Talk:Jargon File

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Internet Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Internet culture, an attempt to better organise information in articles related to the Internet culture. For more information, visit the project page.
??? This article has not yet received a quality rating on the quality scale.
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.
This article may be too technical for a general audience.
Please help improve this article by providing more context and better explanations of technical details to make it more accessible, without removing technical details.

Contents

[edit] Jargon Wiki

Why not make the jargon file a wiki? --Anon.

I recently started such a project not knowing about this discussion (great minds think alike, eh?). Anyrate, it's over on Ursine. --BalooUrsidae 07:08, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I saw a link to a jargon file wiki on one of the websites listed at the bottom, i'm not sure if it had the contents of the actual file on it or not, but it certainly exists MichaelBillington 05:36, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Charles Spurgeon?

A paragraph in the article:

In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages 26-35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication.

From some reason I highly doubt that Charles Spurgeon (died 89 years before that date) managed to somehow hack and get a portion of the File as stated in that paragraph. Is it the hacker's true name, or a nickname? Or maybe it's just wrongly-spelled? In any case, maybe the link shouldn't lead to Charles Spurgeon's (who was more of a Baptist preacher than a hacker) page? --85.65.13.27 01:12, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I've changed the link now to Charles Spurgeon (hacker). —Pengo 04:25, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Item with bad source

"Particular instances that attracted much attention were the addition of tendentious pro-Iraq War and pro-gun ownership entries"

This links to a Slashdot article. The entire text of the article is "As reported by NTK, ESR appears to have embarked apon the process of recasting the Jargon File in his own image, adding terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GhandiCon" that he dreamt up and seemingly no-one else uses, and various terms from (of all places) the warblogging community, where he is active. He's also updated the "Hacker Politics" page to be more closely aligned with his own views."

This contains no mention of Iraq or gun entries. Eric himself already objected on the Eric Raymond page to that and claimed it was false and there were no such entries.

I'm going to rewrite this as an allegation unless someone can come up with an Iraq or gun entry he added. Ken Arromdee 19:01, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

anti-idiotarianism would seem to be one entry that comes close to this, though it doesn't specifically mention Iraq.

[edit] hereafter

Overdone. Kashami 23:42, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 1950s as start date

User:68.36.192.168 changed the start date of the Jargon File from the 1960s to the 1950s at 09:18, 11 August 2006, citing Steven Levy's Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution. I don't have access to the book, so I can't confirm it. Can anyone confirm it? Phelan 13:49, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Explain more

I tried reading it but as I have never heard of it before making out what it really was grew hard. Can someone make a section just simply account for it. Keldon 12:43, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ursine:Jargon fails

The interwiki link is yielding the following error from the Canadian system:

Not Found
The requested URL /Jargon was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 PHP/5.2.0-8 mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at ursine.ca Port 80

Are you getting something different? -- David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 18:13, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

I think I see ... the Interwiki link is fixed, but Wikipedia's internal [[Ursine:Jargon]] shows the earlier, broken link. What has to be done HERE to reload the change? David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 18:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] needs more sources for the raymond criticism

The section about critics of raymond's version includes phrases like "Critics lament that…", "Some hackers have become dissatisfied…", "He has also been criticised for…". These are weaseley and should be sourced: see WP:WEASEL. --jacobolus (t) 06:41, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

I've added the criticism over ESR's handling of the JF directly from ESR's page. rone (talk) 23:03, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Debating abbreviations tag

14-Oct-2007: I've read and revised the entire article, but it does not contain excessive acronyms, IMHO. Keeping that abbreviations-tag would be like complaining that an article about corporations had too many abbreviations, such as AT&T, GM and IBM, or an article about television shows was overrun with acronyms: TV, ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN & CNN. I've moved that abbreviations-tag lower inside the article, but I really want concensus to remove it totally, and refer to this debate for the decision. Most acronyms have even been wikilinked, so warning about the acronyms seems absurd. Has this tag issue been decided in a similar article? -Wikid77 14:31, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Computerese

Computerese? --Abdull 20:05, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

What about it? --FOo (talk) 07:05, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ==

"In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to "AI words" and so stored the file on his directory, named as "AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON"."

Is this meant to be a self referential joke, cause it sure sounds like it. Gigitrix (talk) 16:29, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Plagiarism

Unfortunately, much of this article has been directly plagiarized from the jargon itself at [[1]]. I don't know enough about the background to rewrite it - should we tag this for cleanup or similar? Verin (talk) 14:20, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't go so far as to call the situation unfortunate. Fortunately the jargon file is in the public domain, so there's no copyright violations to deal with. I do think it should probably be copyedited to be more encyclopedic. -FrankTobia (talk) 15:59, 11 April 2008 (UTC)