Talk:Carl Hewitt/Archive 1

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 User page = Page about you 2 Affiliation 3 Deletion of notice for talk 4 Archive? 5 Is advertising a talk appropriate use of a talk page? 6 Concurrent computing 7 Not banning intellectuals and scientists (proposed language) 8 Future and Recent Seminars 9 References vs. Citations 10 Deleted content 10.1 Publications of Carl Hewitt 10.2 Comments 11 Repeated reverts by Ruud Koot have deprived people of proper credit for their work 12 No image is preferable to a bad image 13 Why is an idiosyncratic partial list of publications superior to an annotated complete list? 14 Watch for sock puppets 15 Wikipedia norms versus scientific norms 16 Greatest current deficiency 17 This article should be deleted 18 Nominated for deletion 19 Question for Ruud Koot and Allan McInnes 19.1 Distinguished scientists that Allan McInnes removed from the list of students of Prof. Hewitt 19.2 Material that Allan McInnes removed from the article on Prof. Hewitt 19.3 Some Major Publications of Carl Hewitt 19.4 Notes 20 Please help 21 Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Paraconsistency and Reflection 22 ArbComm ruling 23 The Wikipedia harassment of Professor Hewitt has to stop 24 Please change site for Professor Hewitt's seminars, publications, and academic biography 25 Typo? 26 Trivial cleanup 27 Indefinite protection 27.1 Notes 28 Page protection 29 Wikipedia ban 30 Suggestion 31 Sock puppets

[edit] User page = Page about you

Isn't this kind of odd? Your user page redirects to a page about you? It's indirection I guess, but I'm not sure this is something that should be encouraged on Wikipedia. For example User:Lumidek (though no shining example of Wikipedia civility, he) who is known to be Lubos Motl maintains a distinction between the two pages. --CSTAR 04:36, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Good point. I was just trying to connect the two pages. So I changed it to "See Carl Hewitt".--Carl Hewitt 05:08, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

This is still weird. I can't figure out if the encylopedia page about you is your user page or your bio or what (I assume you're not looking for another job). I really find the WP lynch mob disgusting, but you really have to be more sensible, and try to separate yourself from your contributions to WP. Why on earth do you have an abstract from a talk you gave 5 months ago? This is really looks like a case of self-promotion and that's a big no-no on WP. See Florentin Smarandache a grand self-promoter.

If you don't remove the abstract to your talk, soon, I will. --CSTAR 22:11, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

Previously, the page had a link to the abstract of the talk. Unfortunately, the link to the abstract died and someone requested that it be restored. So I restored it. Now the question is what to do. Should some of this be reported in a Wikipedia article? Would it be better to put this in a user talk page as some have suggested? I agree that it doesn't really belong in the page about me.--Carl Hewitt 05:03, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Most of the article is OK, although I suggest it refer to Hewitt as opposed to Carl. Moreover that abstract is innappropriate. Please remove it. The article might also give some informsation about birthtdate, place of birth etc (optional of course). Other info such as you're a student of Pappert Ph. D. 1971 (BTW I got my PhD at that awful place down the street, on the T stop between Central and Porter, just a little later).--CSTAR 05:10, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

 :Thanks for your suggestions. I moved the abstract to the talk page (below). So now at least it is not part of the article. Also I changed "Carl" to "Hewitt" as per your suggestion. BTW when I was an undergraduate at "Tech", my classmates sometimes referred to the other place as "Upchuck river community college"!?--Carl Hewitt 17:52, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Affiliation

You are not one who can pretend to be coy, Carl, so please tell us precisely what your affiliation was. I just tried to google and to my surprise cannot find you listed anywhere in any of the UM campuses, in any department. Usually retired full professors are listed somewhere as emeritus faculty. Can you please clarify this? If your uni is anything like mine, you can keep a home page in your departmental directory, which could be useful for any non-CS-er trying to quickly spot check your affiliation. Which I'm not questioning, but why make me do all this detective work? All you need do is to state Hewitt was on the faculty at UM, SomeCampus, from 19mm to 19nn. He retired with the rank of Prof. in 19qq. TIA for this information ---CH (talk) 11:17, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

I know some of you guys are uncomfortable with the article, but maybe it's good to keep your tone down and show some respects...at least a comment like this should be based on more careful google search. This link http://www.eecs.mit.edu/faculty/index.html#h shows Carl Hewitt IS a associate professor emeritus at EECS department of MIT.

[edit] Deletion of notice for talk

I deleted a notice placed by User:CarlHewitt on a scheduled talk at Stanford for two reasons

1. It is self-promotion. This is clearly a violation of WP policy.
2. At the time it was posted, it was about an event to take place in the future.

Aside from any issues of policy, it is extremely bad judgement to use an encyclopedia article as a private notice board. If you want to advertise a talk, please do it on your user page. --CSTAR 20:32, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I removed the links to his user talk page as well. --R.Koot 12:25, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Archive?

Some of the stuff here is old and should be archived. How is this done? Thanks,--Carl Hewitt 03:37, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

All of the stuff here is not old. Even if it was it would not be necessary to archive, since the page is very short. --R.Koot 03:49, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Is advertising a talk appropriate use of a talk page?

Is it really appropriate for User:CarlHewitt to use an article talk page to advertise an upcoming seminar presentation? For example, I would go ballistic if say William Dembski used the talk page of the WP article on him to promote talks on Intelligent Design. Hewitt is setting very bad precedent here, in my opinion. --CSTAR 00:15, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

I put it in external links at the suggestion of another Wikipedia editor.--Carl Hewitt 01:48, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

It's still advertising.--CSTAR 04:58, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

At least it's an external link. We have all sorts of stuff in external links.--Carl Hewitt 05:16, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

What I meant was that you should put an external link to your homepage (e.g. www.mit.edu/~hewitt) in the article, not a link to an advertisment on the talk page. --R.Koot 12:04, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't think any of this is a good idea. What will prevent anyone from writing links to their webpages? --CSTAR 15:00, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Well anyone does not have an article about him/her on Wikipedia for starters. But if someone does (e.g. Jan_Marijnissen) an external links to his/her homepage is usually provided. To User:CarlHewitt: we do not have "all sorts of stuff" in external links, see WP:EL. --R.Koot 15:33, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

According to WP:EL, linking to your own web site is strongly discouraged. The Wikipedia is supposed to have comprehensive reporting on the published literature so we ought to be able to report this published material somewhere even if it is only an external link.--Carl Hewitt 17:28, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Concurrent computing

Discussion moved to User_talk:CarlHewitt#Concurrent Computing (moved from Talk:Carl Hewitt)

[edit] Not banning intellectuals and scientists (proposed language)

• Dear Carl, thanks for standing up for objectivity and accuracy. Since you mentioned my work, I wish to make it clear (as it can be seen in the 1st deletion bid archive) that I have suggested to offer my corrections and new related publication material to an objective editor (even if he/she disagrees with my conclusions). To date no-one has accepted to act in that capacity. Sadly, this leads to my inability to correct the obvious errors in the article, which then causes more confusion about what I have actually claimed. I suggest that we start a process of asking qualified editors to act as "official editors" of the page, so that their edits remain as the more reliable portions of the article. While non-official editors can still edit the article, their input should be closely and promptly monitored to ensure accuracy. I hate self-promotion (and have never acted in that manner), but I hate disinformation and lies even more. I believe truth does not require salesmen; it simply sells itself. Best regards. Prof. Afshar 09:00, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Future and Recent Seminars

The future and recent seminars of Carl Hewitt that were previously on this papge have been moved to Future and Recent Hewitt seminars.

[edit] References vs. Citations

DBLP has a very incomplete list of publications. The article should now be expanded to include a citation for every reference.--2ndMouse 09:46, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted content

In our opinion, the content below should be restored to the article.--LelandStanford 19:17, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Hewitt's work on Planner introduced the notion of the "procedural embedding of knowledge",^[1] which was an alternative to the logical approach to knowledge encoding for artificial intelligence pioneered by John McCarthy (Minsky and Papert [1971]). A subset of Planner called Micro Planner was implemented by Gerry Sussman, Eugene Charniak and Terry Winograd (Sussman, Charniak, and Winograd [1971]). It was used in Winograd's famous SHRDLU program,^[2] and Eugene Charniak's natural language story understanding work. (Minsky and Papert [1971]) At Edinburgh, Julian Davies implemented essentially the whole language (Davies [1973]).

Hewitt's first publication was with Manual Blum proving impossibility results for automata on a 2-dimensional tape (Blum and Hewitt 1967). Using program schemata in collaboration with Mike Paterson, Hewitt proved that recursion is more powerful than iteration and that parallelism is more powerful than recursion.^[3] Using participatory semantics, he proved that coroutines are more powerful than recursion and that Concurrency is more powerful than parallel coroutines.The Ultraconcurrency Revolution in Hardware and Software

The work of Hewitt et. al. on the Actor model built on Lisp, Simula, capability-based systems, packet switching^[4] and Smalltalk '72 ^[5], and was influential in the development of the Scheme programming language^[6] In collaboration with Henry Baker, he published physical laws for computation^[7] which they then used to derive the continuity criterion for computable functions of Dana Scott.^[8]

Together with Bill Kornfeld, he developed the Scientific Community Metaphor.^[9] He has also made contributions in the areas of garbage collection,^[10] programming language design and implementation, primitives for structured concurrent programming (Atkinson and Hewitt [1979]; Hewitt, Attardi, and Lieberman [1979]), Organizational Computing (Hewitt and Inman [1991]; Hewitt [2007]), negotiation (Hewitt and Manning [1994]; Hewitt [1996]), logic programming,^[11], denotational semantics of concurrency^[12], and paraconsistent logic (Hewitt [2007]) with his students and colleagues. Work on the Scientific Community Metaphor led to academic work on the characterization and development of Open Systems (Hewitt and de Jong [1983], Hewitt [1985 1986 1990], Hewitt and Inman [1991]). Joint work with Carl Manning, led to the development of Participatory Semantics (Hewitt and Manning [1996]).

Subsequently Hewitt has worked to integrate sociology, anthropology, organization science, the philosophy of science, and Services Science into information science.^[12]

He has an interest in massive concurrency. The Ultraconcurrency Revolution in Hardware and Software

[edit] Publications of Carl Hewitt

• Manuel Blum and Carl Hewitt. Automata on a 2-Dimensional Tape FOCS 1967.
• Carl Hewitt. PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots IJCAI. 1969.
• Mike Paterson and Carl Hewitt. Comparative Schematology MIT AI Memo 201. August 1970.
• Carl Hewitt. Procedural Embedding of Knowledge In Planner IJCAI. 1971.
• Carl Hewitt. Description and Theoretical Analysis (Using Schemata) of Planner, A Language for Proving Theorems and Manipulating Models in a Robot AI Memo No. 251, MIT Project MAC. April 1972.
• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger. A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence IJCAI. 1973.
• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, Irene Greif, Brian Smith, Todd Matson, Richard Steiger. Actor Induction and Meta-Evaluation POPL January 1974.
• Carl Hewitt, et. al. Behavioral semantics of nonrecursive control structures Symposium on Programming. 1974.
• Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker Laws for Communicating Parallel Processes IFIP-77, August 1977a.
• Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker Actors and Continuous Functionals Proceeding of IFIP Working Conference on Formal Description of Programming Concepts. August 1–5, 1977b.
• Henry Baker and Carl Hewitt The Incremental Garbage Collection of Processes Proceeding of the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages. SIGPLAN Notices 12, August, 1977c.
• Carl Hewitt and Russ Atkinson. Specification and Proof Techniques for Serializers IEEE Journal on Software Engineering. January, 1979.
• Carl Hewitt, Beppe Attardi, and Henry Lieberman. Delegation in Message Passing Proceedings of First International Conference on Distributed Systems Huntsville, AL. October, 1979.
• Carl Hewitt. Viewing Control Structures as Patterns of Passing Messages Journal of Artificial Intelligence. June, 1977.
• William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt. The Scientific Community Metaphor IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. January 1981.
• Henry Lieberman and Carl Hewitt. A real Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetimes of Objects CACM. June, 1983.
• Carl Hewitt and Peter de Jong. Analyzing the Roles of Descriptions and Actions in Open Systems Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. August 1983.
• Carl Hewitt. Offices Are Open Systems ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 4(3): 271-287 (1986).
• Henry Lieberman and Carl Hewitt. Design Issues in Parallel Architectures for Artificial Intelligence IEEE CompCon Conference, March 1984.
• Carl Hewitt. The Challenge of Open Systems Byte Magazine. April 1985. Reprinted in The foundation of artificial intelligence---a sourcebook Cambridge University Press. 1990.
• Carl Hewitt. Towards Open Information Systems Semantics Proceedings of 10th International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence. October 23–27, 1990. Bandera, Texas.
• Carl Hewitt. Open Information Systems Semantics Journal of Artificial Intelligence. January 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Gul Agha. Guarded Horn clause languages: are they deductive and Logical? International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems, Ohmsha 1988. Tokyo. Also in Artificial Intelligence at MIT, Vol. 2. MIT Press 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Jeff Inman. DAI Betwixt and Between: From ‘Intelligent Agents’ to Open Systems Science IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Nov. /Dec. 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Carl Manning. Negotiation Architecture for Large-Scale Crisis Management AAAI-94 Workshop on Models of Conflict Management in Cooperative Problem Solving. Seattle, WA. August 4, 1994.
• Carl E. Hewitt. From Contexts to Negotiation Forums AAAI Symposium on Formalizing Context. November 10–11, 1995. Cambridge Mass.
• Carl Hewitt and Carl Manning. Synthetic Infrastructures for Multi-Agency Systems Proceedings of ICMAS '96. Kyoto, Japan. December 8–13, 1996.
• Carl Hewitt (2006a). The repeated demise of logic programming and why it will be reincarnated What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications. Technical Report SS-06-08. AAAI Press. March 2006.
• Carl Hewitt (2006b) What is Commitment? Physical, Organizational, and Social COIN@AAMAS. (Revised version in Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Edited by Javier Vázquez-Salceda and Pablo Noriega. 2007) April 27, 2006.
• Carl Hewitt. Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Paraconsistency and Reflection COIN@AAMAS. April 23, 2007.

[edit] Comments

• What is your (LelandStanford's) relationship to Carl Hewitt? (And, if this "we" is referring to multiple users of the account, it should be banned and reverted. "Role" accounts are not permitted on Wikipedia. I am using "we" to refer to Wikipedia editors in the following.)
• We should only list publications relivant to the article; WP:NOT a resume service.
• We need to establish notability and verifiability of the rest of the insertions from sources other than Carl's publications and those of his students. In fact, I think the article needs to be further trimmed, rather than further expanded.
• — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 19:23, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

The professors were talking about the problems that the Wikipedia is having with persecuting academics. Some of us starting talking afterwards and we got the idea that I try making a suggestion. It sure looks like the faculty were correct!--LelandStanford 20:31, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

My take is that Carl Hewitt is notable, but primarily for his (non-falsifiable) claims about the philosophy of asynchronous computing, not about his models or theorems. I have not seen evidence to the contrary presented here before from a reliable source.

• If that is not the case, please add some sources other than his papers or his students' papers that his theories are used in the field.
• If it is the case, we need more references about how reputable scientists disagree with his theories.
• If reputable scientists don't talk about him or the Actor model, this article and the entire Actor model family of articles should be deleted.

I'm not sure which of the options is correct, or even most probable. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 20:50, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I think it's safe to say that both Hewitt and the Actor Model are discussed by reputable scientists. Three examples:

1. Filman and Friedman's "Coordinated Computing" devotes an entire chapter to the Actor model, and mentions Hewitt by name.
2. Robin Milner's Turing Award lecture specifically mentions both Hewitt and the Actor model.
3. Mark Miller and the folks working on the E programming language for secure distributed computing have made use of a number of ideas from the Actor model, as illustrated by the extensive references to Hewitt and the Actor model in Mark's thesis.

I'd previously included a reference to the Filman text in the article. The other references may well be worth adding, although where they'd best fit within the current detailed recounting of Carl's resume, I'm not really sure. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:28, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Repeated reverts by Ruud Koot have deprived people of proper credit for their work

Repeated reverts of this page by Ruud Koot have deprived people of proper credit for their work. Eugene Charniak has been deprived credit for his co-authorship of the Micro-Reference manual. Julian Davies has been deprived credit for his implementation work on Planner. Manual Blum has been deprived credit for his work on automata. Peter de Jong and Jeff Inman have been deprived credit for their work on Open Systems. Russ Atkinson, Beppe Attardi and Henry Lieberman have been deprived credit for their work on Actor serialization programming constructs. Carl Manning has been deprived credit for his work on Participatory Semantics. Depriving these people of proper credit for their work was highly unethical.--TheHoover 17:36, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] No image is preferable to a bad image

The image previously included in the article is not an encyclopedic photograph and is not appropriate for use in Mr. Hewitt's infobox. If we cannot find an appropriate photograph, we do not include a photograph. FCYTravis 23:07, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why is an idiosyncratic partial list of publications superior to an annotated complete list?

In addition to the highly unethical business of depriving people of proper credit for their work, why is the idiosyncratic partial list of publications being imposed instead of an annotated complete list of publications? The partial list being imposed is idiosyncratic in that one of those selected is the wrong version, the latest publication by Professor Hewitt is omitted, etc. What is the principle behind the partial selection?--64.75.137.250 00:37, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

If someone other than Carl and his students is willing to edit the article to add publications, we'd consider it. However, you are banned from editing the article. However, in general, we only list selected publications, rather than all publications which the person has co-authored or co-edited, which seems to be the way you're going. Perhaps all the publications should be removed? — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 00:51, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Watch for sock puppets

See Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/CarlHewitt. Jehochman ^Talk 17:02, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia norms versus scientific norms

The recent conflict here harks back to basic conflicts between Wikipedia norms and scientific norms. In the Wikipedia scientific experts are viewed with suspicion and barred from contributing to their areas of expertise. In this way, the Wikipedia tries to maintain a level playing field for the nonexpert. The Wikipedia stance against experts has survived so far in articles that report on well established areas. However, it seems destined to fail in areas at the state of the art where there are very few who have the expertise to participate. Censorship of experts does not seem like a viable solution long term. Perhaps the Wikipedia will adapt to accommodate expertise. In scientific communities, experts are honored and invited to contribute in their areas of expertise. Attempts are made to engage nonexperts using overviews, surveys and tutorials. Jealousy is important factor in science. Scientific communities attempt to channel jealousy in constructive directions. New research directions often have their genesis at least in part motivated by jealousy. Also there is a strong scientific ethic in properly acknowledging the work of others. The Wikipedia is still working through its jealousy issues. Lacking support for properly acknowledging the work of others is a major weakness of the Wikipedia.--64.75.224.82 19:49, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps. Have you considered becoming an editor at Citizendium? —Ruud 20:09, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Greatest current deficiency

Perhaps the greatest current deficiency in the article is that it doesn't include the following reference:

• Carl Hewitt. Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Paraconsistency and Reflection Proceedings of COIN@AAMAS'07. April 23, 2007.

Could someone please remedy this? Thanks,--Prof. Hewitt 03:52, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

That paraconsistency is important is disputed. But, I suppose it could still be important that Prof. Hewitt believes it is important. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 05:00, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

To determine the importance of the article, I would ask experts who were at the the presentation of the paper at AAMAS'07, e.g., Les Gasser, Mike Huhns, Victor Lessor, Pablo Noriega, Sascha Ossowski, Jaime Sichman, Munindar Singh, etc. Alternatively, I would ask others who have some knowledge of the work including Gerry Allwein, Jeremy Avigad, Randy Bryant, Mike Dunn, Sol Feferman, Jeremy Forth, Harvey Friedman, Mike Genesereth, Mehmet Göker, Tim Hinrichs, Bill Jarrold, Ben Kuipers, Mike Kassoff, Pat Langley, Vladimir Lifschitz, Henry Lieberman, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Peter Neumann, Ray Perrault, John Reynolds, Dan Shapiro, Wilfried Sieg, Mark Stickel, Graham Priest, Pete Szolovits, Gerry Sussman, Dana Scott, Richard Waldinger, and Jeannette Wing.--Prof. Hewitt 17:42, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps it would help if Prof. Hewitt put his complete CV/bibliography on his blogspot site (or some other site), and then helped us to identify the 5-10 publications from that list that were the most important or influential, and that should therefore be listed in the "selected publications" section. It'd be particularly helpful if Carl (or someone else) could point to a third-party source which identifies the most important publications. But such a source may not exist. --Allan McInnes (talk) 05:14, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately the complete CV is very long. Probably the papers that are most useful to Wikipedia users are the most recent ones. Since the research community is very fragmented, opinion as to which are the most influential would depend on who you ask. Also some people think that older papers are more influential because of the impact that they had over the years. Others think that recent papers are more influential because they have more impact on current research.--Prof. Hewitt 18:45, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

The fact that the CV is so long is the precisely the reason that we don't want to list every publication in the article. I don't know that Wikipedia has any set criteria for selecting which publications to include. Perhaps that's something worth taking up with the folks at WikiProject Biography. --Allan McInnes (talk) 19:27, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

This might help to identify influential papers. Although I think only covers publications up to around 1997. --Allan McInnes (talk) 05:20, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I wonder if it would make sense to establish a policy of listing all the publications of each author in computer science and encouraging the community to annotate each one. This could create a valuable resource. What do you think?--Prof. Hewitt 18:34, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I think that:

1. Such a list would, in most cases, be so long that it would overwhelm the rest of the article. Besides, Wikipedia isn't a resume service, and Wikipedia bios are not supposed to be resumes. There are plenty of other places for academics to list their complete set of publications (such as personal webpages or blogs).
2. Community annotations would most likely amount to original research, and thus be inappropriate for Wikipedia. However, I agree that a resource along those lines might be valuable. Perhaps you should consider setting up your own MediaWiki-based site, which could contain community-annotated information on various publications. Such a site could conceivably have far more extensive annotations than could reasonably be fit into a Wikipedia article.

--Allan McInnes (talk) 19:27, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

You make some good points.

1. In cases where the number of articles by an author X is long, a sub-article "Publications of X" could be created. I am only thinking of covering published articles; not resumes. Similarly, it also might be useful where there are a large number of publications on a subject X to create a sub-article "Publications on X".
2. I don't see why encyclopedia descriptions of particular scientific publications should necessarily constitute original research any more than encyclopedia articles on the scientific areas of the publications.
3. A significant problem with using some other site is that there doesn't seem to be any easy way to link (using the double square bracket notation) between an article about publications on some subject and the articles related to the subject.

--Prof. Hewitt 05:19, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

In response to 1, there are already plenty of other venues which are appropriate for containing complete lists of publications for particular author or subject. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be summaries of existing material, with pointers to further information (which might include pointers to those other venues). Providing an entire publication list seems (to me) outside the scope of Wikipedia. However, if you believe otherwise then I suggest you take it up either with Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography, or at the village pump. Debating the issue here will get us nowhere.

In response to 2, unless the "annotations" consist of a purely factual summary of the article in question with no additional opinion inserted, or a referenced commentary on the article (rare), then the material will end up being OR. Beyond that, I again have trouble seeing how such material is within the scope of an encyclopedia. As I said before, perhaps you should consider setting up your own MediaWiki-based site to provide such material. Alternatively, take the issue up at the village pump - as with the previous issue, what you are suggesting seems like something that would be better handled at a Wikipedia community level, rather than debated here.

In response to 3, that's what single-bracket http links are for. However, in general such links belong in the external links section or in the references. Again, Wikipedia is supposed to be a sourced summary of existing material, not a microcosm of the entire web. And again, these issues (if you want to pursue them further) are probably better discussed at the village pump, since they potentially involve a large number of articles rather than just the current article.

--Allan McInnes (talk) 23:19, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This article should be deleted

Carl has embarrassed himself with this self-promoting, largely self-authored web page. Contrary to his implications otherwise, he is no longer on MIT's faculty; he has no office at CSAIL nor does he act in any official capacity. It is highly doubtful that his (exaggerated) contributions to AI were sufficiently notable to warrant an entry here. In my humble opinion, he does not meet either the standard for WP:BIO or Wikipedia:Notability_(academics). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 151.203.18.206 (talk • contribs).

My, my! We haven't seen controversy like this in foundations since Gödel.--209.101.250.228 17:24, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nominated for deletion

{{editprotected}} I have nominated this article for deletion. Can the link to the AfD discussion page be added to the article? Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Carl_Hewitt RandomHumanoid 02:30, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Done. Cheers. --MZMcBride 02:35, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Question for Ruud Koot and Allan McInnes

Dear Ruud Koot and Allan McInnes,

Evidently you

1. Haven't read much of the specialized literature in the areas where I have published.
2. Haven't attended the scientific meetings
3. Don't know the researchers

Also, evidently, you haven't consulted widely among those who do have the above qualifications.

So how can you possibly know what is significant?Prof. Hewitt 22:18, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I agree to some extent, except that all the editors who do not belong to the categories you list above appear to be you or your students, who are strongly discouraged from editing this article under WP:AUTO and WP:COI, and banned from editing it under an ArbCom decision. I'm afraid this suggests that you and/or your specialization^[13] are not notable. I really don't know whether that's the case. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 23:11, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I have published in many areas (see a list of some of my major publications below). It would be notable if you did not consider these areas to be significant. It would also be notable if you did not consider some of my distinguished colleagues to be notable just because they were my students ;-)

Of course there is a large community of distinguished researchers who have the qualifications that I listed as evidently lacking in Ruud Koot and Allan McInnes that are not my students including Gerry Allwein, Jeremy Avigad, Geof Bowker, Jean Pierre Briot, Randy Bryant, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Bill Dally, Mike Dunn, Ed Durfee, Sol Feferman, Jacques Ferber, Rich Fikes, Jeremy Forth, Harvey Friedman, Les Gasser, Mike Genesereth, Mehmet Göker, Pat Hayes, Tony Hoare, Mike Huhns, Toru Ishida, Bill Jarrold, Nick Jennings, Alan Kay, Ben Kuipers, Bob Kowalski, Pat Langley, Victor Lessor, Vladimir Lifschitz, John McCarthy, Robin Milner, Marvin Minsky, Peter Neumann, Pablo Noriega, Sascha Ossowski, Ray Perrault, Graham Priest, Edwina Rissland, John Reynolds, Dan Shapiro, Jaime Sichman, Wilfried Sieg, Leigh Star, Mark Stickel, Chuck Seitz, Katia Sycara, Pete Szolovits, Gerry Sussman, Dana Scott, Munindar Singh, Richard Waldinger, Jeannette Wing, Michael Wooldridge, and others too numerous to list.--Prof. Hewitt 01:31, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't recall claiming any special knowledge in the area of "Carl Hewitt's research".

By the norms of the scientific community, by stepping in and making the changes you made, you are implicitly claiming certain qualifications analogously to intervening by speaking up at a scientific meeting.--Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Not at all. What I've implicitly claimed (to the extent that I've claimed anything) is some familiarity with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. I've deleted some material that a number of editors (see here) seemed to think was inappropriate, and requested that we discuss the material in question on this talk page before (or if) it gets added back into the article.

You have taken the following actions:

[edit] Distinguished scientists that Allan McInnes removed from the list of students of Prof. Hewitt

Allen McInnes has removed the names of distinguished scientists from the list of students in the article on Carl Hewitt including Dr. Russell Atkinson, Dr. Gerald Barber, Dr. Peter Bishop, Professor William Clinger, Dr. Peter de Jong, Dr. Irene Greif, Dr. Kenneth Kahn, and Professor Akinori Yonezawa.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Great! Does this mean that we can finally discuss content instead of arguing around the issue? Please, let's do so.

The Infobox field in question is labeled as listing "notable" students. As my original edit summary stated, I removed from then list those students who apparently are not notable enough to have so far had a Wikipedia article written about them. This is, I confess, a crude standard. However, the list was substantially longer than that found in articles about some other academics (such as Seymour Papert), and while roughly same length as the list for someone like Marvin Minsky the redlinks looked bad, IMHO, since they called into question the veracity of the list (some might argue that it was being artificially inflated - especially given what I just said about the length compared to that of other important academics).

That said, I'll happily concede that it's entirely possible for someone to be notable, and yet not have had Wikipedia article written about them yet. Do any of the (former) students you have listed meet the Wikipedia criteria for academic notability? If so, which students, and which criteria do they meet? (Will Clinger is the one that most immediately leaps to mind, given his extensive work on the R^nRS Scheme specs, which I believe arguably constitutes "a significant and well-known academic work" within the meaning of WP's notability criteria; Irene Greif also seems a likely candidate, although it seems that if there was a WP article about her it was deleted in May for not meeting the notability criteria). Despite the redlinks, I'd certainly be amenable to adding those students back to the infobox, particularly if we can find some way to footnote those names which are redlinks with some kind of reference which supports their notability (relative to Wikipedia's notability criteria). --Allan McInnes (talk) 01:24, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

There is an inconsistency between the source text of the infobox and the display text. The source text simply says "doctoral students" whereas the display text says "notable students". I would propose changing the display text to distinguished students since this is a more standard scientific category. There is no doubt that Dr. Russell Atkinson, Dr. Gerald Barber, Dr. Peter Bishop, Professor William Clinger, Dr. Peter de Jong, Dr. Irene Greif, Dr. Kenneth Kahn, and Professor Akinori Yonezawa are all distinguished scientists. Each of them produced a doctoral thesis at MIT (no mean feat in itself!) and subsequently did exemplary work. However, it make take a very long time for the Wikipedia to catch up to this fact.--Prof. Hewitt 02:04, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't doubt that the students you have listed are distinguished, and have done some great research. I also have the highest respect for MIT and its standards. However, the issue isn't about respect, or whether your former students are distinguished. The issue is whether or not they are considered notable within Wikipedia guidelines. The infobox is a Wikipedia-wide template. If you wish to change the template, or the criteria for the inclusion of students within the template (which I note specifically states that "any students that aren't notable enough to have their own wikipage should be deleted"), then I suggest you take it up at Template talk:Infobox Scientist. Alternatively, you might look into getting the academic notability guidelines changed to incorporate the "more standard" scientific category of "distinguished students". --Allan McInnes (talk) 02:19, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Since the infobox is internally inconsistent, I suggest removing the whole infobox as inaccurate. The distinguished scientists who obtained their doctorate under my supervision could be mentioned in the article. Also the article could mention that I held the IBM Japan Chair at Keio. The other information in the infobox is already mentioned in the article.--Prof. Hewitt 02:34, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Works for me. --Allan McInnes (talk) 03:42, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Material that Allan McInnes removed from the article on Prof. Hewitt

Allan McInnes has removed the following material from the article on Carl Hewitt:--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Using program schemata in collaboration with Mike Paterson, Hewitt proved that recursion is more powerful than iteration and that parallelism is more powerful than recursion.^[14] In collaboration with Henry Baker, he published physical laws for computation^[15] which they then used to derive the continuity criterion for computable functions of Dana Scott.^[16] Using participatory semantics, he proved that coroutines are more powerful than recursion and that Concurrency is more powerful than parallel coroutines.The Ultraconcurrency Revolution in Hardware and Software

Together with Bill Kornfeld, he developed the Scientific Community Metaphor.^[17] He has also made contributions in the areas of garbage collection,^[18] programming language design and implementation, open systems,^[19] Organizational Computing, logic programming,^[20] and denotational semantics of concurrency^[12], and paraconsistent logic Hewitt (2007) with his students and colleagues.Using program schemata in collaboration with Mike Paterson, Hewitt proved that recursion is more powerful than iteration and that parallelism is more powerful than recursion.^[21] In collaboration with Henry Baker, he published physical laws for computation^[22] which they then used to derive the continuity criterion for computable functions of Dana Scott.^[23] Using participatory semantics, he proved that coroutines are more powerful than recursion and that Concurrency is more powerful than parallel coroutines.The Ultraconcurrency Revolution in Hardware and Software

Subsequently Hewitt has worked to integrate sociology, anthropology, organization science, the philosophy of science, and services science into information science.^[12]

He has an interest in massive concurrency. The Ultraconcurrency Revolution in Hardware and Software

I realize that you might believe that you have good excuses for taking the above actions. However many of my colleagues hold high standards and I am afraid that they may judge your actions extremely harshly.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Great! Another opportunity to actually discuss content. Ok, the objections that I saw raised in the AfD debate essentially boiled down to (I think) four things:

1 Poor English in places (which I hope we can fix through a rewrite).

2 Inappropriate external links - I believe that this is primarily a reference to the inclusion of links to your blog in several places within the article, which is generally frowned upon. It would be better if we could eliminate the blog links completely (although you appear to be trying to use them as references, in contradiction to WP:RS). Failing that, a single listing in the external links section might get by the WP:EL guidelines (but we'd still need to replace the citations of the blog with something else).

Future and Recent Hewitt seminars is not a blog. It republishes seminar announcements that have been published at research institution websites including Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, SRI, UT Austin, etc. Unfortunately, the original web pages tend to disappear after a while and so that have to be republished elsewhere so that they can be referenced.--Prof. Hewitt 04:05, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

It would probably be safer (and less likely to generate objections) to use Wayback Machine links for that kind of thing, particularly anything that you want to use as a citation. Probably safe enough to keep the link in the External links section though (although I suspect some people might complain about it being advertising, since it claims to discuss "future" seminars as well - I'll leave you to defend that particular complaint if it comes up). --Allan McInnes (talk) 04:27, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I have not found the Wayback Machine to be reliable for this sort of thing. The advertising thing is a fine point. However, the blog only republishes notices that have been published on research institutions websites so it is not an original source.--Prof. Hewitt 04:41, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Might I suggest then that you (a) change the name to just "Recent Hewitt Seminars", so that it seems less like you're advertising upcoming events, and (b) if you wish to use the abstracts in question as references then include URLs for the original notices so that (even if they eventually become invalid) there's some record of the location from which notices were republished, and others can have opportunity to use Wayback or some other archival service to look for the original publication if they so desire. --Allan McInnes (talk) 04:59, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Good ideas! I changed the name of the link and managed to find URLs for 3 of the 4 seminar announcements that were republished.--Prof. Hewitt 05:24, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

3 "Non-notable information". I'm guessing that's largely a reference to the fact that several quite specific research results are called out, despite the fact that there's no indication that those results are actually noteworthy enough to warrant being called out in that way (Planner and the Actor model are widely mentioned, even in articles that are not strictly technical - these other results are not). Perhaps we could consider toning those sections of the article down a little, and simply describe the major areas in which you've worked instead of detailing specific results (alternatively, if you can point me to references regarding some of those other results that parallel that references I've found on Planner and the Actor model, then maybe we could justify keeping those specific results).

4 Self-authorship in violation of WP:AUTO and WP:COI. The things I left in the current version of the article were parts that I had either written myself, or substantially edited, which I think overcomes the objections about self-authoring. The stuff I removed (which you have pasted in above) was still, I think, predominantly your writing. Obviously, the only way we can overcome the objections about self-authorship is if someone other than you writes the article. At this point, I appear to be the only person with even a passing interest in doing that.

Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons says "Wikipedia is a top-ten website, and with such prominence comes a measure of responsibility...The Foundation and Jimbo Wales get well-founded complaints about biographical content on living people every day — people justifiably upset at inaccurate or distorted articles. The successful resolution of such complaints is a touchy matter" My primary concern is correcting the accuracy of the article.--Prof. Hewitt 04:23, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate your desire for accuracy. However, from the same policy we find: While Wikipedia discourages people from writing new articles about themselves or expanding existing ones significantly, subjects of articles remain welcome to remove unsourced or poorly sourced material. (emph. mine)

Since we're on to quoting policies and guidelines:

• From WP:AUTO:

• Writing autobiographies is highly discouraged.
• It is difficult to write neutrally and objectively about oneself. You should let others do the writing.
• Wikipedia does not wish to have an inaccurate article about you. We want it to be accurate, fair, balanced and neutral. Our goal is to accurately reproduce the opinions of others, which should be sourced and cited. You can help by pointing us to sources which can enable a more balanced view to be presented. (emph. mine)

• From WP:COI:

• Conflict of interest often presents itself in the form of self-promotion, including advertising links, personal website links...'
• Be careful about excessive citation of your own work, to avoid the appearance of self-promotion. When in doubt, discuss on the talk page whether your citation is appropriate, and defer to the community's opinion.

--Allan McInnes (talk) 04:53, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

It's the usual deal; Wikipedia policies often conflict with each other in particular cases. In this case, the Wikipedia has to allow people to correct inaccuracies to their own biographies but needs rules to try to prevent abuse. The most famous case is Jimbo correcting his own biography. ;-) --Prof. Hewitt 05:37, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

--Allan McInnes (talk) 02:05, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Speaking of Wikipedia guidelines, please try to assume good faith

I am prepared to believe that you took the actions above in good faith. However, I am afraid that many of my colleagues may question your judgment.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

That is, of course, their prerogative. --Allan McInnes (talk) 02:05, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I have put a substantial amount of effort into converting references in this article to inline citations, finding references which actually establish notability (something that helped to prevent the article from being deleted in the current AfD), and otherwise tried to improve the article. I am still trying to do so. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

The strong norms in the scientific community against censorship may lead many of my colleagues to question your judgment in taking the actions to remove respected scientists from my list of students and to censor the article in order "to improve the article".--Prof. Hewitt 01:39, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

The edit I'm assuming that you are complaining about simply removed a chunk of material which appeared (to me) to be a report of various research results with no effort made to establish the notability of the results (most or all references were to the publication on the work itself, rather than anything that indicates that the work in question was actually notable).

There is conflict between the norms of the scientific community and certain current practices on the Wikipedia. The scientific community has long established practices for addressing issues of significance and accuracy. Those who don't have the qualifications that are listed at the beginning of this this section basically have no basis for determining current significance. Those who do have the qualifications have vigorous discussions and debates about these matters.

I am not aware of any norms in the "scientific community" for writing biographies of academics. If you know of some, I'd be interested in seeing them. Alternatively, if you can provide a few links to biographies of academics that you think illustrate those norms, that might be helpful. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

However, there are strong norms against censorship. It is not completely obvious how we can help you since you evidently currently do not have the qualifications to judge the significance of current work. (Hopefully your will do an excellent dissertation and become more qualified!) One suggestion that I would make is that if a paper is published in a respectable forum, then it should be able to be reported in the Wikipedia. This holds especially for recent publications because one of the claimed advantages of the Wikipedia is that it is more accurate than older encyclopedia models because it is more current. Consequently, the fact of being out of date can be a valid criticism of a Wikipedia article.

I sincerely doubt that the completion of my dissertation has any impact on my "qualifications" to edit this article, except on paper.

Hopefully you will learn a great deal from your experiences in getting a doctorate that will improve your qualifications!--Prof. Hewitt 01:08, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

My knowledge prior to writing the last sentence of the dissertation is no different to my knowledge after writing that last sentence.

I consulted with a respected colleague on this discussion. She suggested that you show this dialog to your advisor and get his opinion.--Prof. Hewitt 01:08, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Regarding your suggestion, "reporting" on every paper a given academic has "published in a respectable forum" is likely to produce an article that is lengthy, and a biography that amounts to little more than a bibliography. Since (a) there are other venues for bibliographies, and (b) a bibliography is no substitute for a biography, I'd rather focus on producing articles that are biographies.

You misunderstood me.

1. I suggested that an article on an author be encouraged to have a subarticle on the major publications of that author (when this makes sense). In this way the major publications would not clutter the main article. Of course the subarticle on the major publications would consist of reporting on the biographical, historical and scientific aspects of the major publications. So the subarticle would not just consist of the list of major publications.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
2. I suggested that it is the job of the Wikipedia to report on significant new scientific papers published in respectable forums. E.g. the subarticle on publications should presumptively include the new publications of an author with a biography in the Wikipedia.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I have no interest in debating this issue any further, for the reasons I have already stated. --Allan McInnes (talk) 02:05, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

In that vein, it would be helpful if you could provide pointers to any biographical material that has been written about you. I've searched myself, but have had difficulty laying my hands on anything substantial (what I've found so far I've already added to the article as references). I'm assuming that you are in a much better position than I to identify such information. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Quite often a student someplace has said "I haven't heard of this new thing that has just been published and therefore it can't possible be significant" ;-) or said "Show me proof that this new thing that has just been published is significant" ;-) ;-) Unless someone is an up-to-date well qualified expert in exactly the subject of the new publication, they can't possibly have a basis for judgment. Even then they can be wrong!

So I think that the Wikipedia is better off just reporting on new publications as they occur in respectable forums rather than attempting to judge a priori the significance of the publications and suppressing mention of those thought insignificant by people with dubious qualifications. I.e., the task is to report on the new publications with explanations of what they say including any claims to significance that may be contained in the publications themselves. Going further raises the risk of original research creeping into the Wikipedia.--Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

As I have mentioned previously on this talk page, I don't think that reporting on every publication, in the fashion you suggest, is feasible or in the scope of Wikipedia.

Of course it's feasible to have subarticles on the major publications of significant scientific authors! The Wikipedia is constantly evolving. As Jimbo likes to say: "We are making this up as we go along!" Also the Wikipedia encourages boldness ;-) So it is perfectly feasible to do a couple of subarticles as an experiment and see how it works out.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not "report" on everything. Other venues are better outlets for such out-of-scope material (such as Wikinews for current events, or the academic wiki that I previously suggested that you consider starting). If you honestly feel that the things you are suggesting are in-scope for Wikipedia, then please take these proposals to the Village pump (as I have also previously suggested) and see if you can get them turned into a content guideline of some kind. Debating what amounts to a Wikipedia policy issue here will get us nowhere. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

My removal of material was carried out in response to the opinions expressed during the recent AfD debate regarding this article. As I made clear on my edit summary, I'm happy to discuss the material in question on this page (perhaps we could invite some of the other editors from the AfD debate to participate). But, given the opinions expressed during the AfD debate, I don't think it's appropriate to simply add back the material that I removed without discussing it here.

I am afraid that many in the scientific community will consider you responsible for your actions and will hold you accountable.--Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Certainly I am responsible for my actions. I specifically elected to use my real name as my login, rather than editing anonymously or using a pseudonym, precisely because I choose to take responsibility for my edits. I am not sure exactly what you mean by the phrase "hold you accountable", but if the "scientific community" wants to hold me accountable for trying to produce a quality encyclopaedia they are welcome to do so. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

See my comments above on the strong norms in the scientific community against censorship.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I have previously asked you to help identify a set of "selected works" which you consider particularly influential, since I am "obviously unqualified" to judge the notability of the listed works. But you have so far been unhelpful in this regard.

As we discussed before in this article, it is not clear what to use as the selection criteria! (See below.)--Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Yet somehow you've managed to come up with a list of "major publications". So there must be some selection criteria at work. In any event, if coming up with selection criteria is too hard, then perhaps the right answer is to not include a "selected works" or "list of publications" section at all (many WP academic biographies do not). Instead, we can simply link to external bibliographic information. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

There are well established norms in the scientific community for "major publications". Criteria for "selected publications" are quite a different matter. The issue of "selection" tends to come up in compilations reprinting previous publications.--Prof. Hewitt 19:32, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

The list you have provided below is too lengthy to included in the article in its entirety.

The list given below at least has the virtue of being accurate, i.e. it is a list of some of my major publications. (I agree that the list of all of my publications is too long and should not be included.) Also it is about a page in length. So it should either appear at the end of an article or (better) it should appear in subarticle of the main article. As we discussed before, having the major publications of an author appear in a subarticle would have the advantage that other Wikipedia editors could then report on the overall structure of the publications as well as on individual publications.--Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Of those Wikipedia bios of academics that include "selected works", the ones I'm aware of are relatively short lists - see, for example Marvin Minsky#Selected works or Seymour Papert#Selected bibliography.

I am afraid that the "selected" approach is fundamentally flawed in that the criteria for selection is unclear and therefore unreliable and subject to fruitless debate. E.g., the current "selected works" in the Minsky article is missing his famous frames paper and the current "selected biography" in the Papert article is missing the famous 1971 report that he co-authored with Minsky on progress in Artificial Intelligence. So what was the criteria for selection?

I agree that selection criteria are problematic. Yet Wikipedia style guidelines mandate some kind of inclusion criteria for lists. Perhaps list of publication should not be included at all. See above as well. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

For encyclopedic accuracy, we need a list of major publications of each author. In cases of authors with many publications over a long period (e.g. John von Neumann, John McCarthy, etc.) it may be desirable to divide the publications into categories.--Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with your assertion that Wikipedia needs to list the major publications of each author, for two reasons:

1. As you have already pointed out, selection criteria are problematic. How does one judge "major"?
2. I do not think that such lists are necessarily "encyclopaedic" - encyclopaedias are supposed to summarize other material, rather than to collect that material. In particular, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.

Furthermore, as I've already pointed out several times, what you are suggesting amounts to a Wikipedia-level decision (policy, guideline, or something similar), which is better discussed in other places than the talk page of an individual article.

--Allan McInnes (talk) 08:20, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Lastly, I would like to point out that, while I (to paraphrase you) "evidently lack the qualifications" to judge the notability of your work, I have taken the time to dig up references which support the notability of you and your work (while others have argued that you are not "notable" at all), including references to writings by Robin Milner, Dan Friedman, and Alan Kay (the last of those is no longer in the article).

I agree that it was a contribution to have brought these citations forward. And the ones that you found are not bad ;-) I wonder why the one by Kay was deleted from the article?

It was removed because the material it supported was more relevant to the Actor model article than to this one, so I moved the reference over there. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

A weakness of the citation approach is that it can be very idiosyncratic. For example, it's not immediately obvious where to dig up a good citation for highly significant work such as Comparative Schematology, the Scientific Community Metaphor, etc. Also, although many in the community believe that the work on Direct Logic is highly significant, there are no citations because the publications are too recent. More fundamentally, the scientific community does not take such citations as primary evidence of significance. So the Wikipedia should not take such citations in a simplistic way as the basis for judging significance.--Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, I'm the only one that has actually bothered to add such references to the article. If you know of other references along similar lines, then by all means mention them here and I'll see that they are added.

Unfortunately, a list of all of the published citations to my work would number in the thousands. --Prof. Hewitt 08:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Then could you perhaps point me to a few that specifically discuss the importance and impact of your work. Since I (in your words) "Evidently ... Haven't read much of the specialized literature in the areas where I have published", while you presumably have read a lot of the literature, I'm assuming that you're much more likely than me to be aware of the kind of references I'm interested in finding. --Allan McInnes (talk) 07:22, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, citations in areas in which I publish are typically technical in nature and do not in general discuss the importance and impact of the work of other authors. However you might check out Multi-Agent Systems: An Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence by Professor Jacques Ferber.--Prof. Hewitt 01:14, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. That is helpful. --Allan McInnes (talk) 02:05, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

--Allan McInnes (talk) 03:32, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some Major Publications of Carl Hewitt

• Manuel Blum and Carl Hewitt. Automata on a 2-Dimensional Tape FOCS 1967.
• Carl Hewitt. PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots IJCAI. 1969.
• Mike Paterson and Carl Hewitt. Comparative Schematology MIT AI Memo 201. August 1970.
• Carl Hewitt. Procedural Embedding of Knowledge In Planner IJCAI. 1971.
• Carl Hewitt. Description and Theoretical Analysis (Using Schemata) of Planner, A Language for Proving Theorems and Manipulating Models in a Robot AI Memo No. 251, MIT Project MAC. April 1972.
• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger. A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence IJCAI. 1973.
• Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, Irene Greif, Brian Smith, Todd Matson, Richard Steiger. Actor Induction and Meta-Evaluation POPL January 1974.
• Carl Hewitt, et. al. Behavioral semantics of nonrecursive control structures Symposium on Programming. 1974.
• Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker Laws for Communicating Parallel Processes IFIP-77, August 1977a.
• Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker Actors and Continuous Functionals Proceeding of IFIP Working Conference on Formal Description of Programming Concepts. August 1–5, 1977b.
• Henry Baker and Carl Hewitt The Incremental Garbage Collection of Processes Proceeding of the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages. SIGPLAN Notices 12, August, 1977c.
• Carl Hewitt and Russ Atkinson. Specification and Proof Techniques for Serializers IEEE Journal on Software Engineering. January, 1979.
• Carl Hewitt, Beppe Attardi, and Henry Lieberman. Delegation in Message Passing Proceedings of First International Conference on Distributed Systems Huntsville, AL. October, 1979.
• Carl Hewitt. Viewing Control Structures as Patterns of Passing Messages Journal of Artificial Intelligence. June, 1977.
• William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt. The Scientific Community Metaphor IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. January 1981.
• Henry Lieberman and Carl Hewitt. A real Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetimes of Objects CACM. June, 1983.
• Carl Hewitt and Peter de Jong. Analyzing the Roles of Descriptions and Actions in Open Systems Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. August 1983.
• Carl Hewitt. Offices Are Open Systems ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 4(3): 271-287 (1986).
• Henry Lieberman and Carl Hewitt. Design Issues in Parallel Architectures for Artificial Intelligence IEEE CompCon Conference, March 1984.
• Carl Hewitt. The Challenge of Open Systems Byte Magazine. April 1985. Reprinted in The foundation of artificial intelligence---a sourcebook Cambridge University Press. 1990.
• Carl Hewitt. Towards Open Information Systems Semantics Proceedings of 10th International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence. October 23–27, 1990. Bandera, Texas.
• Carl Hewitt. Open Information Systems Semantics Journal of Artificial Intelligence. January 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Gul Agha. Guarded Horn clause languages: are they deductive and Logical? International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems, Ohmsha 1988. Tokyo. Also in Artificial Intelligence at MIT, Vol. 2. MIT Press 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Jeff Inman. DAI Betwixt and Between: From ‘Intelligent Agents’ to Open Systems Science IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Nov. /Dec. 1991.
• Carl Hewitt and Carl Manning. Negotiation Architecture for Large-Scale Crisis Management AAAI-94 Workshop on Models of Conflict Management in Cooperative Problem Solving. Seattle, WA. August 4, 1994.
• Carl E. Hewitt. From Contexts to Negotiation Forums AAAI Symposium on Formalizing Context. November 10–11, 1995. Cambridge Mass.
• Carl Hewitt and Carl Manning. Synthetic Infrastructures for Multi-Agency Systems Proceedings of ICMAS '96. Kyoto, Japan. December 8–13, 1996.
• Carl Hewitt (2006a). The repeated demise of logic programming and why it will be reincarnated What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications. Technical Report SS-06-08. AAAI Press. March 2006.
• Carl Hewitt (2006b) What is Commitment? Physical, Organizational, and Social COIN@AAMAS'06. (Revised version in Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Edited by Javier Vázquez-Salceda and Pablo Noriega. 2007) April 27, 2006.
• Carl Hewitt. Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Paraconsistency and Reflection COIN@AAMAS'07. April 23, 2007.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Please help

Please note that I would prefer that the information requested below by Allen McInnes not be published in the Wikipedia for many reasons. The most important reason is the prevention of identity theft. Other reasons include the prevention of spam and other marketing attacks. Thanks,--Prof. Hewitt 03:20, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Given this clarification of your feelings towards this article, I will retract my request for information (although I'd like to point out that any such information included in the article would necessarily come from sources already public, in order to comply with WP:V). --Allan McInnes (talk) 03:27, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't think details on Hewitt's personal life (apart form his approximate date and place of birth) are really relevant a he is, even though notable for his academic achievements, not a public figure. The article should likewise only focus on this. —Ruud 15:56, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough. I thought it was worthwhile to produce a more rounded biography, but I can see that perhaps that isn't appropriate here. I defer to you and Prof. Hewitt on this. --Allan McInnes (talk) 19:35, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I've made several requests on this talk page for help in locating sources of biographical information about Carl Hewitt, which can be used to add verifiable material to this article. However, perhaps those requests have gotten lost in amongst the other lengthy discussions going on higher up this page. So let me explicitly make a request for help here. Please help me to locate sources of biographical information about Carl Hewitt. Examples of the kind of facts that are commonly presented in Wikipedia biographies, and for which it would be helpful to have sources, include:

• Birthdate
• Birthplace
• Early life - where Hewitt grew up, what schools he attended, etc.
• Marriage and children, if any
• Philosophical or political views
• Awards

Any pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks! --Allan McInnes (talk) 02:30, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Paraconsistency and Reflection

There is a new significant publication that has not yet been included in the article:

• Carl Hewitt. Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Paraconsistency and Reflection Proceedings of COIN@AAMAS'07. April 23, 2007.

It was extensively discussed by Prof. Les Gasser, Prof. Mike Huhns, Prof. Victor Lessor, Dr. Pablo Noriega, Prof. Sascha Ossowski, Prof. Jaime Sichman, Prof. Munindar Singh, etc. at AAMAS'07. Parts of the published work were previous presented at the following seminars (among others): Inconsistency is the Norm, Direct Logic for Increased Safety in Reasoning about Large Software Systems and Commitments: Inherently Inconsistent and Incomplete

Therefore, the work is notable and should be placed in the list of "selected works".--Prof. Hewitt 06:39, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Unverifiable and insufficient. To be included this work should have been discussed in (multiple) published works by other scientists. —Ruud 14:49, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

It is verifiable from seminar notices with abstracts posted at their websites that the work was presented at notable research institutions including MIT (twice), Stanford (twice), SRI (twice), and UT Austin. Also the work has been published in the proceedings of COIN a notable and prestigious workshop of the notable and prestigious international AAMAS'07 Conference. At the conference the work was discussed by many of the most notable and prestigious active researchers in the field. Therefore the publication is clearly notable. Furthermore, not to include it would render the article on Carl Hewitt inaccurate because it would be obsolete.--Prof. Hewitt 15:51, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

For example here is a reference by Alan Bond and a citation ^[1]

Carl Hewitt's ORGs

In examining the problem of how a set of agents can be viewed as an entity in its own right, Carl Hewitt came up with the idea of an ORG. ^[2].

An ORG is a fundamental unit used to build larger more complex organizations. An ORG has the following structure and capabilities:

Reception is concerned with fielding the communications addressed to the ORG as a whole.

Management is concerned with allocation of resources including storage, processors and communications links.

Operations is concerned with the functional relationship among components including internal communications.

Liaison is concerned with relations between the ORG and the external environment - including insiders, outsiders and representatives.

--Prof. Hewitt 03:57, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Your conclusion does not follow from the premises. By your logic nearly any paper presented at a scientific conference would be notable. Clearly any paper is not in the same league of notability as, say, On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem or A Mathematical Theory of Communication, wouldn't you agree? —Ruud 16:03, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't agree. You made the mistake of confusing "famous" with "significant and notable". Also you are being cute. I clearly did not say that nearly any paper presented at a scientific conference would be notable.--Prof. Hewitt 16:34, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I did not use the word "famous" here so I don't known inferred that I'm confusing the concepts (but for as far as the difference matters here, the two examples I mention are both famous and notable.) However, what you still are failing to explain is why your paper would be notable and most of the other papers presented at the conference (or a lot of the papers presented at other conferences) are not. —Ruud 18:28, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Evidently,

1. You haven't read and understood the literature in the area of the paper.
2. You don't know the researchers in the area of the paper.
3. You haven't attended the scientific meetings on the subject of the paper.

So what is the basis for your judgment that the paper is not significant and notable?--Prof. Hewitt 19:23, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Absence of evidence that it is. Per WP:V you will have to present some verifiable evidence that it is notable, I don't have to prove that it is not, which make the above mentioned three points irrelevant. —Ruud 19:30, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

It is highly relevant that you admit that you do not have the qualifications listed above because they bear on whether or not you have even the more limited qualifications needed to understand the argument that I am making for the relevance and notability of the article. Evidently, you don't even have these more limited qualifications.--Prof. Hewitt 19:54, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

You have, so far, not made any verifiable or adequate argument for the relevance and notability of the article. —Ruud 10:21, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

The article was published in the proceedings of COIN'07 (a prestigious international workshop) of AAMAS'07 (the most prestigious international conference) where it was presented to and discussed by by the leaders in the field. Also the paper was referenced in the Spring 2007 Paraconsistent Newsletter. What more do you want? --Prof. Hewitt 20:19, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

At risk of becoming repetitive: citations: your work on PLANNER, the Actor model, open systems, the scientific community metaphor is often cited by other. Your work on paraconsistent logic may become that as well, cut currently seems not to be. —Ruud 21:17, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

The number of citations in Google Scholar should not be the limiting criterion for reporting on a significant new scientific publication in the Wikipedia. First of all, Google Scholar can take over a year to index a publication. Secondly, Google Scholar does not cover many publications, e.g., the Paraconsistent Newsletter is not covered. In fact, the ordinary Google search is usually far more up to date than Google Scholar. Finally, the Wikipedia is not supposed to be obsolete. It should report on significant recent publications. --Prof. Hewitt 22:33, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Don't twist my argument: I never implied the citations need to be listed in Google Scholar, it merely demonstrated that your other papers are well cited. To prove the same for your paper on paraconsistent logic you would only have to list the authors and title of papers citing yours. The Spring 2007 Paraconsistent Newsletter means very little in this context, it merely lists papers published on its topic, it does not give a review or discussion. Wikipedia's currentness is limited by fundamental pillars of verifiabilty and no original research, it is not a crystal ball. —Ruud 23:05, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

There is no crystal ball here and no original research. Also, it is verifiable that the paper was published online in a very prestigious proceedings, that it was discussed at the conference, and that it was significant enough to be listed in the Paraconsistent Newsletter, which is a premier forum for updating researchers on current events. So you are basically arguing that the Wikipedia should become obsolete. --Prof. Hewitt 00:48, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ArbComm ruling

I think it's time to remind people of Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Carl Hewitt, with remedies including that Carl may not edit this article, and is on general probation. I had forgotten, also.... — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 20:11, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Here, I am not editing the article on Carl Hewitt. I am participating in a discussion page on how to remove inaccuracies in that article.--Prof. Hewitt 20:25, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

That's probably acceptable. You were editing Carl Hewitt to add aditional references your papers. Your vociferous objections to the removal probably constitutes disruption, as you have been attacking Ruud's and Allen's credentials, rather than their edits. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 20:31, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

This is ridiculous. Carl and all his sock puppets need to be blocked for repeatedly violating his agreement not to edit the article. --RandomHumanoid^(⇒) 19:17, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

I have reverted edits to the main article by Prof. Hewitt according to the above. I respect you, Carl, and your work. But rules are rules. Sam Staton 17:08, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Dear Sam, I believe that the Wikipedia allows people to make corrections to their own autobiographies. Also you reversion destroyed work by other editors.--Prof. Hewitt 18:03, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

In general, Wikipedia allows people to make corrections of clear errors in their own biographies. However, the ArbCom decision does not allow you or anyone acting like you to edit your biography, except for removal of information deletable under WP:BLP. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 18:06, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I apologise for my action. I had thought it was a correct interpretation of the ArbCom decision. But now I see that Ruud Koot has undone it, so evidently it was inappropriate. So I apologise, to Prof Hewitt especially. Sam Staton 09:41, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

I have blocked Prof. Hewitt for 72 hours due to his violation of the prohibition on Hewitt editing his biography, and due to his arguing over it. Omissions are not the same as errors. We may omit some of the subject's publications, we may omit key points of his personal life, we may omit listing the classes he took as an undergraduate. Even if the article doesn't have those things it is not erroneous. It's simply incomplete. All biographies, in all media, are incomplete to some degree. Omissions are not an urgent problem, requiring special action. (Indeed, many biographies on Wikipedia would be better if they omitted more.) Unlike CVs, encyclopedia articles are not expected to include promptly every accomplishment that a subject deems important. Wikipedia is a longterm project and we'll get around to it. More urgent are errors, which should be reported and acted upon promptly. I think the article looks pretty good. Cheers, ·:· Will Beback ·:· 10:07, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

The article has serious inaccuracies that should be corrected. I have added Dr. William Kornfeld to the list of my students.--Prof. Hewitt 17:54, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Please do not edit the article. Leaving off one of your students is not a "serious inaccuracy", it's a minor omission. The entire list is unsourced and may be removed. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 01:39, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Will, your deleting Dr. Kornfeld from the list of Professor Hewitt's students was highly insulting. Are you saying that Dr. Kornfeld is somehow inferior?--SallySprite 01:55, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Prof. Hewitt has been banned from editing this article. I will revert any change he makes. As a separate matter, we seek good sources for assertions about living people. Unsourced material can be removed at any time. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 03:45, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

William Kornfeld's thesis is here, from which it is clear that Carl was his supervisor. To source the article, should links like this be included for all the students?

SallySprite (aka Hewitt?) has a point: how can editors decide which students should be listed? Should all students be listed for all professors? Sam Staton 09:28, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

When, for articles on plces or universities, we compile lists of notable alumni or residents, we usually limit the lists to those who already have articles, or would qualify for an article based on our notability standards. Are any of these students notable? ·:· Will Beback ·:· 19:11, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Wikipedia harassment of Professor Hewitt has to stop

The Wikipedia should be ashamed of itself for harassing Professor Hewitt. Arthur Rubin took away his category as an American Logician. Then Ruud Koot deliberately insulted Professor Hewitt by taking away his Emeritus title and he changed the title of Hewitt's "Seminars, Publications, and Academic Biography" to "blog", which is (deliberately?) misleading. Also Ruud has been censoring those who attempted to protest his antics. First they called it the "Great Firewall of Ruud." But recently I have heard it referred to as "Ruud's Musharraf Strategy."

The Wikipedia harassment of Professor Hewitt has to stop.--LittleSur 23:02, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Is there any material in the article that you believe is incorrect, non-neutral, or improperly sourced? ·:· Will Beback ·:· 23:43, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

This is all over the media now, its making those responsible look bad. Where's the WP:OFFICE fire brigade? Surfing bird (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 04:49, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please change site for Professor Hewitt's seminars, publications, and academic biography

Please change site for Professor Hewitt's seminars, publications, and academic biography as follows:

• Carl Hewitt's seminars, publications, and academic biography

The material is much better formatted on the new site and the old site will go away. Thanks,--AnotherLiveAndLetLive 10:46, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Just my opinion of course, but you can change the site when the other link is no longer available. I don't see any reason to change it right now, nor the sounds of urgencies for the need for immediate change. Thanks,--CrohnieGal^Talk 17:07, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

The individual items have been redirected to the new site, but it is not clear how long all of the redirections will remain valid. There is no reason to make the change unless you mind inconveniencing Wikipedia users ;-)--AnotherLiveAndLetLive 18:01, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Slightly off-topic for Wikipedia, but the biography at the linked site could do with a light copy-edit. For example, the paragraph on the Actor model includes a duplicated occurrence of the phrase "...influenced the development of...", and a misspelling of the word "calculi". --Allan McInnes (talk) 02:11, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Typo?

I could easily be mistaken, but it looks as though there is a typo in the Selected Works section. Specifically, I don't think the title of the publication includes the curly braces "{" or "}".

Henry Lieberman and Carl E. Hewitt (1983). A Real-Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetimes of Objects Communications of the {ACM}, 26(6).

The headers on the CACM website suggest that they are not included: http://www.acm.org/publications/cacm/

Can someone with more access look into this and (if necessary) make the change? -- Ubermichael

Thanks for your note. I removed the curly braces. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:00, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Trivial cleanup

{{editprotected}}
There are calls cite templates that have carriage returns in the titles, which is an error. Please remove the excess carriage returns and the unlabeled URLs are displayed. The titles, with their carriage returns, are:

Coordinated Computing - 
Tools and Techniques for Distributed Software

Robust Composition -
Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control

If it is easier: the unique words are in these inline cites are: Filman and dissertation .--Laughitup2 (talk) 08:53, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Y Already done (diff) by Utcursch. Nihiltres^{t.l} 13:58, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Indefinite protection

I noticed an anon added the permprotect template to this talk page, but I don't see any explanation of whether it truly is indefinitely or why; the protecting admin's protection doesn't mention anything. --Gwern (contribs) 23:32 10 December 2007 (GMT)

Yes, it's indefinitely (and fully) protected to enforce wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Carl Hewitt#Remedies. Semi-protection didn't work unfortunately. —Ruud 16:52, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I see. That's too bad. I didn't realize the rules had changed so mainspace content could be indef-protected. --Gwern (contribs) 19:55 11 December 2007 (GMT)

Indefinite doesn't mean infinitely, of course. Just an until a now unspecified moment in the future. —Ruud 23:57, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Probably until Carl gives some evidence of being willing to abide by Wikipedia rules policies, and to not ask^[3] his students to break them. (redacted my possible BLP violation) — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 00:11, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

This page is subject to the BLP policy, so could I ask people please to tone down the comments a little? SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 01:35, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. :-) SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 02:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Pan, J.Y.C. Tenenbaum, J.M (Nov/Dec 1991). "An intelligent agent framework for enterprise integration". . IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics
2. ^ Carl Hewitt (1989). "Toward an Open Systems Architecture".
3. ^ And to boldly split infinitives no one has split before.

[edit] Page protection

I've archived and protected this talk page because people were adding problematic material. As the article is currently protected from editing, there's no need for this to be open at the moment anyway. If anyone has a query, by all means e-mail me. Many thanks, SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 17:08, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Aactually, as it is protected from editing at the moment the talk page does need to be open for protected edit requests. Viridae^Talk 21:45, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

If anyone has such a request, they can e-mail me or another admin. I'd like to keep it protected for a short time, Viridae. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 23:08, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah understandable. I am also open to making small, uncontroversial edits for people, they can request them on my talk page while this page is protected. Viridae^Talk 00:40, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

I do not believe it is appropriate to protect an article talk page, and definitely not because of something like this. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:02, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons#Removing discussion of articles in major newspapers from talk pages. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:00, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

The consensus there is clearly that this should not be protected. As a fellow admin, I therefore ask SV to remove the protection. DGG (talk) 18:08, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

I've replied on WT:BLP. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 19:06, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia ban

Can we mention (or even just link) this in the article?

• Kleeman, Jenny. "Wikipedia ban for disruptive professor", Guardian Unlimited, 2007-12-09. Retrieved on 2007-12-10. 

I know it may be a bit self-referential, but I think the article is still marginally relevant to the topic. Today, Wikipedia is big and if some prominent figure was banned from editing Wikipedia, that becomes an interesting fact. -- Taku (talk) 22:07, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think this is especially notable in the context of his overall career. Redquark (talk) 01:25, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Redquark. One article written more than a year after the event indicates that it's not that important. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:37, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I believe the Guardian article was triggered by recent events over the past couple of months during which Hewitt anonymously created and edited a series of new articles promoting his work. These articles have now been deleted, so it is not easy to recreate their history. However, the note at the bottom of the following page gives some idea of what has been going on: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_logic_programming&action=edit Logperson (talk) 17:00, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree that this is probably not a major event to the person, but since The Guardian is a major newspaper, to me, it seems to make sense to add a link to the newspaper article in this article. But if others think it's not worth even mentioning, then it's ok with me.-- Taku (talk) 12:00, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion

Following a suggestion from Black Falcon, I've unprotected the page to allow people to discuss the Observer article for a few days, as some editors seem to feel that discussion is required. The suggestion is that the discussion will be blanked after a few days as a courtesy. I was thinking three days, although no one's going to blank it mid-sentence so if it takes a bit longer, that's fine. But the idea is to discuss it, wrap it up, then blank the discussion. I hope the editors here see that as a fair compromise. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 21:43, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok, for starters then can someone explain to me why this isn't a reliable source? I understand not giving it much mention in an article, since Hewitt's notability isn't generally connected to it and so it should have at most a small mention (probably a sentence or two) but I don't see how the source is unreliable. JoshuaZ (talk) 03:15, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I have read the article in question, and have read Slim's arguments both here and at talk:BLP. I have seen no compelling reason to blank the discussion on the relevance of including a source to this article. As such, I have put the discussion back (see the section before).

SlimVirgin, I would suggest that instead of blanking the discussion again you make the case for what harm is done in keeping it in. The usual way of handling talk page discussions is to let them run their course and have them archived. Suppression and blanking of discussions go against the spirit of Wikipedia should not be used except in very good circumstances. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:45, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Well if we decide not to mention it at all courtesy blanking isn't so rare. We don't need to keep perfect archives of talk pages. I don't however see any good reason to extend a courtesy in this case. Transparency overides courtesy to banned editors especially when everything we are talking about is clearly factually accurate. JoshuaZ (talk) 04:17, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Right. The Guardian article mentions Hewitt complaining about users and admins harrasing him. This wiki article is already protected. A further reaction along having the talk page protected, and any discussion suppressed and blanked, is probably not the right thing to do given the circumstances. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:34, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

We can archive a link to the blanked discussion. In the future, the question of his alleged self promotion as verified by http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/09/wikipedia.internet will come up again, and we need to be able to point to where a consensus was found so we don't repeat the discussion unless new facts or new arguments arise. For my part, I see no good reason to raise the issue of self promotion in this article, nor to include http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/09/wikipedia.internet in the article. People self promote all the time and people edit Wikipedia with a conflict of interest all the time. Neither are usually notable, and I see nothing about this case that makes it notable. If other reliable sources make a point of dwelling on the allegation of his self promotion, then our reliable sources will have deemed it notable - but not until then. WAS 4.250 (talk) 20:12, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I have restored the comment above by WAS, as an appropriate contribution to the discussion. To the deleting admin: blanking other people's comments (without explanation), and deleting them altogether from the page history (again without explanation), is an inappropriate use of admin tools. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sock puppets

I'm not sure that naming the list of sock puppets on this talk page is inapproriate. They're not banned from Wikipedia, merely banned from editing his articles. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 15:31, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Is a set of {{Notable Wikipedian}} boxes really the appropriate way to do this though? The single box links to his main account talk page, which links to the list of suspected sock puppets (which is more complete anyway), that's sufficient for enforcement of keeping him from using them to edit this article (I didn't know until you said, by the way, that there was a topic ban in place). An article talk page is more visible, and the "notable wikipedian" box provides less context. —Random832 16:22, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I've added a link to his suspected sockpuppets category to the box, is this sufficient? —Random832 16:34, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Yep, I think that covers it. Thanks. (I wrote a longer message, but it's more appropriate for WP:AN or the Village Pump.) — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 16:38, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

We can archive a link to the blanked discussion. In the future, the question of his alleged self promotion ... will come up again, and we need to be able to point to where a consensus was found so we don't repeat the discussion unless new facts or new arguments arise. For my part, I see no good reason to raise the issue of self promotion in this article, nor to include ... [it] in the article. People self promote all the time and people edit Wikipedia with a conflict of interest all the time. Neither are usually notable, and I see nothing about this case that makes it notable. If other reliable sources make a point of dwelling on the allegation of his self promotion, then our reliable sources will have deemed it notable - but not until then. WAS 4.250 (talk) 20:12, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Linking to the article twice in one post, and in an edit summary, when it's already linked above, and you're arguing that there's no need to link to it, is completely gratuitous. Please do not do it again. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 20:22, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I understand where you are coming from. You are coming at this from the point of view of trying to cause minimum harm, which to you includes a minimum number of mentions of the exact link in question. I am coming at this from the point of view of being maximally clear and precise in my language. You seem to repeat the problem of not realizing that lack of clarity is not helpful. Please do not do it again. WAS 4.250 (talk) 20:36, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

http://hewitt.wikicensored.info/ is apparently his response. WAS 4.250 (talk) 20:36, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Why the sudden interest in clarity on this page? You have never edited the article, or the talk page before today. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 21:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm interested in clarity everywhere, hence my keen lifelong interest in logic. But I take it that what you wish to know is what brings me to this page. I'm an old retired guy who likes to spend his retirement learning new things. For a while I found it fun and useful to record new things I learned from reliable sources here at wikipedia and comeback later to see what new interesting things people had added. Lately, I'm doing less of that and have been studying Wikipedia itself and when I come across something I feel I can help with, then I try to help. That was my intent here. To try to help - just like you. WAS 4.250 (talk) 22:21, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I have restored the diff deleted by SlimVirgin, because the deletion was done without explanation, and since one should use administrative powers to hide entries in the history only in appropriate circumstances. SlimVirgin, rather than attempting the deletion again, I would like to ask you to make the case for what harm is in discussing this news article relevant to this Wikipedia article. Thank you. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:47, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Having looked at the Guardian article in question (Oleg's link may be enough to indicate which article), I think it would be more appropriate in the article Wikipedia than here; for what it is worth, this can be done without saying more than "a distinguished professor" in the article text or notes. The Guardian does view this as a milestone in Wikipedia's history, to which it is more significant than it is to Hewitt; other professors have done silly things in their hobbies without it appearing in their article. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 06:36, 25 December 2007 (UTC)