan

The article does not say that Dave Winer implemented enclosure tags before Tristan Louis proposed sound tags.

To propose something in a draft is different from implementing that something. It is even more different from implementing something that somewhat resembles something you proposed. Tristan Louis proposed sound tags--he did not implement sound tags. He did not propose, or implement, enclosure tags. Dave Winer implemented enclosure tags. That's what the article says, and it's the truth. Please stop deleting it. betsythedevine 00:43, 18 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I don't think Nirelan is justified in deleting the sentence on the grounds of Tristan Louis's suggestion. Nor do I think it makes much sense to call the decision to use a particular XML element implementing it - hey, I just <implemented> the implemented tag! It does seem pretty certain that Winer's company was the first to implement an automatic download feature using that element in RSS 2.0. That is the way the majority of podcasts are delivered today. I personally have my doubts about the significance of that implementation, it happened a long time before podcasting took off, it's not particularly innovative technically and the idea of delayed downloads via feeds was attributed by Winer to Adam Curry (before they fell out). But Winer did play a big role in the podcasting buzz, and perhaps the current sentence isn't such a bad way of giving him some credit. I'd rather see it more technically accurate - "necessary ingredients" isn't true, it's more of a convenience. But "first to implement the 'enclosure' feature" in itself isn't bad. Danja 23:52, 18 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Danja, I'm glad to see you distinguishing your ideas from the vandalism of Nirelan. But --if you took your <implemented> tag and added it to some dialect of RSS, some brand of blogware, some brand of aggregator--went on beyond that to publicize its usefulness so more folks would adopt it--as Winer and Userland did all of this with the <enclosures> tag--then, I would agree you had implemented the tag. To stick a word between angle brackets is not the same as to put a new tag into "practical effect."

Yes, all the <enclosure> stuff happened long before podcasting took off. And all the CDF/RDF stuff happened long before RSS took off. Let's give people credit for the stuff they did in each case, without trying to deprive others who did other stuff of the credit for what they did before or afterward. Now, if somebody out there wants to ask stupid questions, like "But who deserves all the credit for RSS/podcasting/blogging/whatever?" Well, god help us all, because no matter what you say to them, they will hear some over-simple answer if that's all they are listening for.

My very lovable and good-natured husband Frank Wilczek is a physicist who is not and never has been feuding with anyone, AFAIK. Yet sometimes after a reporter interviews Frank, although Frank was enthusiastically trying to answer questions about the stuff he works on, the reporter goes on to publish something like "Frank Wilczek, who invented quarks and gluons...", stuff that had been developed by people Frank much admires back when he was just starting off in grad school, because some reporters just assume that if the subject talks about X, the subject must be claiming to have invented X.betsythedevine 01:12, 19 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Betsythedevine, I take your point entirely about reporters getting the wrong end of the stick, simplifying stories and making mistaken attributions. But this is significantly different than an individual purposefully exaggerating their own work. Another Winer example: back in 1999 he claimed to have invented the collapsing-outline UI paradigm. Curiously in that piece he mentions Doug Engelbart in passing, who is generally credited with the invention some decades before. It might have been possible to put this claim to a simple mistake, Winer not having known about the previous work, had he not said elsewhere that he had been familiar with Engelbart's work at least since the 1970's. In more recent documents, Winer does give considerable credit to Engelbart, for example in this piece. However even that contains an exaggerated claim: "Frontier brought outlining to programming in the early 90s, with a script editor that worked with code in an outliner.". But the well-known (Lisp-based) emacs editor, popular amongst programmers, has had that facility apparently since 1978, and what's more Winer had already acknowledged prior art around Lisp elsewhere. As I suggested earlier, Dave Winer probably isn't the most reliable source of information on his own contributions. Danja 10:13, 19 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Immediately above, Danja discusses Dave Winer's role in outling, citing it as evidence that Winer chronically exaggerates his work.

As it happens, I have some knowledge of the history of outlining. I've known Engelbart and Nelson since 1987, I've worked with and written about Engelbart's NLS/AUGMENT as well as Winer's MORE, and I've managed products that competed directly with both. I'm also familiar with lots of other pertinent work in and around outliners in this era and with their creators: GUIDE (Peter Brown), TIES (Ben Shneiderman, Alan Borning), Xanadu (Ted Nelson), Boxer (Andy di Sessa), Gateway (Rosemary Simpson), Symbolics Document Examiner (Janet Walker), NoteCards (Halasz and Trigg) come quicky to mind for the 1980's.

There is absolutely no question in my mind that Winer's claim is reasonable. Engelbart's NLS is a monument, but in the late 1980's and early 1990's it was also a decayed monument, a fascinating and powerful early timesharing system that had inspired a generation of researchers -- the people now known as 'hypertext pioneers' -- but that had almost no progeny outside the laboratory and would clearly die with the PDP-10. NLS/AUGMENT was a collaborative, distributed hypertext system that possessed -- among MANY other things -- an ellision mechanism that anticipates the modern outliner. Winer's ThinkTank/MORE was a personal text processor for editing outlines (which subsequently accreted presentation tools). It was widely used, and has always had progeny. (The contemporary stretchtext solution, Peter Brown's GUIDE, packages the same tradition differently. Ted Goranson, incidentally, has published a superb, nearly book-length, review of outliners in serial form in ATPM.) There was lots of relevant work: Winer turned that work into a product. There were other products with ellision: the ones we recognize as 'normal' outliners are closer to Winer than to any of the others.

Danja's EMACS objection is easily dealt with. Stallman's original EMACS paper was, when it appeared, a brilliant and surprising effort that turned programming inside out. Instead of designing an ideal editor with optimal instructions and interface, Stallman showed that you could achieve DiSessa's vision of software that users could reconfigure to work the way they wanted, on the fly. It was a stunning demonstration and has been immensely influential. As a result, EMACS became a lot of things -- including (bizarrely at the time) a programming language. And that programming language did offer an ellision mechanism, which anticipates Frontier. You can see similar work in InterLISP editors of the period. The Smalltalk-80 browser is aiming at the same target with the same tools (and with a bigger UI budget).

Frontier, on the other hand, was (originally) a scripting environment, a replacement for the shell that was developed because the original Macintosh had no shell and people needed to do things for which DOS users used simple scripts. Outline editing had been a lab curiousity for years, a cute mode in some esoteric editors and some ambitious education systems; Winer put it at the heart of a shipping mass-market product. He took an idea that made people in the computer science education community scratch their heads (this was a *keynote* at IJCAI in 85 or 86 -- the one at UCLA) and put it into a software environment for casual computing. Frontier took stuff out of the lab and shipped it: that, in software engineering, is called "first to market". It's an achievement.

Danja, Nirelan, and all: let it be. The world is filled with people who do hard work. The endless sniping and derisory snipping that has characterized the entire discussion here is perfused with rancour and ill will toward the subject, with a hostily that has spilled at times onto those who are unwilling to join the chorus of detractors. Historians know that we can always find precedents: the hard part is recognizing what people achieve rather than in enumerating the limits of that achievement. A generous spirit should be looking for ways to acknowledge and reward work, rather constantly seeking reasons to minimize and diminish. A scholarly spirit would identify the individual's unique contribution rather than striving to shift each achievement to someone -- anyone -- else. Nothing is at stake here for you, save perhaps some tokens of respect for a colleague of whom you seem not to be overly fond. Let's have malice toward none, charity for all, and finish the work we are in: to explain who Winer is and appreciate what he has designed and built. MarkBernstein 17:02, 19 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Mark, an eloquent summation. I hope there is some way your comment could be captured in a Wikipedia article. We have an article called Outliner which is reasonably good but very short. How about a History of outlining, for which yours could be the starting contribution? Of course there'd be the small matter of finding all the references, which could take some time. EdJohnston 18:24, 19 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Mark, your talk of scholarly spirit and suchlike is charming. But I (like many, many other people) have been on the receiving end of hostility from Winer, and I've also wasted numerous hours working around coding problems that have arisen squarely from Winer's half-baked specifications. Like you say, the world is filled with people who do hard work. He may have made some valuable contributions, but that does not make him a saint, nor his influence necessarily positive. In the context of the Wikipedia I personally want nothing other than the information presented to accurately reflect the reality.

I don't see how your statements about the history of emacs and the commercial success of Winer's outliners change the fact that he didn't invent the collapsing outline UI (if you look at his claim it goes far beyond what we'd call outliners). His core claim was false. Also emacs certainly wasn't just the scientific curiosity you suggest. It's still a very popular development tool, with considerably broader adoption than Frontier (I use it myself, as it happens). But I'll accede to your wishes and let it be. My point this time was simply that Winer has a tendency to exaggerate his own contributions, it's not worth essays. Danja 80.104.221.203 18:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC) (hmm, lost my cookie)Reply

Weather or not Betsy agrees with me I think that we along with some moderators need to take a look at her contributions because she shows a serious bias. A simple Google search shows her website has mentioned him 770 times! She has also worked on her own husband's profile! She even worked on her own profile. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frank_Wilczek&action=history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Betsy_Devine&action=history http://www.google.com/search?q=Dave+Winer+site:betsydevine.weblogger.com&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&start=90&sa=N -- Nirelan