User talk:Joshfisher

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Hello, Dr. Fisher.

The tradition at Wikipedia is to add a "welcome" as the first edit to a talk page. This seems a bit silly in this case, since you have been editing much longer than I have, but welcome anyway.

I made an un-cited modification to the article on Explicitly parallel instruction computing awhile ago, and you reverted it, quite properly. I then researched the first occurrence of the name in the literature and added that, with a cite. Please check my work, if you will.

During this research, I noticed that you are a true expert and a participant in the history of EPIC. By contrast, I am an outsider, and my only knowledge is what I dimly remember reading in the trade press.

Here at Wikipedia, being an expert is a two-edged sword. On the plus side, you can tell when something is incorrect by inspection. On the minus side, you are likely to become very frustrated by the "verifiability" requirement. It took me awhile to really understand this requirement. It stems from the following:

  • Anyone can edit wikipedia
  • Anyone can claim to be anyone else: we do not have any ID verification process.
  • even if we did verify ID, we have not formal method to hold editors accountable.

Therefore, we require "verifiability" for any assertion of fact. "Verifiability" is defined as a citation to a source that can (in theory, at least) be held accountable for the assertion. Wikipedia is useful to the extent that (a) this rule is followed, and (b) "facts" reported by accountable sources are correct.

I spent a lot of time working on the Itanium article, replacing a set of three articles that were basically out-of-date press releases. If you have the time, I would appreciate it if you could review the article. Most of the references are currently to the trade press or to industry white papers, and I would like to add academic citations. Also, it is quite possible that I have over-reacted to the extreme bias of the older articles in favor of Itanium: if so, pleas give me some citable references to re-balance the article. I did try very hard to be objective.

Thanks for your time. -Arch dude (talk) 01:03, 22 May 2008 (UTC)