Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Carl Hewitt

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As of 11 December 2005, one of the principle complainants User:R.Koot appears to be on an indefinite wikivacation. [1] I'm not sure where to note this fact, but it does seem important to note.

I also want to remark that Carl Hewitt's activities appear to continue unabated, and after a cursory review, I suspect that they may eventually bring in more complaints. linas 17:04, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

I came here after reading Talk:Denotational semantics. Hewitt seems to advocate making the focus of this particular article be on denotational semantics for concurrent programs, even though the typical presentation of this subject in textbooks begins with denotational semantics for functional languages (the simplest approach). An introductory article on the subject should certainly not present a certain branch of the research first just because it's supposedly the most current research -- it should present the foundations first. That Hewitt either can't understand this pedagogical principle, or doesn't care about it because he's only interested in self-promotion, suggests he's probably not someone who should be contributing to Wikipedia. Catamorphism 08:20, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Having read most of the related pages and discussion, I find the outcome of this arbitration quite problematic and disagreeable. It is not disputed that User:CarlHewitt is Carl Hewitt, who is an expert on the subject matter of the actor model and denotational semantics pages.

Some of the complaints were about trivial things like whether "Actor" is capitalized (who cares?), or whether an article that is already too long should have other stuff merged into it.

Re: the physics pages. It is true that the connections between physics and the actor model seem to be taken more seriously by Hewitt than by other actor model researchers, who tend to see them as inspiration or motivational analogies rather than anything deeper. OTOH, there are some direct correspondances, such as the fact that GR and the actors model both avoid global time, unlike many other computational models. So it's not as though Hewitt is making anything up; just perhaps overemphasising a particular viewpoint. (The thing about hidden variables in QM may be an exception, but that was reverted easily enough.)

The "self-promotion" criticism is at least partly misplaced. It is not Carl Hewitt that is being promoted; at most, it is the actor model, which is the subject of active research and development by many people besides Hewitt. And why not promote it (on pages to which it is relevant)? It's a damn fine model, which successfully addresses many of the limitations of other approaches to concurrency.

Re: the denotational semantics page. There is nothing factually incorrect about Hewitt's view that the denotational semantics of sequential, deterministic and functional languages can be treated as special cases of the semantics of concurrent sytems, or that a substantial proportion of recent research on denotational semantics is about how to apply it to concurrency. Whether this is the best way of explaining the subject in an encyclopaedia article is a different question, but it's a debatable point. I disagree that the article necessarily has to present the sequential case first.

AFAICS, Hewitt's contributions have not been original research. They are partly his research, but were previously published in reputable journals. References to future publications were only made on talk pages, and that doesn't violate any WP policy.

In summary, some relatively minor offences -- combined with having strong opinions about topics about which Hewitt is qualified to have strong opinions -- seem to have resulted in a ban that is totally disproportionate, and amounts to unjustified censorship. DavidHopwood 06:05, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure why this page is still on my watchlist, but IMHO, Carl is and has been shown wrong about several points peripheral to his expertise -- relationships with QM and GR, according to the experts here, and with mathematical logic, according to another expert (me). Or are you saying that I would be justified in removing his statements that mathematical logic (particularly, some forms of modal or temporal logic) cannot accurately model the possible outcomes of concurrent computation -- which would lead to an edit war if he or his allies were still actively editing those articles. I don't think the penalty is severe or being enforced. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 13:42, 9 March 2006 (UTC)