Talk:Bennett Haselton

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Contents 1 no content 2 Improvements to the Haselton Article 3 Need Photograph of Haselton 4 Citation after each sentence necessary? 4.1 It's a Best Practice, like using your turn signals or commenting your code

[edit] no content

has bennett done anything significant outside the bounds of peacefire? because there is already a fine article on that, and there is no non-pf info in this tiny stub. unless someone has interesting things to say about him, i'd put this up for deletion. --dan 05:30, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Improvements to the Haselton Article

I've been working on Haselton's bio and I have found that there are indeed many notable contributions that Haselton has made apart from Peacefire including work in:

• Internet Security: Haselton found a security hole in Netscape that allowed web sites to gather details from visitors' computers, including bookmarks and cache information.
• Anti-Spam Activities: Haselton has won 10 small-claims cases and thousands of dollars in judgments against senders of unwanted e-mail raising awareness of the anti-spam laws that are available.
• Blacklists: Publicizing Blacklists, also called "block lists" or "blackhole lists,that are lists of Internet addresses associated with known spammers that are used to block all incoming e-mail from those addresses.

There is also a lot of material in this article about Haselton's early life growing up in Denmark and how this has influenced his views on censorship and the first amendment. I had actually not looked at the PeaceFire article before I started work on Haselton because I like to develop articles from original sources and let the narrative develop without being influenced by someone else's interpretation, so I was not too surprised to see that at this point, the Haselton article looks better than the PeaceFire article in terms of quality of content and citations. The PeaceFire article does not contain a single citation while every sentence in the Haselton article contains a citation. I would think that the PeaceFire article could borrow some content from this one at this point. The PeaceFire article really needs some work and I may go in and work on it when I get the chance. Best Regards, Reservoirhill 22:39, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Need Photograph of Haselton

At this point, the Haselton article could use a photograph. I found one on Flickr that is in the Creative Commons but unfortunately the license does not allow commercial use and Wikipedia has been cracking down on use of photos that do not have a Attribution 3.0 or an Attribution Sharealike 3.0 license. Does anyone have a photo of Haselton that they can contribute to the article? Haselton is a frequent contributor to Slashdot, so if I don't see one in a week or two, I may contact him by email and ask him for a photo that can be used for the article. Best regards, Reservoirhill 22:45, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Try Taking it from his facebook Profile, He Runs Groups on facebook.com that send out Sites on there when ever he makes a new one for everyone. Uknowwhatisup1 (talk) 18:55, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Sending him e-mail is likely best - he can probably give you a photograph that has the appropriate clearance, so you won't get into license problems -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 05:15, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citation after each sentence necessary?

Is there really any point citing the source of each sentence when a lot of consecutive sentences are from the same source, paragraph two of 'Early life and Education' is a good example. Should they be removed? Illwish (talk) 10:59, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] It's a Best Practice, like using your turn signals or commenting your code

Putting a citation at the end of each sentence is a best practice.

First it does no harm.

But it has numerous advantages.

• It lets editors know that each sentence has a citation and not just the last sentence in the paragraph.

• Later editors are going to move things around. When they move a sentence to another paragraph, the citation goes with it.

• When later editors edit a sentence, sometimes they add new information. If the new information is not supported by the existing citation, it lets editors know that an additional citation needs to be added to support the new information.

One of the purposes of Wikipedia is to ensure that every article is supported by citations. We are not looking for "truth" but verifiability. To my way of thinking, if you edit an article on Wikipedia and add information but don't add a citation for your information, you might as well not have added the information at all. In fact, you have damaged the article by adding unverified information, not improved it. You have just made it harder for someone else later on to correct your mistake. From an engineering point of view, you have increased the entropy in the article.

Take a look at an article like Rickie Lee Jones. There is not a single citation in the entire article. People just go in add stuff because they feel like it. How does a reader know what is true or false? Is the entire article just hearsay? Once an article falls into this state of disrepair, the only way to fix it is to start over from scratch and only put in facts, one at a time, that have citations.

Now look at an article like Mae Jemison. Almost every sentence in the article is supported by a citation. There has been some rigor applied to putting the article together. There is no doubt that any "fact" in the article is supported by a source. Which of the two articles would you put more confidence in?

In an article like this one on Bennett Haselton, it probably doesn't make a lot of difference, because edits to the article are few and far between. But for an article like Mae Jemison that receives daily edits, having a citation on each sentence makes it much easier to maintain the article and have confidence that any changes to the article are supported by citations. Once you get an article into the state of 100% verified, then it is easy to maintain it in that state.

A "best practice" is a good habit you get into like always using your turn signal before you make a turn while you are driving or commenting your code when you are writing a program. You don't have to use the best practice and you can still drive your car and your program may run just fine. But later on when someone else tries to maintain your code and make some changes to it, it may be impossible to figure out what is going on, if the code isn't properly documented.

Beginning programmers that get the right training soon learn that there are best practices and they are there for a reason. If you can get into the habit of following "best practices" automatically then it will save you a lot of trouble down the line.

I know this sounds like a long winded answer to a pretty simple question, but it is something that I have put a lot of thought into during my Wikipedia career and it is something that I have found makes a big difference in ensuring the quality of articles I have put a lot of effort into. I think I may write a blog post on the subject to expand on the idea, and write about other "best practices" I have discovered.

Best Regards,

Reservoirhill (talk) 14:19, 4 May 2008 (UTC)