Talk:Dave Winer/Archive 2

This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

"headnotes"

Some threads below include quoted text with references.

Old threads

These threads are not currently active, but are relevant to the ongoing dispute. Since this talk page is getting large, I am putting a collapse box around them. --Random832(t c) 20:15, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Podcasting

http://epeus.blogspot.com/2005/12/of-bloggercon-and-podcasting.html Dave did not invent podcasting. Please read the link. —Nirelan

The text that was in the article does not say he invented podcasting. Your link doesn't say much of anything at all - it provides a link to an audio file, but I can't read that. —Random8322007-01-26 01:34 UT C (01/25 20:34 EST)

do please read the link - I wrote it and never said Dave didn't invent podcasting, he indeed came up with the enclosure element for RSS feeds, and published feeds that included these; I wrote a script to download these into iTunes directly. Lots of people previoulsy talked about automatic downloading; Dave put a big chunk of the infrastructure to do it in place. Kevin Marks 09:21, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Random, read the part that I have quoted "During one of the breaks, I introduced myself and mentioned that I knew he was interested in Audioblogging (as we called it then), and showed him the Python script I'd written to automatically download mp3 enclosures to iTunes. His reaction was that this was cool, and that I should show it off in the Audioblogging session the next day, which I duly did, thanks to Harold Gilchrist making time for me." Don't say that that was not when podcasting was invented unless you can find an earlier podcast.—Nirelan

The statement was about RSS, not about podcasting. Do you even understand what RSS feeds do? --Dhartung | Talk 06:15, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

It seems self-evident that it existed before, as the quote you're using specifically assumes a pre-existing widespread "Audioblogging" community. I don't see any difference between "Audioblogging" and "Podcasting" apart from the name. The development of a script to allow one piece of proprietary software to automatically get the files doesn't even seem particularly notable, particularly as it involved no changes on the server, and thus not to the creation of any "podcasts" that didn't exist before it was written. —Random8322007-01-26 12:26 UT C (01/26 07:26 EST)

I'll clarify. That is not when podcasting was invented. The description given is of the invention of a way to automatically download podcasts (of which the infrastructure already existed in the form of rss mp3 enclosures) to iTunes. —Random8322007-01-26 12:33 UT C (01/26 07:33 EST)

Random, If it already existed than show me a link.- Nirelan

Random has answered the question. If you are unable to understand the answer, it is self-evident that you are in over your head technically. --Dhartung | Talk 18:15, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

The claim that podcasting already existed is supported by YOUR link, because if it did not, there would be nothing for the newly-written python script to download. —Random8322007-01-26 18:33 UT C (01/26 13:33 EST)

Random, content from audioblogs are what the newly written program downloaded. So like I said show me an instance of Dave writing a program that automaticly transferd audio content to an mp3 player before the link I posted was written. Read this from the general discussion "Dave said "Pioneered at Harvard just a few years ago, podcasting has been growing at an amazing rate." Therefore all podcasting information should either go to Harvard or Podcasting." Nirelan

Here is another link that decscribes him as "campaigning to be thought of as the creator of podcasting" why would you use that term if the man really invented it. Its easy to tell someone that dosen't know what podcasting is like the media that you invented it but its alot hard to confuse people that really create websites. Nirelan

Let's go through this slowly, because you're setting up false dichotomies and constantly changing the terms of the debate, and that makes it difficult. If you would be more precise this Talk page would not be so contentious.

First, the blog post from Marks is objecting to Adam Curry's claims, not Winer's. The CNet story he's reacting to also says it is Curry's claims (and Wikipedia edits) that were suspect. The article doesn't bring up false claims by Winer, although it would seem an opportune time to do so if that was how the author felt.
Second, our article does not say Winer was the "creator of podcasting". Please don't argue that we say that when we don't. It says "Winer was the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature that made podcasting possible." He took the existing spec (may have played with it some, there was much back-and-forth about this at the time) for how RSS feeds -- a subtype of RDF file -- could notify RSS clients (such as browsers, or later iTunes) of the availability of a new downloadable file such as an MP3 podcast. It was left to the implementers of RSS server software to make their feeds do this, and of course clients also needed the feature. As owner of Userland, Winer went ahead and implemented the feature in Manila/Radio and the Radio Userland client. Perhaps to Dave this is "inventing podcasting", but what he thinks in his mind is not at issue in our article, because our article describes a factual event -- "first to implement" -- with verification provided by a reliable third-party source.

Basically, it looks as if you're upset that Dave or anybody else somewhere is claiming he is the creator of podcasting, so you want to remove any claims relating to podcasting from our article, even if they are properly sourced. I suggest you complain to the people making those claims, or better yet, ignore them. If you really want to be helpful, you could research specific times that Dave has said something and somebody else has said something else, and put those into the article in the form "Winer has frequently said X, but K has said Y." --Dhartung | Talk 06:51, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

General Discussion

Dave said "Pioneered at Harvard just a few years ago, podcasting has been growing at an amazing rate." Therefore all podcasting information should either go to Harvard or Podcasting.

How do you differentiate the terms?... UserLand, Manila, Frontier, Radio. Does Manila refer to the city?... What's the origin of the use of each of these terms?... --User:Donwarnersaklad 9 December 2005

UserLand Software is a name of a corporation. Manila, Frontier and Radio are product names offered by this company. An explanation of these products should go on the UserLand Software corporation page -- redirects or disambigs if necessary on the terms themselves. The details of such products and corporations should not go on the Dave Winer biography page. --Ben Houston 20:27, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm not going to touch this entry because of a professional relationship with Dave, but I think the first paragraph should have a sentence like this: "He created or was a lead contributor to several of the most popular XML dialects and APIs related to web publishing, including RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, OPML, and the MetaWeblog API." Rcade 16:29, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I'd like to propose an edit to the sections that discusses Mr. Winer's history at Harvard and his contributions to podcasting. Both are very sparse and there is a significant opportunity to tie together the concepts. During Mr. Winer's time at Harvard, he worked with several people inside and outside of the university to encourage them to record audio and distribute it using RSS--podcasting as we know it today. Is there a viable way to document this with the Podcasting content.

Also, the podcasting content focuses too much on Winer vs. Curry and instead should talk more about the establishement of the enclosure element of RSS 2.0 and specific examples Mr. Winer's evangelism of it's use.

(Due to my relationship with Dave, I can not make any of the edits directly) --User:Skirks December 21, 2005

Discussion about Dave Winer article, from which Danny Ayers has removed all his own comments

I made a change to the first sentence of this entry, betsythedivine removed it. I left the reversion and tried to make a case, but my arguments weren't accepted by betsy. I have removed my comments because my neutrality of point of view was disputed. Life's too short. Danja 22:23, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Clarification: The original changes Danja made to Dave Winer's bio. Danny, I accede to your wish to delete all your own comments here, but a Wikipedian who wants to make sense of this section's discussion can easily find any past state of this talk page from its history. betsythedevine 01:07, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Er, hello, anonymous person who considers Dave Winer's major contributions to many fields a matter of dispute. The description you prefer would seem more suited to someone who had very little impact on web publishing. Furthermore, I'm not sure that you improve the information content of Wikipedia by removing the actual names of the the stuff he worked on. The "reliable history" you reference doesn't look like what Wikipedia would consider a source of encyclopedia quality. I will look for some sources of such quality when I get a chance; maybe a direct quote from one of them will solve this problem while avoiding issues with the Wikipedia "No Original Research" policy. betsythedevine 13:38, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Hello, Danny. I'm moving this discussion of Dave Winer's bio from my talk page to the talk page of that article. It's a public page on Wikipedia, and I am only one of many editors trying to keep it in good shape. Since nobody seems to think it violates Wikipedia Good Faith when people point out that I'm a friend of Dave Winer, surely it is also appropriate to note your own relationship to him--for example, your blogpost saying that others have called you a stalker of Dave Winer, while he has called you "abusive and persistent and stupid as dirt." [1] I do not think that Dave Winer's bio summary was improved by your removing the list of dialects and APIs to which he has made major contributions, and with which his name is widely associated. And, during more than a month since I made that change, not one Wikipedia editor has agreed with your attempt to whittle down his technical history into "... contributed to several popular dialects and APIs related to web publishing"--that is, nobody has reverted my reversion. Furthermore, the actual degree to which Dave did or did not contribute to any of these subjects is a matter for the body of the biography, not the summary, and perhaps for the articles on those dialects/APIs themselves. betsythedevine 16:14, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi Danny--The "facts regarding this Wikipedia page" are that 1) removing information from the biography of somebody who has publicly insulted you is usually a bad idea (WP:NPOV) and 2) the (well-attested and long-standing) information you took out went well beyond items whose factual basis you dispute. You yourself state in this discussion thread that Dave Winer created MetaWeblog API and OPML, and that he "was a lead contributor to XML-RPC." Therefore your quarrel with the statement that he "created or was a lead contributor to several of the most popular XML dialects and APIs related to web publishing: RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, OPML, and the MetaWeblog API " boils down (in your own defense of it) to 1) you don't consider him a lead contributor to RSS 2.0 and 2) you don't like XML-RPC, OPML, or the MetaWeblog API. I've read quite a lot of the deeply partisan special pleading assembled by one side or another in the various RSS 2.0-RDF-Atom wars--interestingly, Dan Libby's own analysis is mellow and thoughtful, acknowledging major influence from Dave and Userland on his own changes between 0.9 and his 0.91: [2] But Wikipedia strongly favors the use of published, reputable sources rather than personal interpretations of "historical documents" WP:NOR. BTW, here's something else I'd like to see more of in this biography-- the colorful and ongoing triumph of web feeds in general, much of their success fueled by Dave Winer's evangelism for RSS 2.0--for example, the adoption of RSS 2.0 by the New York Times and their agreement to stop hiding articles in their pay-for-it archive so long as those articles are accessed by a link to the RSS feed, or the use of enclosures in RSS 2.0 for podcasting. betsythedevine 03:14, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

See note above. Danja 22:26, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I've restored your comments--they ought to remain on this talk page--and I think the balance between our POVs will be useful to future editors. As for my editing Dave Winer's bio "to his glory", I do take NPOV seriously. If you look at my edits to this page, I've mostly stuck to reverting vandalism by others, except for the time I spent working to help another editor create balance in the section on Dave's "Relationship to the Public." betsythedevine 03:00, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia policy is to sign and date edits to the discussion page--just type 4 tildes at the end, if you're signed in. I think anybody with as many achievements as Dave Winer would have to be self-deludingly over-modest not to consider himself pretty darn smart. And his achievements include not only technical work on stuff like RSS but also various kinds of productive outreach like years of blogging, running the first BloggerCon, reinventing the way conferences are run, promoting RSS to major media, etc. You claim Dave's motivation is pure self-promotion--I disagree. (Though isn't everyone entitled to want to do some self-promotion? Would you like to discuss whether or not you ever engage in self-promotion yourself?) In my opinion, Dave Winer considers himself to have an important role as an advocate for users, something a lot of other developers in his (and my) opinion don't think about as often as they should. It's this crusading mentality that underlies his work with Userland, his promotion of RSS, his attempts to make conferences more about the audience and less about speakers or sponsors. BTW, it's funny that people who slam Dave for creating a fork in RSS are never the same as the people who slam the Atom-group for creating a fork in RSS. betsythedevine 02:31, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

How encyclopedia-quality sources describe Dave Winer's role wrt SOAP, RSS, blogging, etc.

BUSINESS/FINANCIAL DESK Microsoft's New Operating System Is the First Part of Expanded Internet Services By STEVE LOHR (NYT) 1435 words Published: October 22, 2001 ... "Microsoft's pitch to developers is greatly weakened because of that," said Dave Winer, co-author of SOAP and chief executive of UserLand, a developer of Web tools. [3]

BUSINESS/FINANCIAL DESK TECHNOLOGY; A Rift Among Bloggers By DAVID F. GALLAGHER (NYT) 1192 words Published: June 10, 2002

"I talk about things Glenn Reynolds doesn't understand, but that doesn't mean they're not important things to talk about," said Dave Winer, founder and chief executive of UserLand Software, whose Scripting News (scripting.com) is one of the oldest blogs.

New Food for IPods: Audio by Subscription By CYRUS FARIVAR Published: October 28, 2004, Thursday [4] Mr. Curry's Daily Source Code, a two-month-old show mainly on technology-related subjects, has inspired other podcasters to follow his lead. He came up with the idea for podcasting nearly four years ago, but it wasn't until he spoke soon thereafter with Dave Winer, an early blogger and the inventor of R.S.S., that Mr. Winer was able to modify R.S.S. so that it could support enclosed audio files.

I hope this brief collection of NYT material is useful to other editors. betsythedevine 16:26, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

The original RSS 0.9 specification, author - Dan Libby. I hope this is useful to editors that prefer facts to a good story. Danja 08:59, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

And, for comparison, the RSS 2.0 specification [5]. Channel elements in RSS 2.0 but not in RSS 0.9: language, copyright, managingEditor, webMaster, pubDate, lastBuildDate, category, generator, docs, cloud, ttl, rating, skipHours, skipDays. Many of these elements reflect enormous changes in the ways RSS was used as it became more popular. Item elements in RSS 2.0 but not in RSS 0.9: description, author, category, comments, enclosure, guid, pubDate, source. Note in particular the importance for blog-RSS of the new tags "category" and "description", as well as the importance to podcasting of the "enclosure" tag. I hope this is useful to those who have been told again and again that Dave Winer's RSS 2.0 adds nothing of value to Dan Libby's RSS 0.9. By the way, Dan Libby describes himself as "the primary author of the RSS 0.9 and 0.91 spec" [6]. Dan Libby does not describe himself as the creator of RSS 2.0.betsythedevine 04:02, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

My pointer to RSS 0.9 was to demonstrate the original authorship of RSS (primarily Dan Libby). Virtually all the elements you list appeared in Netscape's RSS 0.91. The only significant exceptions I believe being "guid" and "enclosure". "guid" corresponds to rdf:about in RSS 0.9 and 1.0. "enclosure" was an addition, but (at least from the viewpoint of RSS 0.9 and 1.0), a redundant one. The media type of a resource on the Web can be determined via HTTP, in that context the additional element acts as little more than a hint. (A good reference for the changes is http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss). If you look at the origins of the idea of RSS, then there are plenty of precursors, most significantly Apple's MCF, Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (which had many of the same elements as RSS, albeit in upper case, and used polled-HTTP delivery).

External links discussion

Bloglines

Removed Bloglines from the list of tools that get Weblogs.com's pings. Just got a comment on [7] saying that Bloglines doesn't use Weblogs.com's pings. --Nick Douglas 01:42, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Eye on Winer

In the external sites section the links to Eye on Winer, I'm Not Dave seem to be sites using wikipedia and winers content to generate google ad revenue. I'm for removing them. 70.20.13.215 20:35, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't see any Google Ads on those pages -- did they just remove them? "Eye on Winer" has been around for a while and I don't think it made to troll wikipedia or for the sole point of profit. I think the sites are problematic because the author doesn't identify themselves -- but that is also the case with you, thus I guess you can't complain. (edited) --Ben Houston 21:35, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Wow. What a shitty way to argue Ben. The poster didn't complain that "Eye on..." was anonymous -- you did. 128.148.37.31 19:36, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I wasn't arguing with him specifically. I was adding that I honestly think the "Eye on Winer" page is problematic because it is anonymous. I find that it is too easy to hide being anonymity when attacking others -- it makes it to easy to be irresponsible and unfair. --Ben Houston 18:59, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

"thus I guess you can't complain." is just plain silly. If the comment has reliable information (In fact, it appears to be incorrect. I see no ads.) that is in-line with the goals of wikipedia, then it should be heard. Attacking the fact that is anonymous, while it may be one of your pecadillios, is not grounds for rejecting the comment. Further, anonymous sites linked on the main page are quite a different thing than anonymous comments on the talk page -- wouldn't you agree? 128.148.37.31 21:15, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what I am arguing about. I must admit that I am confused. I'm going to drop it. --Ben Houston 21:45, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Editor 70.109.203.200 replaced the above with the following comment: "In the external sites section the links to Eye on Winer & I'm Not Dave are anonymous but deemed relevant." I reverted this because I don't think it fully summarizes the discussion. If someone wishes to archive and properly summarize this discussion, please do so. Aapo Laitinen 14:27, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Deletion

Since Dave did not create blogging or RSS should this page be maintained. I am not against a wiki for RSS, Blogging, or even userland. However, I do not know if simply claiming to be an early adopter of something is enough to have an article written about you. Please do not take this as an insult to anyone.--User:Nirelan

I removed the {{db-spam}} as the article is not blatant advertising. If you believe that the article should be deleted, please list it through an AfD. Note that I am not stating my opinion on whether the article should be deleted, just what procedure you need to follow. -- Gogo Dodo 08:38, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Although Wikipedia is supposed to use independant sources this page is made based on information from Mr. Winers own website. That is clearly a violation of the wikipedia guidelines including sources must be written from a neutral point of view, and the no original researchpolicy. That means it violates two of only three content policies.--User:Nirelan

Your claim that "this page is made based on information from Mr. Winers own website" is contradicted the long and diverse history of this article. Furthermore, over the past several days your assault on this entire article--blanking it, marking it as spam, removing informative and appropriate material, etc.--have not improved its quality. I hope other editors will join me in trying to restore the informative and appropriate content on which many previous editors labored and achieved consensus. betsythedevine 05:11, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Compromise

You're still free to list on AfD, but I've replaced your {{prod}} with citation templates. I think the article should be improved, not deleted. (IMO you've also severely misinterpreted both the NPOV and NOOR policies) —Random8322007-01-23T20:59:39UT C(01/23 15:59EST) PS I only added {{self-published}} because I feel it embodies your complaint, I haven't taken the time to look into the claim itself.

-

This page shouldn't be deleted - Winer is a person of note ("Almost Famous" as Wired had it). A while ago I objected to certain inaccuracies (see discussion with Winer's friend Betsy above), ~~but the page now seems considerably better on that front~~ scratch that, the bits I objected to have returned. Some technical points are still questionable, e.g.

He was the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature that made podcasting possible

Winer played a significant role in promoting podcasting, but podcasting is entirely possible without this "feature" (c.f. Atom). In general the reported information still leans somewhat to that which favours Winer, for example it contains :

Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls, a long-time friend of Dave Winer, expressed the sense of indebtedness shared by many of Winer's admirers...

There's no mention that another of the three Cluetrain Manifesto co-authors, Chris Locke, called Winer "that asshole" trying to set a Googlebomb with that string. http://www.rageboy.com/2003_10_05_blogger-archive.html

Danja 20:28, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Danja, that section was an attempt to balance some notable POVs on Dave Winer, and to keep it brief, in response to the advice of Wikipedia admins. I don't think Chris Locke's prank was as notable or informative as the anti-Dave comments that were included. betsythedevine 05:11, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

The line "indebtedness shared by many of Winer's admirers" is sentimental claptrap which I don't think has any place in an encyclopedia (not even for Mother Theresa). Is this gushing really balanced by a single critical comment? (Bray's comment actually praises Winer). Locke's prank is from a very similar source as the positive remark and demonstrates this isn't the only view. You'll note I didn't add Locke's comment to the page, I just wanted to show how this page is still primarily a fan club mouthpiece. Presumably it will remain so while he has a friend here to champion his point of view. (I'm ducking out again - I only wanted to say deletion isn't the solution to the problems of this page). Danja 10:55, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I changed the phrase "indebtedness shared by many of Winer's admirers"--though it's obvious that many of Winer's admirers agree with Doc. Also that some of his detractors try to remove some or all of Winer's contributions to technology or blogging. My intention for this article, as for the many others on my Wikpedia watchlist, is to maintain a source of fair, balanced, notable information about its subject. betsythedevine 21:57, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

It's worth noting that the "that asshole, dave winer" thing is not a googlebomb. It's an attempt to establish a count of bloggers who dislike him by google hit count, whereas a google bomb is an attempt to make a page the top hit for a search result by consistently including the phrase with the target page linked. A googlebomb would be, for example, if he tried to make a page trying to describe how much of an asshole Winer is the top hit for "Dave Winer" by getting everyone to put that link on every single time they mention him. —Random8322007-01-28 18:32 UT C (01/28 13:32 EST)

I stand corrected (and note the current count is about 20,000) Danja 21:17, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

It's worth noting that the current count for for Rageboy's prank phrase [8] "that asshole Dave Winer" [9] is apparently 41--they show 21 blogposts, with 20 more "very similar." betsythedevine 21:57, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Rageboy's test query on that page is : http://www.google.com/search?q=asshole+%22Dave+Winer%22 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Danja (talk • contribs) 19:19, 30 January 2007 (UTC).

Here's how Rageboy himself described the phrase he wanted to propagate: "OK, now here's how the game works. Simply place the exact string 'that asshole, Dave Winer' somewhere on your blog." [10]. If you click the post's title slug, as RB recommends, there's a Google search for that exact four-word string: [11] You get 18 supposedly unique results, of which at least 4 are by RB himself. betsythedevine 21:18, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Section removals

This section was called "Bad faith edits?", renaming it because at this point it seems uncivil (Random832 19:14, 24 January 2007 (UTC))

I believe that this edit was made in bad faith, because your {{prod}} reason was that there were no external sources, and the section you deleted contained external sources. —Random8322007-01-23T21:15:05UT C(01/23 16:15EST)

That edit had nothing to do with wether or not I think the article should be deleted. Wikipedia is for facts not opinions. When that section provides a fact about Dave it can be included in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nirelan (talk • contribs)

"Winer is known as one of the more polarizing figures in the blogging community" seems factual enough to me - whether it's correct, I don't know, but fact vs opinion is a different matter. —Random8322007-01-23T21:42:03UT C(01/23 16:42EST)

I fully admit you have sources for that section , but having a source dosent mean something is worth being in Wikipedia. Statements from co workers definatly shouldn't be included.-- Nirelan

Is it ok for me to leave the banner there with yours present until the article is fixed?--Nirelan

An edit summary would have been helpful - I did honestly think at that time that you intended to go for an AfD (not that you're not still free to do that) with the same reason as you gave in the prod, and were just deleting sections to make the article worse. I still think the section should be improved rather than deleted wholesale, but I'll accept that your edit was in good faith. —Random8322007-01-23T22:53:22UT C(01/23 17:53EST)

I will give you the requried five days to fix the article and I'm sorry if I am being too harsh on this subject, but I feel that the article should be deleted until a relible source can be found. I know that to people who have no expierence in the tech world his contibutions seem signifigant, but he is the owner of a company and only promotes products his company uses. Therefore no article should be based upon what he says. Its like making an article about Windows based on speeches from Microsoft executives. If he would have made RSS or Blogging or something I can accept an article being based on him, but can you honestly tell me that an encyclopedia article can exist only upon the words of someone who is trying to sell a product? --Nirelan

Please look at the long and diverse history of this article [[12]] -- then withdraw your strange assertion that it's written by Dave Winer or based on his writings. Links to his own writings are given here only because they might be of interest to people who have clicked through to read an article about Dave Winer. betsythedevine 23:11, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

What required five days? You don't get to re-add a {{prod}} after it's been removed. If you want it gone, you have to go through the AFD process and actually substantiate your arguments against this article. —Random8322007-01-24T00:45:39UT C(01/23 19:45EST)

If I haven't substantciated my arguments tell me one thing that makes this noteable. This is hype perpatrated on the site of a man that owns a company. There is even a whole section pertaining to what his co workers said about him. The wikipedia guidelines clearly state that numerus third parties need to refrence the subject to make it notable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.159.98.208 (talk • contribs)

eweek and wired and oreilley don't count? those were all linked from the article —Random8322007-01-24T03:04:31UT C(01/23 22:04EST)

Random, the eweek story and the Weblogs.com info needs to be a seperate article. As for the Wired and Oreilly stories I don't know if they should count because as someone that sells tools to the tech media he has a business relationship with these people.-- Nirelan

If you cannot substantiate an actual business relationship, then you are just speculating. --Dhartung | Talk 06:40, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

I gave Weblogs.com its own article and Userland Software has one. This article just feels like it is opinions on the topics of the forementioned articles from Dave. -- Nirelan

In that case, you should work to change this article to make it more neutral. Nominating it for deletion is a statement that you think that he doesn't deserve for there to be an article about him, not that you think the article has problems. As for CNN/Eweek - I really think you should check out WP:NN. And, well, of course most of the media references on a tech subject are going to be tech media - I don't think that's sufficient to create a conflict of interest, at least not in terms of notability; these are professionals we're talking about. And "feels like" isn't much of a reason - there's plenty in this article that doesn't come from him. But, even at face value, your complaint is a POV issue, not something worth nominating it for deletion over. —Random8322007-01-24T19:14:44UT C(01/24 14:14EST)

Thanks Random, I agree that an article could be made here, but I don't think it should be done by repeating what is in other articles like the Userland Section does. I also don't think we should have opinions of co workers. Read his latest post on Wikipedia http://www.scripting.com/2007/01/24.html#stateOfWikipedia. This article definatly needs the cleaning up I am trying to do.—Nirelan

Removing as much material as you have verges on vandalism. Wholesale removal, what you and an anon editor have done, eliminates context and presents a disjointed timeline. The accepted way to introduce material better covered in other articles is with summary style, where two or three paragraphs, for example, are condensed to one, then using a template such as {{main}} to point the reader at the article where the material is covered in greater depth. --Dhartung | Talk 10:48, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Relationship to the Public section

The history of the article on Dave Winer goes back before my time, but I do know the history of the "Relationship to the Public" section. A year or more ago, somebody deleted a similar section heavy with "original research" and called, non-neutrally, "Criticism of Dave Winer." After a brief edit war (I suggested the compromise of putting the material into the talk page but was over-ruled), Wikipedians suggested a short section of direct-quote criticisms from verifiable sources balanced by a short section of defenses also from verifiable sources. betsythedevine 23:03, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that backstory, betsythedevine. Several recent AFDs have allowed articles titled "Criticism of X" to exist as subarticles, so I don't think that is out of bounds as a section heading. It's probably best to integrate into the article what is pertinent where possible, of course. --Dhartung | Talk 06:40, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

I will remove the AFD if we make this an article about facts and not just a list of friends or enemies Dave has in the computer world. --Nirelan Talk

I am deleting it because it is simply unpressidented. Please find one other article about a programmer that has an section like that. --Nirelan Talk

What relevance, if any, does this section have? Anyone who has spent two decades or more as a highly vocal public figure is bound to have both friends and enemies: listing testimonies to that effect seems entirely pointless, however notable and reliable the sources, however impartial the balance of friends and enemies. The testimonials, except for one, are also self-published. I suggest that the section be removed without replacement. ARK (talk) 02:02, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Removed podcasting mention

An IP keeps removing this:

He was the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature that made podcasting possible.<ref>"Podcasting: The latest buzz". ITworld.com. October 27 2004. Retrieved 2007-01-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)</ref>

Please explain this removal (I don't want to get into an edit war or I'd have put it back.) —Random8322007-01-26 23:29 UT C (01/26 18:29 EST)

I didn't remove the line, but it is inaccurate and misleading and should be removed, or at least substantially modified. The RSS 2.0 enclosure element is neither necessary or sufficient for podcasting (the same role is covered in Atom and for that matter RSS 1.0). Winer did add this element to RSS 2.0, but the facility it provides was already available in web standards (any URI/link can potentially have a media object representation, and hence act as an enclosure, this can be determined using HTTP content negotiation). The promotion of the podcasting mode of media delivery (in which Winer played a major role) was considerably more significant than any implementation detail. Danja 11:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I've made a compromise version acknowledging the importance of other elements - and note that the claim is that he was the first to implement the feature (the link goes to a RSS-specific article, but the text is talking about the enclosure feature in general for all types of feeds), not that he was the only one ever - did atom have this feature before he implemented it? But, anyway, what do you think of my compromise wording, and would you like to suggest any further changes? —Random8322007-01-28 18:16 UT C (01/28 13:16 EST) PS I also think your "any URI/link" claim is a bit specious - are you saying that there's no usefulness to <img>, <object>, or <embed> over <a> or <link> in html?

Random832, your compromise wording on enclosures keeps the fact of Winer's contribution while removing the "judgment call" element--that should satisfy NPOV claims. The first podcasters used RSS 2.0. Could they instead have used RSS 1.0 or Atom? The answer to that hypothetical question has little to do with podcasting and zero to do with a biography of Dave Winer. betsythedevine 21:21, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

3RR Warning

Outside 24 hour period:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=prev&oldid=102929732 Deleted, 70.110.249.4 (not disputed to be him as not logged on), no explanation
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=102929808&oldid=102929732 restored, Scimitar, admin rollback button

Within 24 hours:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=103479289&oldid=103478983 deleted, "Opinions dont belong here"
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=103490840&oldid=103480473 restored, Random832 per previous consensus
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=103503112&oldid=103490840 deleted 71.244.210.205 (not disputed to be him as not logged on), "Wikipedia is not a journal of opinion"
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=103503187&oldid=103503112 restored, TomPhil, meaningless WP:VPRF VP edit summary
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=103505464&oldid=103503187 "Form your own opinion"
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dave_Winer&diff=103530924&oldid=103525890 restored, Betsythedevine, per previous consensus

You have not sought a consensus on this issue and you have not addressed the fact that there was a previous consensus on this section. Your next attempt to delete this section WILL be a violation of the 3RR. —Random8322007-01-27 03:30 UT C (01/26 22:30 EST)

note that consensus wasn't really reached on that last restoration by Betsythedevine. I removed this misleading line a long time ago, but Betsythedevine restored it. She questioned my neutral pov (because Winer has publicly insulted me in the past), so I withdrew. I questioned hers (she is a personal friend of Winer), she didn't... Danja 11:21, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I was talking about the restoration of the relationship to the public section, not any other stuff that might be included in that diff. The restored text of that section was not different in that restoration than in any of the other three, so it's not clear what you mean. —Random8322007-01-28 18:24 UT C (01/28 13:24 EST)

User:Nirelan removed the AfD banner from this page

On 26 January User:Nirelan removed the AfD banner from this page. I tried to explain to him that it's considered vandalism. (See exchange at User_talk:Nirelan and User_talk:EdJohnston#Winer_AFD). He believes it is fine for him to personally close the AfD debate, and he has followed the steps. I will leave it to more experienced people to try to explain to him how the system works. EdJohnston 04:07, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

I made the nomination on his behalf (well, on the behalf of an IP no-one is disputing is him), I'm willing to withdraw it on his behalf if that's what it takes. —Random8322007-01-27 04:14 UT C (01/26 23:14 EST)

As he is the nominator, this is a bit inappropriate, but it isn't vandalism. Nominators are allowed to withdraw their own nominations as a speedy keep. When nominators remove AFD notices in pages, it is treated as intent to withdraw. Removing someone else's AFD is still vandalism, just not your own. --Dhartung | Talk 06:16, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Well - this case is a bit more complicated than that, since, first of all, he wasn't logged in when he added the template, and, second, he botched it and I had to finish the process - which means that even though he's clearly the one who wants it deleted, I'm apparently "technically" the nominator and even if we take my statement that I'm definitely nominating it for him, he wasn't logged in. Though, probably the best thing would be to Ignore all rules and treat him as the nominator. —Random8322007-01-27 06:32 UT C (01/27 01:32 EST)

Repairing vandalism to this article

Looking back at this article's pre-AFD state ([13]), I notice that two entire sections have vanished during the recent edit war: "Contributions to podcasting" and "Weblogs.com." I am going to restore these two missing sections from the article as it stood on January 24--not because I contend they were perfect but because that's what was here. betsythedevine 17:14, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

IIRC the Weblogs.com was (if a bit clumsily) split out into its own article, then someone rewrote other sections to fill in the gaps. —Random8322007-01-29 18:42 UT C (01/29 13:42 EST)

OPML

The article has nothing on the subject's connection to OPML. I'm not knowledgeable on the subject but I think a sentence or two would be in order. Cardiffman 23:29, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Nirelan, Part the Second

Latest dispute

Nirelan replaced the page with the following.

I am sorry that I have to take this course of action, but please stop trying to associate Dave with technologies that he did not create. Reverting this article is simple so do not get mad about the change just give people time to read the message than revert the article and fix it.

1. Dave played no role in creating RSS. Netscape did that.

2. Dave was certainly not one of the first bloggers.

3. He did not create podcasting or anything associated with it. Read the talk page.

"He was the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature that made podcasting possible.^[1] Please explain this removal (I don't want to get into an edit war or I'd have put it back.) —Random8322007-01-26 23:29 UTC (01/26 18:29 EST)

I didn't remove the line, but it is inaccurate and misleading and should be removed, or at least substantially modified. The RSS 2.0 enclosure element is neither necessary or sufficient for podcasting (the same role is covered in Atom and for that matter RSS 1.0). Winer did add this element to RSS 2.0, but the facility it provides was already available in web standards (any URI/link can potentially have a media object representation, and hence act as an enclosure, this can be determined using HTTP content negotiation). The promotion of the podcasting mode of media delivery (in which Winer played a major role) was considerably more significant than any implementation detail. Danja 11:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC) "

Dave played no role in creating RSS. Netscape did that.
You have not supported this claim sufficiently. --Random832(t c) 02:03, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Dave was certainly not one of the first bloggers.
You have not even ATTEMPTED to define or support this claim.
He did not create podcasting or anything associated with it. Read the talk page.
THE ARTICLE DOES NOT CLAIM HE CREATED PODCASTING NOR ANYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH IT! --Random832(t c)

02:03, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Random if you do not know these things you are not qualified to write about them.

1. RSS: If your read the RSS wiki or any other articles on RSS you will see that it was created there.

2. Dave is not one of the first bloggers : If you read the Blogging wiki it clearly talks about blogs being around long before Scripting News. So does this site http://www.blockstar.com/blog/blog_timeline.html.

3. Podcasting: The article has a contributions to podcasting section when the comment I posted clearly shows he did not make a contribution.--Nirelan

It's also worth noting that Danja's objections were addressed - the line that was removed was later "substantially modified" to de-emphasize the importance of Winer's contributions. --Random832(t c) 02:05, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Nirelan persists in failing to understand what a talk page is for: This page may state that Dave has done some things that even other wikipedia pages prove that he did not do.

1.RSS: The RSS wiki clearly states that Netscape created RSS.

"RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Ramanathan V. Guha of Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My Netscape portal."

2.Blogs: Dave did not invent the blog nor was he one of the first bloggers. The history section of the blog wiki starts at 1994 which was 3 years before Dave started his blog. This site also provides a timeline of blogs that begins long before Scripting News http://www.blockstar.com/blog/blog_timeline.html.

3. Podcasting: Dave did not make make podcasting possible. This article's discussion section proves that. I do not understand how something can remain when it was disproven in a talk page for the article it is on.

"He was the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature that made podcasting possible.[1] Please explain this removal (I don't want to get into an edit war or I'd have put it back.) —Random8322007-01-26 23:29 UTC (01/26 18:29 EST)

I didn't remove the line, but it is inaccurate and misleading and should be removed, or at least substantially modified. The RSS 2.0 enclosure element is neither necessary or sufficient for podcasting (the same role is covered in Atom and for that matter RSS 1.0). Winer did add this element to RSS 2.0, but the facility it provides was already available in web standards (any URI/link can potentially have a media object representation, and hence act as an enclosure, this can be determined using HTTP content negotiation). The promotion of the podcasting mode of media delivery (in which Winer played a major role) was considerably more significant than any implementation detail. Danja 11:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC) "

The article does not claim that Dave first created RSS - do you deny that he had substantial involvement in later versions? The article does not claim that Dave invented podcasting. And, you are assuming that your POV on what "one of the first" must mean for blogs is fact. --Random832(t c) 03:59, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

References for the 'Contributions to Podcasting' section

Someone put up the 'unreferenced' banner in this section. There is a blow-by-blow timeline in History of podcasting for 2003 and 2004 with a ton of references, at least links to blog postings. Some of those references could be brought over here. I think it's reasonable to accept a blog posting at least as evidence of the poster's views, if not as confirmation of external facts. EdJohnston 03:18, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Nirelan

I'm really trying to be patient with you. You've raised some valid points about how things are phrased, and I've tried to change the article to be more clear about these. I don't understand the view you seem to have that because he wasn't the original author, his contributions to RSS as it stands today are insignificant; or that because the feature he first implemented was only one piece of the puzzle, podcasting should not be mentioned in this article at all. But i'm still trying to work with you - please see the latest version of the article - is there any way you think things should be made more clear? What do you think of the changes I've made to address your objections? --Random832(t c) 04:42, 7 February 2007 (UTC) P.S. please read WP:SUMMARY for why you shouldn't just be blanking sections entirely when the bulk of the content should be split into its own article.

Random, I have a problem because in this article you talk about Dave saying he made RSS popular ,even thought it was made and promoted by a major company, yet on the Ramanathan V. Guha page inventing RSS is basicly a footnote. I don't understand how one man telling people to use it deserves more text in an article than is given to the inventor of the technology. I have given you the name of the technology's inventor and therefor proven that Dave did not invent and does not control RSS. He has nothing more to do with it than you or I do yet you still insist on trying to word the article as if he has some controlling connection to RSS. If the man didn't make RSS he didn't make it. The only reason to associate him with it is to make him sound important enough to have an article.

Blogging: It is clearly known that he didn't invent blogging, yet you still want to tie him to it by using words like pioneered or was one of the first to blog. The blog wiki clearly begins the history section in 1994 while this article says Dave started blogging in 1997. How can you pioneer something or be one of the first if you were not interested in yet for at least 3 YEARS that other people used to actually pioneer blogging and blog?
Podcasting: I along with other users have shown you that he did make podcasting, or make anything that was needed to do it.

You can say I vandalized the article ,but even after I and other people have told you that these things are not true you merely change the wording a little bit. Bill Clinton can define he word is ,but the definition is still the same! Quit trying to associate him with things he likes.--(Nirelan shout)

Your contention that he did not invent blogging, create RSS from whole cloth, etc, is noted, but that DOES NOT mean that what he did do is not relevant. --Random832(t c) 16:12, 7 February 2007 (UTC) PS I changed the wording to the more neutral "an early blog" instead of "one of the first" - I would consider ANY blog whose existence antedates (even if by less than a year) the coinage of the term "weblog" to qualify as an "early" one, do you have any objection to this classification? (16:17, 7 February 2007 (UTC))

I made the article focus on what he did by talking about his company and BloggerCon. However now that even you admit he didn't create blogging or RSS you still want to include those things. --(Nirelan/shout)

The article doesn't SAY he created blogging, or that he created RSS. That he didn't create blogging is not a reason to omit all mention of blogging from the article, and frankly I'm baffled by your contention that it is. --Random832(t c) 16:18, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

You stated "that DOES NOT mean that what he did do is not relevant" and I agree. RSS, blogging and podcasting are not what he did. Starting a company and BloggerCon is what he did.--(Nirelan/shout)

I meant what he did do in regard to (for example) RSS is relevant. He didn't make the first version, but he made several subsequent versions with substantial modifications. I don't understand your claim that it's not worthy of mention at all just because he built on the work of others rather than creating it 100% from scratch. --Random832(t c) 16:27, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

If he was the person that made decisions about RSS or something it would be relavent, but RSS is a standard. No one person makes a decision. Associating him with RSS is like associating Windows with one of the hundreds or thousands of people that have worked on it.--(Nirelan/shout)

Adding to the article, removing stuff from the article

Despite the complaints of Nirelan and the repeated vandalism of this article he used to get attention to those complaints, this article errs more on the side of omitting relevant information than on the side of giving Dave Winer too much credit for technologies in which he played a major role.

For example, BloggerCon 1 and 2 get summed up in a sentence. And the main BloggerCon article isn't much more informative either about these events or Dave Winer's role in them. When the Register runs a huge flame-war against BloggerCon [14] and [15], they have no doubt that BloggerCon = Dave Winer. But when Wikipedia gives credit, it's to "Dave Winer and friends."

For another example, Dave's evangelism of OPML has inspired a lot of new stuff including most recently Placeblogger.com. I hesitate to add this stuff because I'm no expert and it'd be good if some expert who isn't a friend of Dave would do it. But if nobody will do that stuff maybe I will.

Random832 has done yeoman work trying to meet the complaints of NIrelan, but I think in two instances too much stuff was taken out. First, Dave's sale of Weblogs.com belongs in this article. Second, I don't think it's appropriate to pull so much information about RadioUserland out of this article. Surely the Bill Gates article includes substantial detail about Microsoft under his leadership? betsythedevine 14:44, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

The Bill Gates article is twice as long, too, and he's been at Microsoft for thirty years. I actually think that the sections (along with links to main articles) are fine, but there should be an additional section (of comparable length) on living videotext --Random832(t c) 16:50, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Reality Check

IMHO- this is probably one of the most troubled articles about a person I've seen. The relentless vandalism and arguments are inexplicable. There are often dozens of edits daily. I think Nirelan should no longer edit this article has that user seems to be one of the major problems. So many claims that user has made without referencing anything. Clearly a personal problem from him. David Winer is a hugely influential and polarizing person, his article should be NPOV and well written, we owe to ourselves and readers to do a much better job at keeping personal feelings out of this article and sticking to published, referenced information. The fact that Someone actually considered this for an AfD is insane. I've added this to my own watch list and I'll definitely try to keep a close eye on its improvement.Tester er 18:19, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Trying to Improve things

As agreed upon before, this article is a mess. I've tried to subdivided and insert refs wherever possible. I think it might need a full edit but we'll try and avoid that for now. In the future- PLEASE DO NOT ERASE or REMOVE information unless you have good reason to do so and can prove your point in it's removal. The discussion page should be used regarding all major edits and if we work together and be fair, this article should be well written and complete in a matter of days.Tester er 19:05, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Tester tell me what I have not proven.

RSS was created by Ramanathan V. Guha

Which RSS? RSS .91, RSS .92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0? You really believe that the guy who created Rich Site Summary for netscape gets all the credit for continued improvements and in fact major upgrades to the protocol? To say RSS is lazy, there are many versions of RSS, some Winer and Guha co-authored, others were sole authored by David Winer.Tester er 20:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Blogging: It is clearly known that he didn't invent blogging, yet you still want to tie him to it by using words like pioneered or was one of the first to blog. The blog wiki clearly begins the history section in 1994 while this article says Dave started blogging in 1997. How can you pioneer something or be one of the first if you were not interested in yet for at least 3 YEARS that other people used to actually pioneer blogging and blog?

I don't think any one person invented blogging, but that should not get in the way of fairly describing the obviously important role that Dave Winer has played in the history and evolution of blogging. To use the word "pioneer" does not mean he invented it. Frankly he should get a short mention on his roll in blogging and everything thing else should go into the history of blogging article. FWIW- Adam Curry, Leo Laporte, Dave Winer, Dawn and Drew and many others were early pioneers in podcasting. Pioneer does not = sole creator and inventor. Tester er 20:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Podcasting: I along with other users have shown you that he did not make podcasting, or make anything that was needed to do it. Kevin Marks created podcasting at BloggerCon.

http://epeus.blogspot.com/2005/12/of-bloggercon-and-podcasting.html This is perhaps the most insane link I've ever seen. You say that 1 guy created podcasting at a convention started by Winer and others from Harvard, and to prove this, you link to that guys blog where he says he created it? Insane. I can't claim to have landed on the moon when my only proof is my own blog post about how I once landed on the moon.Tester er 20:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Linking to blogs to prove your point is not up to the standard of wikipedia. This information is not correct. More importantly, recent edits that say Winer was invited by microsoft to help develop XML-RPC could not be further from reality. There is a known and much talked about rift regarding this very subject. Kevin marks did not invent podcasting at BloggerCon. You can't link to his blog where he claims such a thing and call it proof. Not only is it absurd it is not definitive. This is a case where stubbornness and vandalism have ruined an article. Also, PLEASE sign your edits. 4 of thesse "~" please. Tester er 19:59, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

"RSS was created by Ramanathan V. Guha" No-one's saying it wasn't. But Winer's LATER contributions to the format, despite not being the actual original creation of RSS are still significant in their own right. --Random832(t c) 20:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Blogging - the words "one of the first" were removed, stop bringing that up. The article currently (before you vandalized the lead para to remove even that) makes the much more neutral claim that Scripting News was an early blog. --Random832(t c) 20:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Podcasting - Why is it that being the first making a RSS server that lets you upload mp3 files and use the enclosure tag is not "inventing podcasting", but making a tool to automatically download such files to itunes is "inventing podcasting"? --Random832(t c) 20:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

RFC

I am considering whether or not to file an RfC against Nirelan regarding this article. Anyone else have any thoughts? --Random832(t c) 20:09, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

File it man, he's ruining this article. I've already reported him to an admin I know.Tester er 20:14, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Glaring Error

This article gives no credit to David Winer for his important roles in pioneering podcasting. It is a glaring omission as are the details of his work with OPML, and details about the importance of BloggerCon. This article has been hijacked by people who wish to rewrite history. The only mentions of podcasting are his own podcast and a few external links. From the actual Podcast article in Wikipedia.

"The concept of podcasting was suggested as early as 2000 and its technical components were available by 2001, then implemented in the program Radio Userland[1]. In 2003 regular podcasts started showing up on well-known Web sites and software support spread."

And I think we can all agree that Dave founded Radio Userland right? So why does he not get credit in this article? Why has vandalism been stopped in the podcast article but not in this article?

Again from the "History of Podcasting" article:

October 2000 - The concept of using enclosures in RSS Feeds was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis^[2], and implemented in somewhat different form by Dave Winer, a software developer and an author of the RSS format. Winer had discussed the concept, also in October 2000, with Adam Curry^[3], a user of his software, and had received other customer requests for audioblogging features. Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92^[4], by defining a new element^[5] called "enclosure"^[6], which would simply pass the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator.

January 11, 2001 - Winer demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog.^[7].

Well sourced, NPOV content that clearly defines the origin of podcasting while fairly giving all parties credit. Why is that so hard in this article?Tester er 20:15, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

This information has now been ported into this article for clarity and fairness. It is entirely sourced and has stood the test of time being the starting point of the history time line in the history of podcasting article. It will continue to be included in this article until it is proven to be incorrect, which would change the history article drastically. It does not give unfair credit to Winer but does fairly, and accurately describe history. Kevin Marks did not invent podcasting in 2003. This goes back to October 2000.Tester er 20:22, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

RSS 2.0

From the undisputed actual article on RSS in wikipedia

"In September 2002, Winer released a final successor to RSS 0.92, known as RSS 2.0 and emphasizing "Really Simple Syndication" as the meaning of the three-letter abbreviation. The RSS 2.0 spec removed the type attribute added in RSS 0.94 and allowed people to add extension elements using XML namespaces. Several versions of RSS 2.0 were released, but the version number of the document model was not changed."

RSS 2.0 is what podcasters and subscribers use today, this is why Winer is given what credit he is given.Tester er 20:26, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Suprise! More Vandalism!

Why would anyone put this in the main article?

Please prove that he made something important to podcasting. You can't say he created the enclosure becuase that is already available in Atom and URIs. I fully admit he used it but he did not create it. Danja has already proved that.

"I didn't remove the line, but it is inaccurate and misleading and should be removed, or at least substantially modified. The RSS 2.0 enclosure element is neither necessary or sufficient for podcasting (the same role is covered in Atom and for that matter RSS 1.0). Winer did add this element to RSS 2.0, but the facility it provides was already available in web standards (any URI/link can potentially have a media object representation, and hence act as an enclosure, this can be determined using HTTP content negotiation). The promotion of the podcasting mode of media delivery (in which Winer played a major role) was considerably more significant than any implementation detail. Danja 11:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC)"

Seriously?

RSS 2.0 with enclosures is what the vast majority of people use to syndicate their podcasts. Someone please, please, please put a leash on this puppy.Tester er 20:31, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

10 References in the Winer and Podasting subsection

10 refs are now in the Winer and Podcasting subsection, since this is turned into a shouting match, I thought I'd point that out. 10 refs working to substantiate a mere 3 paragraphs. Good work!Tester er 20:34, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Tester please prove to me that URIs and Atom can not link to media. If at the very least those two standards can do it then Dave did not invent the enclosure. Nirelan

He helped create enclosures in RSS 2.0, which is what this discussion should be about.Tester er 06:09, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

"URIs" is meaningless - that's like saying that <object> and <embed> have absolutely no advantage over <a> in HTML. RSS antedates Atom. And it doesn't say "invented", it says "first to implement". there is a difference. --Random832(t c) 20:44, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

URIs having that capeability is not meaningless because RSS uses them. If Atom did it first he obviously wasnt the first to implement it. Nirelan

The question is, was he one of the firsts to implement them into RSS, again, Atom has nothing to do with it. Very few people use Atom for podcast syndication.Tester er 06:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Look up the word "antedate" please - I've changed my above comment to include a wiktionary link for your convenience - Atom came after RSS. --Random832(t c) 21:22, 7 February 2007 (UTC) and my point was, "can link to media" is NOT the sum total of what enclosure does.

Just a little non-encyclopedic context for Atom. Atom was at most a project (called Echo IIRC), not a product, at the time of Bloggercon 1 (October 2003), when Adam Curry plus Dave Winer plus audiobloggers Chris Lydon and Harold Gilchrist plus tech geniuses like Kevin Marks all got into the same rooms and had conversations that led to "podcasting" becoming popular. The audiobloggers in the room were already using the enclosure feature of RSS 2.0 at that time. After that event, I started working for Feedster, one of the early blog-search engines--it worked by polling the Weblogs.com ping-server (maybe others too, this wasn't my end of the company) to see which blogs had updated and then polling the RSS feeds of those blogs for new content. I can well remember our dismay when the Atom fork showed up first in Mark Pilgrim's blog, later in Blogger and MovableType--meaning that Feedster's search engines and our aggregator (and everybody else's aggregators) had to be able to parse (n + 1) different kinds of feeds whereas before we had gotten by parsing just RSS 1.0 and 2.0 and .91 and .92 and ...maybe I'm forgetting somebody? Anyway, to claim that Atom had enclosures before RSS 2.0 is simply absurd. If fellow-Wikipedians want to keep arguing with Nirelan on this talk page, I salute your tolerance and energy. But will somebody please block him from repeatedly vandalizing the article? betsythedevine 21:50, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I see that you now acknowledge that Dave only did it after someone else so I am happy. Nirelan

The (well-documented) claim generally made for Dave is that he created (in 2000) the enclosure element for RSS, which the first audioblogs and later the first "podcasts" relied on. betsythedevine 02:21, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

He most certainly did not make enclousures! Tristan Louis did!

Tristan Louis _invented_ them, Dave Winer _built_ them. Why do you think that does not deserve mention? Your position seems to be that everyone but Dave Winer deserves credit for what they did but he doesn't deserve credit for anything he contributed to if anyone else was also involved in any way, and that seems inconsistent. --Random832(t c) 13:36, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

With all respect to Tristan Louis, here is the full text of what he did that gets cited as the "invention" of enclosures: [16]. Yes, using a special tag to link to a sound file was one two-line suggestion that Louis included iamong many others. But the word "enclosure" never appears. It was Dave's decision, not Tristan's, to generalize the concept of linking to any media file from RSS. If we were using what Tristan Louis invented, then you'd need to invent a new RSS tag any time you planned to link to a different media type--Tristan proposed separate tags for "sound" and "video." betsythedevine 16:03, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

The diff

Well - here's the results of today's "storm" - [diff] - I like to think that at least something net positive came out of this - the article is better than it was before. --Random832(t c) 01:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

When looking at this diff, be aware that some of the info was split out into the linked "Main article"s for the subsections. I don't know how much should be here and how much there, but just be aware if restoring content that it may not have been actually deleted, just moved. 63.107.91.99 02:44, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Great work! The article has been greatly improved by the addition of so many references, although I still think a few parts that were deleted should be restored--see below. betsythedevine 03:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Restoring information about Weblogs.com

I have just re-added part of the earlier Weblogs.com info that I think is particularly relevant to Dave Winer as opposed to material that belongs only to the Weblogs.com article.

First, the flame war surrounding Dave's ending free hosting at Weblogs.com keeps getting re-visited ( e.g. [17] )--so we might as well try to frame it in enclopedia-quality terms with a direct quote from a contemporaneous encyclopedia-quality source.

Second, Dave's sale of Weblogs.com for $2.3 M made all the major trade papers at the time, and quite a few of those stories are still online: [18], [19], [20] and more. In the small world of blogging and software design, so few of anyone's achievements or successes get such recognition--surely when something rises to this level we shouldn't let Nirelan succeed in deleting it from Dave's biography. betsythedevine 03:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreement

Listen, you said we have to agree that what goes on that article is correct and everyone agrees on what I put there. We all know that some of you are Dave's friends and if you put something like he pioneered RSS you can tell someone that knows the truth that you didn't say he invented it, but you can tell people that don't know the truth that he is responsible for it. You are trying to give things vauge wording so you can associate things with him that he may support. He cleary did or did not do the things I put in the article theres no vauge opinions. --Nirelan Nirelan

What is true that you "put on there"? That Kevin Marks invented podcasting in 2003 at Bloggercon? When the history of podcasting goes back to 2000? Question: what was RSS 2.0 released? What's the difference between, Rich Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication? To say that enclosures existed in another syndication format is true, but ti doesn't change that fact that we all use RSS 2.0 which was initially released as an update to previous versions created by both Winer and others, and RSS 2.0 is what we're all using? He's not "responsible" for podcasting, he didn't invent it, no one person invented it, I think that is why it is both important to keep it that way, and cool that it really is that way! You keep referring to things you "put in the article" well Nirelan, here is something you "put in the article",

I didn't remove the line, but it is inaccurate and misleading and should be removed, or at least substantially modified. The RSS 2.0 enclosure element is neither necessary or sufficient for podcasting (the same role is covered in Atom and for that matter RSS 1.0). Winer did add this element to RSS 2.0, but the facility it provides was already available in web standards (any URI/link can potentially have a media object representation, and hence act as an enclosure, this can be determined using HTTP content negotiation). The promotion of the podcasting mode of media delivery (in which Winer played a major role) was considerably more significant than any implementation detail.

Why would anyone put this in the main article and not on the talk page? Plus it was posted with a bogus name, no sig like someone else I know who likes to edit this article. ;)

To say that you don't get it, would be more than fair. It's a disappointment that you seem to think that some of us are Dave Fanboys. I think that anyone who reads Dave disagrees with his strong opinions as often as they are inclined to agree. You may not know this, but this article is quite old, it's history has been troubled because he does tend to be a polarizing figure. In fact, in much earlier versions of this article existed about a 1/2 dozen quotes by famous people about Dave Winer. Half of them were positive, half where quite critical. That was a great way of dealing with the subject of this article in a real and human way, inherently ref'd by the people who said them themselves.

Obviously you are not a fan of Dave Winer, maybe he's even posted about you and you are upset? Seriously though, stop wreaking havoc on this article because you think it gives him undue credit. I implore you, I think others do also. Read the articles for Adam Curry, Kevin Mark, hell look at what is says for Tristan Louis

"In the early 2000s, Louis was involved in the development community surrounding RSS and podcasting, proposing a number of amendments to the specifications of the time. The proposal included creating a date element for every item in an RSS feed and provided the theoretical framework to distribute data files over an RSS channel, anticipating what is now known as podcasting."

Many people worked on what would become podcasting, nowhere in this article does it say he is the one guy who is responsible for it. You say that Kevin Marks invented podcasting, how could you give him all the credit if RSS was invented by Guha? This article didn't even have the graduation year of his High School at Bronx Science, if you go to that page, he's not listed as Alumni. There are too many big holes in this article to argue over the degree to which he helped/pioneered/created/developed/assisted in the evolution of podcasting, but he did release the 1st RSS 2.0, yes, the spec has evolved with help from him and others, who are fairly credited, but we're all still using RSS 2.0. Please sign your post. 4x~ :) Tester er 06:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

And can someone who knows the history of both, please do major edits to include detailed information on Winer and BloggerCon and the impact and Winer related history regarding OPML, someone should definitely also expand the article for Radio Userland. Thanks to Betsy and others who help improve this article.Tester er 06:14, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Tester I have no problem saying he supported RSS or something ,but you are making him sound more important than he was. In the opening paragraph it says "Winer was the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature, one of several necessary ingredients for podcasting at the time it first emerged[3]" then in the podcasting section it says "special "audio" and "video" tags in RSS Feeds to link to specific file types was proposed in 2000 in a draft by Tristan Louis." Tristian Louis cleary did it before Dave. - Nirelan

<Sigh> If you read it again, it says Dave is the one who wrote and released RSS 2.0 incorporating older versions. We all still use RSS 2.0. Tristan Louis proposed the idea yes, but in 2000, not until later, Summer of 2002 was RSS 2.0 released. Sorry but, why haven't you been blocked from impeding the progress of this article? Tester er 17:14, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

OPML

OPML the article says "Originally developed by Radio UserLand as a native file format for an outliner application, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of RSS feeds between RSS aggregators." Where is the proof that he was the one that made it there? -- Nirelan

~~the OPML article also mentions, e.g., his proposal for validation, etc - why doesn't that at least qualify for "contributed significantly"? --Random832(t c) 16:43, 8 February 2007 (UTC)~~

He's got a point, at least as it stands. Can someone get a reference on Winer's personal contribution to OPML so we can put it in there? (note to Nirelan: a less controversial way to do this would be to write {{cn}} after the OPML statement (and, maybe, delete it after a week if no cite is provided) , NOT to delete it with no explanation.) --Random832(t c) 16:52, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

OPML was created in 2000 by Radio Userland , during which time Dave was CEO^[8] working on centralized RSS news aggregators and content management. He also released a beta OPML validator.^[9] and wrote the first OPML 2.0 spec available for public DRAFT.^[10]. It should also be noted that in the main article for OPML the 1st "see also" is guess who? Nirelan, "prove to us" who else, besides David Winer created OPML. I mean, Winer does own OPML.org and FWIW- OPML is about outlining content in structured trees, to say its about lists of RSS feeds is not entirely correct. Random He didn't just "propose" validation, he wrote the beta validator^[11]. Not mentioning alot about OPML in this article is like leaving out the podcasting stuff. Tester er 17:11, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree it needs to be mentioned, I'm just saying that cites are necessary since this is clearly a contentious article, even if Nirelan's gone someone else will just come along in six months and it's better to have cites. I did put back in the mention of it with {{cn}}, and it should be fairly easy to find a cite - someone also needs to write a section about it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Random832 (talk • contribs) 17:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC).

I can't believe Nirelan is seriously proposing that Dave Winer is not the author of OPML. That's such a ridiculous claim. The 2.0 draft spec claims authorship by "Dave Winer, Berkeley, California". "I am both the designer of the OPML format and the author of this specification." Both specs http://www.opml.org/spec and http://www.opml.org/spec2 are signed "DW". The claim that he didn't create OPML seems to me to require some extraordinary support. Is there anyone else who claims to have created it? I can't find any such thing. (I wouldn't be surprised if Nirelan claimed that "DW" might not really be Dave Winer now. That seems to be the level of argument here.) 207.180.187.46 18:32, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree with the above comment. Dave created and named OPML during his time at Userland Software. Period. I also don't think he can fairly demand that we prove this and that, everyone but Nirelan seems to be citing sources that are publicly accepted and available. Nirelan, if Winer did not author OPML, who did? It dawns on me that all of this technical "Who wrote what" discussion is really tolerant of Nirelan, I mean, let's discuss it sure, but if you go to the publicly available CV for Dave Winer it lists all of his major accomplishments as well as vocational experience, education etc. Very few people as public as Dave Winer are going to claim credit for the kinds of things he does in his CV knowing full well that it can be disputed and cause irreparable damage to both credibility and reputation. All of it can be proven or he'd never post it so boldly, this may be my opinion, but I think it is worth noting.

2002: RSS 2.0, sole author.

2001: RSS 0.92, sole author.

2000: SOAP 1.1, co-author, with Microsoft and IBM.

2000: OPML 1.0, sole author.

1999: RSS 0.91, co-author, with Netscape.

1998: XML-RPC, co-author, with Microsoft.

Pretty cut and dried, and all of this matches up with his work history as well. I do think that Netscape's Rich Site Summary get's a bit shafted in this, but only because Guha, and not Netscape inclusively is given so much credit in this area. Betsy had a great point before about this very issue.Tester er 18:57, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

"© Copyright 2000 UserLand Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved." That is from the OPML 1 page. I'll admit that the second one says he is the sole developer, but It was clearly copyrighted by Userland before Dave claimed to be the sole author. --Nirelan

On inclusion of RSS 0.9 author in lead para, etc

I don't think it's appropriate to shift the focus of the lead paragraph of Dave Winer's own article to other people's accomplishments. This should be mentioned briefly in the section of this article about each respective thing, and of course, the RSS article itself (etc) would tell the whole story. --Random832(t c) 16:43, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

If working on it and not only inventing it is important why can't we list the inventor's name? It seems that someone is just trying to promote Dave. -- Nirelan

The inventor's name can be and is listed at the RSS (file format) article, and could be added to the section in this article further down that deals with Winer's contributions to RSS. Listing it up top just bloats the lead para with information that's not directly relevant to the subject of the article. --Random832(t c) 16:49, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

It seems like such a short time ago that somebody else was trying to insert into this article the information that Dan Libby "really" invented RSS at Netscape. With all respect to Libby, and to Guha as well, where is the verifiable, encyclopedia-quality source stating that either of them did. I look at the Wikipedia article for Ramanathan V. Guha and I find the only source given for the statement that he invented RSS is his own claim made to Marc Andreessen. This seems like a very slender basis for trying to insert that claim into this article even once, let along every time RSS is mentioned. betsythedevine 17:19, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I took the RSS article at face value - I've added {{citecheck}} so people there can check these and find more appropriate references if applicable, or otherwise remove the claims --Random832(t c) 17:28, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

More on the "inventor" of RSS--here's Dan Libby in August of 2000 saying "I was the primary author of the RSS 0.9 and 0.91 spec." [21] Libby makes no mention of Guha's being the "inventor" of RSS, although he does mention the usefulness of "guha's RDFDB and similar tools". To be clear, nobody is claiming that Dave Winer single-handedly "invented" RSS. But the claim that Guha or Libby "invented RSS" is a not-very-well-documented oversimplification of events that took place long ago, at the very beginning of the complex history of RSS. betsythedevine 19:40, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

"I don't think it's appropriate to shift the focus of the lead paragraph of Dave Winer's own article to other people's accomplishments." Maybe you should list things that he was more than just a "contributor" in the lead paragraph.-- Nirelan

That would be not accurate Nirelan. He was in fact the sole author of many of the formats so to say merely contributor would not be accurate.Tester er 18:59, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Microsoft's XML-RPC?

I just remove the word "Microsoft's" before XML-RPC in the top of the main article because it is not accurate. XML-RPC was "first created by Dave Winer of UserLand Software in 1998 with Microsoft." This has been understood for quite some time, thus XML-RPC is not "Microsoft's" at all. That's why I removed it. I also added OPML back in with a ref to the article in Wikipedia on OPML that clearly states its origin also. I think Nirelan should stop blanking out data if cannot prove it is false or somehow not accurate.Tester er 19:13, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Tester, how can you say something like that? Even Dave's site disproves that. "That's not exactly true. Before folklore becomes reality, XML-RPC was originally, privately, called SOAP, when Don Box and I were working with Bob Atkinson and Mohsen Al-Ghosein at Microsoft, in early 1998.

UserLand had a protocol before that called "RPC", I announced it in DaveNet, and they asked if I'd like to work with them on this. " http://www.xmlrpc.com/stories/storyReader$555 You can cleary see that Userland had a protocol called RPC ,but XML-RPC is something that Micorsot invited other people to help them make. -- Nirelan

Request for comment on Nirelan's edits

Would users, including Nirelan if he wishes to do so, please add their own comments to the RfC page [22]. betsythedevine 20:55, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

After the IP address 70.104.126.193 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) got a final vandalism warning, Nirelan has re-started the clock by making edits using a different IP address, 71.244.175.212 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log). In order for anyone to act on the RfC, some user other than me has to add information regarding these incidents and how we have tried to resolve them here. Otherwise, the RfC gets deleted 48 hours after it was filed. betsythedevine 01:02, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Besty, please tell the truth. I was cleared of the vandalism by the first admin you went to ,who is obviously your friend btw, and instead of talking in the discussion tab you have gone from admin to admin in a desprate attempt to block me. -- Nirelan

Nirelan, please tell the truth. User:Ganfon was approached by User:Testerer and not by me. I only learned later that this interaction occurred and that you had succeeded in persuading Ganfon that you were just trying to "improve" the article--you claimed that those of us who oppose you are just "fanboys" of Dave Winer. [23] Ganfon later admitted on my talk page that he/she looked at just a few of your recent edits where you had just changed a word or two without knowing about all your page-blanking, multiple reverts of other users' consensus, etc. I don't know Ganfon or Testerer or anybody else here--friendliness and civility between editors is supposed to be the norm here. What you are doing is against the policies of Wikipedia and also against the spirit of Wikipedia and I will keep on trying to stop your vandalism. betsythedevine 16:44, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Update on RfC: Nirelan (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and his two sock-puppet IPs 70.104.126.193 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) and 71.244.175.212 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) were blocked from editing Wikipedia for 96 hours. [24] Less than 12 hours after Ryulong blocked all three, Nirelan has registered yet another sockpuppet to continue vandalizing this article. betsythedevine 16:44, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Living Videotext

When you insist on giving Dave credit for things he did not create ,like RSS, and will not even make an article about a company he created you are clearly biased. -- Nirelan

When you persist in violating WP:NPA and WP:FAITH by accusing everyone here of being biased, I hope you don't mind if I post here the comments you yourself wrote on Dave Winer's blog on the very day you started vandalizing this article, January 23 ( [25] )

I would like Dave to admit that he did not create or play any part in the creation of RSS, blogging, outliners, or podcasting.

Dave I have listed your wikipedia entry as an article proposed for deletion. You got an audience by implying that you either created or played an important role in the development of the technologies I listed. However, many people can show that you did not.

For example, today you implied that podcasting has some connection to Harvard when it clearly does not. You have been trying to tie yourself to that technology since Adam Curry invented it.

This is the POV you have brought to this article, wasting the time of many hard-working edits as you try trick after trick to carry out some personal feud against Winer. And I might add that, judging from your contributions so far, you don't seem to know or care much about the history of "RSS, blogging, outliners, or podcasting." Your only interest in any of these seems to be to try to find some obscure blogpost somewhere suggesting that someone other than Dave Winer should get the entire credit. betsythedevine 17:03, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Nirelan2

I have reported Nirelan for sockpuppetry. --Random832(t c) 16:59, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Random I never said that wasn't me. Besty broke the rules by going to a different moderator after the first one said I was trying to contribute to this article. -- Nirelan

You lied to that first moderator and he admitted his mistake. And, the appropriate action to take is NOT to create another account, but to post {{unblock}} on your user talk page. --Random832(t c) 17:19, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Random832. betsythedevine 17:36, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

What a shame we have to deal with this instead of just focusing on a simple and accurate Bio. Thank you Random, Betsy, others who've vastly improved this article, even over the last week. And yes, it was I who 1st contacted Ganfon for help, not Betsy. All in all, I think this article is better today than it was a week ago, hopefully it will improve next week and...Tester er 18:16, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I have cited what I put there. You guys have broken many rules including removing information that was proven to be true because I cited the sources and you went from moderator to moderator. -- Nirelan

Nirelan, nobody is removing "information" but you. Way more than 3 reverts have been done by all of us on your repeated attempts to put "Microsoft's" in front of XML-RPC and "Netscape's" in front of RSS 2.0. When you keep re-inserting those claims, you are trying to add POV, not information.

Your "citation", which does not support either of your additions, and with which you attempted to replace an encyclopedia-quality source, is a commercial page of unknown authorship with no footnotes, no authority, nada. [26]. I might add that your citation gives much more credit to Dave Winer for the history of RSS than you do. People here have cited many different rules that you and your sockpuppets have broken, most trivially the WP:NPA and WP:3RR. Wikipedia has many different resources available for trying to get admins to deal with a disruptive user--in fact, those pages are a bit of a labyrinth that I'm having a hard time finding my way around. Trying to defend Wikipedia against POV vandalism and sockpuppetry is not against any rules that I know about. betsythedevine 19:04, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Betsy one of the pages I cited is from Dave's company!-- Nirelan

Nirelan, Wikipedia has rules and policies about what kind of pages are "encyclopedia-quality" sources and what kind are not. But I don't want to break the 3RR myself, so I will leave your latest reversion for somebody else to deal with. I must add, however, that the changes you keep re-making amount to your many-more-than-three times reversions of corrections that other users have made to your misstatements. betsythedevine 19:25, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Besty, there are other links to Userland sites in this article. Why is my link from the site not encyclopedia quality when the same company's content has clearly been used before? -- Nirelan

Nirelan's latest sockpuppet Nirelan2 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has already made 6 reverts with this new username to Dave Winer:

With all these reverts, Nirelan2 keeps trying to make three changes to the summary of Dave Winer's bio, all three of these changes calculated to reduce or remove credit to Dave for technologies he has been part of.

Item 1. The summary already very much understates Dave's role when it says he "contributed" to RSS. But Nirelan keeps trying to reduce that credit even further, so that Dave is said to have contributed to "Netscape's RSS". Even if RDF and/or RSS .91 were invented at Netscape, which abandoned those technologies 15 years ago, there is no reason to describe RSS as "Netscape's" --except if your goal is to muddy technology history and to give all credit to anybody but Dave Winer.

Item 2. Dave did major work toward creating XML-RPC and so did some people at Microsoft. But there is no reason for Dave's bio summary to refer to XML-RPC as "Microsoft's XML-RPC." It isn't, in any sense, the creation or the possession of Microsoft. So why insert "Microsoft's" into Dave's bio summary? No reason, except to muddy the historical waters and make Dave's technical contributions look unimportant.

Item 3. Dave's contributions to podcasting have been many, but the one that got into his bio summary was that he first "implemented" the enclosure tag. That is, he modified RSS to use it, his company modified its blogware to enable it, his company modified its aggregator to let their users access audioblog posts. Nirelan and his sockpuppets have removed, many times, a simple sentence saying Dave first implemented enclosure tags. Their argument--somebody else proposed "sound" and "video" tags, therefore Dave made no contribution to podcasting.

Well, these are only the latest of the changes Nirelan has been trying to make here--aside from his early antics of blanking pages, removing sections, etc. This is not a content dispute. This is an effort by a multiply-banned user to insert his POV into the article about somebody with whom he has a feud, and to do so in such a way that he will be able to damage that person's online reputation. We should never let Wikipedia be used as a weapon this way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by betsythedevine (talk • contribs) 21:36, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry I left off my sig, I must have forgotten to add the right tilde-ness. betsythedevine 21:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

"Any reasonable reader, reviewing the history of this page..."

User:MarkBernstein speaks for most of us here, in hisresponse to the RfC on Nirelan [27]

Any reasonable reader, reviewing the history of this page in recent weeks, would conclude that Nirelan is eager to minimize Dave Winer's accomplishments, rather than to report them. If the page can be erased: good. If not, can entire sections be erased? If not, can each sentence in each section be erased? Can any other contributor be assigned credit? If so, all credit be assigned to the collaborator. The community has been more than patient with Nirelan, who is clearly willing to pay any price and expend as much of the community's time as possible, in order to accomplish an essentially negative result that clearly seems to be based in some personal grievance or grudge. MarkBernstein 15:23, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

betsythedevine 20:09, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

"Any reasonable reader, reviewing the history of this page in recent weeks, would conclude that Nirelan is eager to minimize Dave Winer's accomplishments,"

Exactly. This is what all of us, who (imho) are being far to diplomatic in this situation must feel. This article is full of this kind of vague language 'He created some and contributed significantly to the rest of these popular dialects'.

With all due respect to everyone helping, who wrote this dung? This says nothing, dialects? How is it possible that one user can entirely ruin an article. Dave was the sole author, creator and inventor of many things. He, like many, many others on the internet is also an opinionated loudmouth. This divisiveness and his often polarizing vibe have been characterized well in this article with real life quotes from associates and people who can say it better than any of us can. Yet, we've all allowed Nirelan, Nirelan2, Danja, various IPs all equaling one, very determined person to destroy what should be an informative and easy to write wiki. Winer is a very public figure, his CV is easily found and verifiable. Yet Nirelan and his various masks have essentially raped the experience, and though he never is able to offer any proof of anything, I'm desperately trying to use work safe language here, he's a troll. That's it. A Troll and I have a feeling if he were to be blocked somehow, this article would sort itself out just fine. Tester er 07:35, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I am not Nirelan! As far as I can remember I have only made one constructive edit of the entry, which was promptly reverted. Since Betsythedevine disputed my neutral pov, I won't attempt any more edits. Danja 08:44, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

It could also be said : "Any reasonable reader, reviewing the history of this page would conclude that certain editors are eager to maximize Dave Winer's accomplishments". While it sounds like Nirelan has been committing acts of vandalism, the fact remains that this page still reads like a piece of PR. Attempts to correct inaccuracies associated with Winer's contributions are generally met with reversion. Sure, block Nirelan, but until Winer's personal friends (and sycophants) acknowledge their bias and back off, this entry will remain poor quality. Danja 08:44, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Nirelan aka Nirelan2 aka Nick Irelan aka Nick Irelan aka a couple of sock IPs has been blocked from editing for a few days. In one of those edits, he replaced the entire Dave Winer article with a talk comment previously made and signed by Danja aka Danny Ayers, hence Testerer's misapprehension. What Nick Irelan and Danny Ayers have in common is the belief that Dave Winer's bio should be modified so that his contributions, no matter how many encyclopedia-quality references vouch for them, should be made to sound as unimportant as possible. What I would like to see this article contain is an accurate and well-sourced account, not an inflated one. It's understandable that an accurate bio reads like inflated PR to people who have a strong anti-Dave POV. The inclusion of a short section devoted to criticisms of Dave Winer, balanced (as is Wikipedia policy) by statements of the opposite POV, was intended to satisfy people who wanted the anti-Dave POV to get included. But surely the most interesting and notable stuff about Dave Winer is what he's done, not what people said about him. betsythedevine 11:42, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the (partial) correction Betsythedevine. However the statement that I hold the belief that Dave Winer's bio should be modified so that his contributions, no matter how many encyclopedia-quality references vouch for them, should be made to sound as unimportant as possible is a blatant untruth, and does little for your own credibility. Danja 00:22, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Another View on Winer's Contributions

This viewpoint may be worth considering:

My overall view of Dave Winer is that he has brilliant ideas ahead of their time and then does such poor implementation that other people must send years cleaning up the mess created by the early adopters on the basis of his half-written, barely-thought-out specifications. Atom cleans up his broken idea of RSS. SOAP was supposed to clean up XML-RPC although it made the situation worse… As Don [Box] says in the talk you referenced: “The whole world is living with the arbitrary decisions that Dave Winer made when he rolled out of bed that morning.”

http://www.kintespace.com/rasx37.html

Danja 09:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

That would be neat and anecdotal if 1) it wasn't just some random blog comment or 2) if the blog itself was perhaps even in the top 200,000 over at Technorati? Which it's not.Tester er 18:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, if only more people could come up with brilliant ideas and then code them in such perfect shape that nobody ever criticizes the work or wants to implement it differently. betsythedevine 11:42, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

In fact, if we match up the viewpoint that Dave is a brilliant but too-quirky creator whose ugly creations require major rescue-work -- against the viewpoint that Dave is nothing more than (to quote Danja) than "a contributor to several popular XML dialects", with the clear implication he played a major role in none of them [28]-- isn't there some kind of contradiction here? betsythedevine 14:23, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I think there are definitely contradictions in the double speak. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Testerer (talk • contribs). 12 February 2007.

If this were a normal Talk page, untroubled by furor, we would probably be discussing with User:Danja how to get more information about Paul Prescod's comment, reported in the page at kintespace.com that he referred to above [29]. As it stands, there's nothing more we can do here, until we find out what 'broken ideas' in RSS (file format) Prescod feels have been cleaned up in Atom. If there are documented weaknesses in RSS, and they are described in reliable sources, we could discuss them. EdJohnston 18:20, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

It's entirely possible for the rivals and detractors of almost ANY software developer to make the argument cited here. I have personally heard this argument advanced against both Tim Berners-Lee (who contributed to the popular dialect known as the Web) and Ward Cunningham (who invented the wiki), not to mention Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, who invented hypertext. This is an absurd standard, impossible to meet. Just as, in retrospect, some aspects of the Web and the wiki might have been designed more cleverly or implemented with more grace and style, not all of Winer's designs were perfect. That they were important and influential is, I think, incontestable. MarkBernstein 19:25, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

EdJohnston, the issues with RSS 2.0 are well documented on the web (e.g. how should you treat markup in titles? No-one knows.) Mark - fair point. However I personally think the quote above is noteworthy, firstly because the views expressed were made on the public web, and secondly that Prescod and Box are highly respected figures in the Web/XML development community - Box having worked on SOAP alongside Winer. A bizarre aspect of the discussion here is that while Winer has been responsible for imaginative, hugely influential and original technical work - such as Frontier - there's an awful lot of effort going into inflating his technical role in developments like RSS where his contribution was primarily promotional. The quality of this entry really isn't going to improve while it's protected by the subject's friend and assorted (ill-informed) sycophants. Danja 00:13, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Assume good faith? Civility? MarkBernstein 16:00, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Danja, I agree that Dave's "promotional" contribution to RSS (over some 15+ years) outstrips his technical contribution to it--and everyone else's technical work on it also. Just about any stripped down system of tagging *could have* enabled the form-free content-repurposing that lets Robert Scoble read 10 million blogs per day. Even setting aside aggregators and ping-server search tools, how about convincing the NYT to let us bloggers create un-vanishing RSS links to their older content, previously all tucked away under pay-per-view? But that's my POV, and doesn't belong in the article, any more than your POV does.

What I don't understand or agree with is the efforts by many to edit an article that's labeled "Dave Winer" so that, instead of describing Dave's contributions, it skimps them while naming all those who came before or after him. The biography of Albert Einstein, for example, doesn't include praise of Isaac Newton, Ernst Mach, or the Michelson-Morley Experiment. Surely it makes more sense to describe what Dave Winer did in this article, meanwhile referring people who want more history to articles such as History of podcasting or RSS (file format)#history? And those historical articles should indeed, I agree, contain a full and well-sourced account of the many people who made contributions to technical innovation as well as to those format's popularity.

I am at peace with being called Dave Winer's friend (although it would be more telling if you could cite one of my edits that tries to inflate his bio as opposed to my edits aimed at deterring vandalism) but I doubt that the Wikipedians who have been outraged by Nirelan's antics are all "sycophants" of Dave Winer. betsythedevine 01:46, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Betsythedevine, it sounds like we're actually in agreement over something! This entry shouldn't be about RSS or podcasting or whatever, but Winer's contributions to the field. The problem I suppose is the tendency of people to focus on the technology (and look for a sole inventor), and it's easy to miss the persons actual contribution. While it would be accurate to say that Winer was the author of the RSS 2.0 spec and Einstein wrote a couple of pieces on relativity, their contributions to the respective fields is substantially different. There isn't any real innovation in XML-RPC or OPML, they're both just well-known ideas (RPC and outlines) expressed using a particular format/protocol (XML/HTTP). The ideas in RSS were well-established by the time Winer got hold of them. Even the technical aspects of podcasting don't represent any real creative input - if you trace back the history, you'll find Marc Canter begging Winer for tags to deliver media back in 1998 - and implementing that is a no-brainer in XML. But Winer has contributed significantly to the web, through Userland's applications and his clever evangelism, to the current generally easy-entry approach to content management and delivery. Would all this have happened without him? Probably, and it could be argued even quicker. But that's hypothetical, not historical. This is considerably more important than the markup he used. So while he didn't invent syndication or blogging (or outlines, or "the two-way web"), he has played an influential role. This should be acknowledged in this entry, along with his personal history. An accurate biographical piece wouldn't be complete without noting his gargantuan ego, eccentric and somewhat bipolar personality and the clashes that it's caused. Anyhow, I've got things I'd rather do than argue about someone's biography (it's remarkably easy to get sucked into this), so I'll leave this entry in your capable hands ;-) Danja 08:48, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

The final sentence above is wildly [WP:POV] and intrinsically unverifiable. There is no reason for the biography of a living computer scientist to discuss his personality, any more than Einstein's biography should discuss his cooking or his painting. MarkBernstein 16:00, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I accept the (penultimate) sentence is [WP:POV], but don't think my opinion is exceptional (Google is your friend). If Einstein's cooking or painting had a significant impact on his life and work, then I would expect them to be mentioned in his biography. Danja 16:48, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Radio 8

Sometimes you can't argue with a picture.

From Yesterday's SN

"Here's a screen shot of the RSS enclosures prefs page from Radio 8. As you can see from the timestamp at the bottom of the page it was last modified on 11/24/2001. It was created some time before that. Adam Curry, who wrote iPodder, three years later, was an avid user of this software."

I know it is (for some reason) fun to go round and round with people you call "fanboys" over what Dave Winer did and didn't do. But just for a moment, let us ask ourselves; what if Dave was a part of this conversation? How easily would people try and discredit his work or diminish the roles he has played in Blogging, syndication and podcasting? I posted the quote and pic from yesterdays SN, because it's Dave Winer trying to help others fill in the gaps that they may have and perhaps answer some questions. It really is true, sometimes you can't argue with a picture.Tester er 18:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I rest my case. Danja 23:26, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

What Case? That we should consider what we write about real people, and how they perceive it's accuracy? I think we all know that you and Nirelan, if not the same person, seem to want to dicsredit and strip Dave Winer of any credit he might possibly deserve. We all are working on this article because, obviously we are interested in the subject matter, I'm not working on the wiki for tangerines because frankly I don't care. To criticize editors for being readers (which is what I think your point is) is absurd. Can I not fix information about the launch of Gizmodo because I'm a reader? I don't really even like that blog, it may be one of 300 feeds I subscribe to.

You rest your case? What case? That Radio 8 and the SS posted sorta proves that in 2001, Radio 8 used earlier versions of RSS w/ media enclosures to enable the automation that many associate with podcasting? Tester er 06:23, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

What Dave Winer's biography should and shouldn't say

I don't dispute that a product from Winer's company was able to do the automation that many associate with podcasting back in 2001. What I dispute is this being framed as "Dave invented podcasting". The use of the enclosure element in feeds is the implementation that became popular, and Radio 8's support obviously helped this - sure, both aspects involved Winer in a big way. But there were (are) many other ways of implementing the same functionality, and it wasn't until around 2004 that podcasting really took off. This suggests there were other factors involved. Winer's blog may not be the best place to look for reliable information on the topic as he tends to spin such things (e.g. his Dave-centric RSS history, his refusal to acknowledge that Ben Hammersley first coined the term "podcasting" - Hammersley being on Winer's paranoic "monsters" list). For what it's worth I'm not especially interested in the subject of this entry, but did spend around a year researching RSS and related technologies for a book. When I encountered this entry I noticed that not only was it inaccurate on many technical points, it also gave exclusive credit to Winer for developments which involved other contributors. I now attribute this to naive, unskeptical piping of material from Winer's blog by his followers - exactly as you appear to recommend. Danja 11:09, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Danja, this article does not say, did not say, and should not say "Dave invented podcasting". And although the NYT among others have referred to Dave as the "inventor" of RSS, I also think that's misleading. (And it's even more oversimplified and misleading when people claim that "Ramanathan V Guha invented RSS." )

But if you look at the pre-Nirelan state of the article on January 23, it doesn't make either of those claims! It doesn't say Dave "invented" podcasting. It doesn't say Dave "invented" RSS. The only occurrence of the word "invented" is in a direct quote from Tim Bray, which Bray himself added: [30].

There's an urban myth out there, like the myth that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet [31], that Dave Winer claims he alone invented RSS, which Dave doesn't claim, and that Dave Winer claims that he alone invented podcasting, which he also doesn't claim. Does Dave get upset when people write about the history of these important technologies and imply that somebody else deserves all the credit? That's something entirely different, don't you agree?

What I see as our problem here is that this article tries, as Wikipedia articles should, to describe the contributions of the person whose bio it is. I agree with Danja that piping the details in from his (or anybody's) blog would be a bad idea, but looking at the long history of this entry I doubt that's how it got written.

I can appreciate that someone who comes to this article and expects a detailed account of the history of RSS or podcasting will feel this article is way too Dave-centric. I think we should find a more forceful way to send such readers off to the appropriate article where these things are discussed in depth.

I can also appreciate that someone who comes to this article with the hope that this article will contain some juicy sneering at Dave Winer's "claims" to invent RSS and podcasting will be disappointed. I have less sympathy with that expectation. It's not what Wikipedia is or should be. betsythedevine 14:23, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Concerning the urban myth that Winer claims he invented RSS

Again Betsythedevine, I largely agree. But re. the urban myth, like many there is a basis in fact. Winer may not have made those claims explicitly himself (he has come close), but he'll link to other people making such statements, without offering any correction. What's more his own history of RSS begins with one of his formats, and on his blog sidebar he has a blatantly incorrect quote (from O'Reilly) which suggests the same. On the other hand he's quick to talk of credit when his name is left out. Incidentally, the current entry text here is such that anyone assuming he did invent RSS would keep that illusion. Danja 15:46, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

"Incidentally, the current entry text here is such that anyone assuming he did invent RSS would keep that illusion." Er, well, anyone assuming that Dave invented RSS might kinda wonder why the entry doesn't claim he did. What would it take to satisfy you, Danja? A sentence like "Dave Winer is not the sole inventor of RSS, blogging, podcasting, the Internet, Web 2.0, sliced bread" ... wow, long sentence, now that we come to think of it.

The urban myth that Dave claims he's the sole inventor of RSS is false. Dave claims (and others agree) that he was working on RSS and on similar stuff back in the late nineties. That claim is true. That claim is all that the quote from Tim O'Reilly is meant to suggest. That claim is not adequate grounds for the kind of loud-mouthed meanness that keeps getting showered on Dave by people who believe the urban myth that Dave claims full credit for RSS and podcasting. betsythedevine 16:48, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

One last counterexample to the statement that Dave "comes close" to making claims about his role by quoting and linking to excessive praise by others: here's a very juicy example of the NY Times referring to Dave Winer in 2004 as "the inventor of R.S.S." [32]. Now look at the sidebar of Dave's blog [33] and notice that Dave does not quote that statement in the NY Times nor does he link to it. But if he's trying to establish such a claim through the words of others, then why not quote those words in the NY Times itself? Answer: the urban myth that "Dave Winer claims he invented RSS" gets passed around and re-justified when it flunks a serious truth test by people who heard it from people who heard it from people who have the same kinds of motivations as the guys who passed around "Al Gore claims he invented the Internet". betsythedevine 15:00, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Betsythedevine, while that particular quote might not appear in Winer's sidebar, he certainly did link to it: [34] and what's more he thanked the NYT specifically for the "inventor of R.S.S." line :[35] !!. Did Al Gore create such screenshots? Danja 09:17, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

He thanked the NYT specifically? He scrawled "Thx" on a screenshot, next to their comment that he's "the inventor" of RSS. C'mon, a guy wouldn't be human if he wasn't flattered to hear such a description of his role on RSS--and in the NYT yet. So he briefly blogged the existence of the article on the day it appeared--in 2004. He linked to a screenshot--didn't even front-page it. [36]

Having linked to an article, once, in 2004 is pretty darn far away from coming "close" to making false claims by linking to others who make them. Or maybe we should start a new Wikipedia category, "People who react to praise with a modest rebuttal and a long list of the others who deserve credit." There aren't many among us who could stand up to writing our thoughts on the Internet for 10 years and then having them all searched for evidence that we ever failed to live up to that standard. betsythedevine 12:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, try this punctuation: he thanked the NYT, specifically for the "inventor of R.S.S." line. This is clear, unambiguous, first-hand evidence in support of the statement I made at the top of this section (which was the bottom of the last section). But still you discount it. Your faith is way too strong, I give up. 80.104.218.207 16:11, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Danja, repunctuate as you will, that wording and your use of boldfacearound it imply a lot more than one backpaged, scribbled-on screenshot with the word "THX". To me, that "THX" reads more like "Aw, shucks" than like "YES! I am the inventor. Bwahahaha!"--but maybe we both read too much into one TLA.

To your mind, Dave's one-time, three-year-old link to the NYT article, his scribbled-on screenshot, are clear evidence that "he'll link to other people making such statements, without offering any correction." Well, it's evidence that "he's been known to link." But it's strong counter-evidence to what "he'll link" implies--that Dave makes a habitual, purposeful use of other people's inflated praise to advance false claims for himself about his role. If that were his aim, if that were his ongoing practice, he'd have to be pretty lame not to keep on pointing and pointing and pointing to that NYT quote.

My faith is not that Dave Winer belongs in the angelic category "People who always correct any excess praise." My contention in this debate has been that Dave Winer belongs in the very large human category "People whose enemies overstate their faults." Well, let's just say that we both know more facts now than we did before this long talk-thread, but we will probably keep on disagreeing.

Thanks for helping to keep our debate on-topic and civil. betsythedevine 20:30, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Concerning the POV and accuracy of differing histories of RSS

In his comment above, Danja refers to a posting by Dave as a 'Dave-centric RSS history'. This might be read as claiming that Dave overstates his own role in the creation of RSS. If you read the cited posting, it's hard to get anything like that. Every item in the list appears to be a bald statement of fact about the appearance of certain specifications. Perhaps there are other facts that could also be added to the list, but the ones listed there seem innocent enough, unless you have a reason to think some of them aren't correct. EdJohnston 18:51, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

EdJohnston, my point is not that Winer's list isn't factual*, it's that it's selective and misleading : if that is the history of RSS, then RSS began with <scriptingNews> format. Compare with this history. (* although his remarks about the "RDF header" are fairly nonsensical - that isn't how XML namespaces or RDF/XML work). Danja 22:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Danja, I looked over the new link to goatee.net that you provided above. It's hard to get anything dramatically different out of that link. I did not find myself changing my opinion very much. Curiously, the nuances of the specification stuff (and the truth about who proposed what) are actually interesting, but it's hard to sell that kind of thing as a meaningful addition to any current articles. For example, the RSS article (to which I've made some contributions) has Winer-related items, and is reasonably fair so far as I can tell, but exactly 'who-invented-what' is hardly important to an actual reader of the RSS article. They would mostly care if there were leftover ideas from the 1990s that would be truly beneficial today, and it's not clear that there any such ideas. Do you want to propose a History of RSS article?

Trolls and this Article

I think that the large group of us who've been recently working on this article have done a fine job dealing with a prolonged editing war, extended, archived discussions, and wild unreferenced allegations. We've encountered many unfounded arguments that could not even be categorized as conjecture as well as dealing with trolls and we've all been very patient. Yet this article is still in bad shape thanks to a few people who'd rather stymie rational, referenced improvement to this article than offer up any real counterpoints that would bolster their argument. When can we get on with improving this article and put aside the obtrusive and get on with the progressive. If someone wants to write a History of RSS article, do it, it will probably be merged with the main article in due time. And bogus claims made within the article or section will surely be deleted by responsible people. If you make wild claims like, Kevin Marks invented Podcasting at Bloggercon in 2003 or say that in RSS, media enclosures are no big deal because they've long since been a part of other Markup languages then that too will be deleted. If you'd rather speculate on the importance of this or to what extent someone invented a part of something, you will invariably attract some people, not unlike myself, who will take you seriously enough to discuss things to no end, but after a while they'll too get the idea that some people are just trolling, for what reason does not matter.

If someone would like to say Dave Winer came "close" to saying bla bla bla, I say to them, almost saying something doesn't count. In fact, saying someone came "close" to saying something is a rather asinine argument. At the risk of sounding heavy handed, what must we all do, the logical majority that is, to "get on with it"? Thanks to all those who've spent countless hours being patient and discussing this to such an extent that glue factories all over world are beaming at the horses being sent their way. I really think its a simple matter of a few trolls. So how can we leap over this hurdle and progress? Tester er 05:28, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Tester, the "close" sentence I included parenthetically, it had little bearing on my main argument. I don't personally think Kevin Marks invented Podcasting at Bloggercon in 2003 or that media enclosures in RSS are no big deal, but nor do I think these are "wild ideas". If you define podcasting as the full chain right down to the iPod, then Kevin Marks probably did implement first. If you consider media enclosures in RSS solely from a technical pov, then they are fairly trivial. If you want to "get on with it" then find some fresh material that sheds more light on the subject, or offer some text that is likely to get consensus support. (Funny you should mention the word troll, I get a strong feeling I'm feeding one right now). Danja 14:27, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Separate "History of RSS" article

I think your suggestion of a "History of RSS" article is excellent. There already exists a separate History of podcasting article, as a way of separating out the "who gets credit for what when" arguments that interest only a tiny number of people from information that interests a lot more people. Because the tiny number of people who care about who gets credit really do care about it a lot--and understandably so. Or maybe those sections should have names like "invention of RSS" or "early history of RSS"? By the way, this Dave Winer article could use more detailed info about his RSS role. betsythedevine 13:15, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Update--I created an article for History of web syndication technology and re-directed History of RSS there. I then moved a bunch of stuff from the RSS and Atom articles there. I'm going to go back to those articles now and try to put a summary of their history there with a link to the history page for more details. I don't look forward to getting flamed for this, but I see it as a way to improve the articles. betsythedevine 14:02, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Brave move! It is likely to be a battlefield, but at least it should help decouple the controversial stuff from entries such as this one. (btw, it does seem rather format-oriented, I haven't time myself, but it might be worth looking into other use of polling over HTTP, i.e. the protocol side of RSS). Danja 14:34, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Inventors

Since you still have technologies that Dave did not invent under the word "created" in the lead paragraph, I am going to add the inventors names once again. --Nirelan

Footnote--soon after leaving this comment, and reverting the text of Dave Winer three times to reflect his earlier edits, Nirelan was blocked indefinitely for his edit-warring on this article. betsythedevine 15:06, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Enclosures

Tristan Louis created enclosures. That means Dave wasn't the first to implement them. -- Nirelan

Tristan Louis *suggested* using a tag called "sound" to link to a sound file. I don't think many people would agree with you that this hypothetical suggestion of something named X means he has to get credit for "creating" something similar named Y. To "implement" something is to put it into practical effect. This is what Dave Winer did when he added a tag called "enclosure" to his RSS and made it possible for his company's blogware and aggregator to recognize therein a link to (among other types of files) a sound file. betsythedevine 00:19, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

"- Using special "sound" and "video" tags in RSS Feeds to link to specific file types was proposed in 2000 in a draft by Tristan Louis. [13]"- Prove that Dave implemented them before that. -- Nirelan

The article does not say that Dave Winer implemented enclosure tags before Tristan Louis proposed sound tags.

To propose something in a draft is different from implementing that something. It is even more different from implementing something that somewhat resembles something you proposed. Tristan Louis proposed sound tags--he did not implement sound tags. He did not propose, or implement, enclosure tags. Dave Winer implemented enclosure tags. That's what the article says, and it's the truth. Please stop deleting it. betsythedevine 00:43, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think Nirelan is justified in deleting the sentence on the grounds of Tristan Louis's suggestion. Nor do I think it makes much sense to call the decision to use a particular XML element implementing it - hey, I just <implemented> the implemented tag! It does seem pretty certain that Winer's company was the first to implement an automatic download feature using that element in RSS 2.0. That is the way the majority of podcasts are delivered today. I personally have my doubts about the significance of that implementation, it happened a long time before podcasting took off, it's not particularly innovative technically and the idea of delayed downloads via feeds was attributed by Winer to Adam Curry (before they fell out). But Winer did play a big role in the podcasting buzz, and perhaps the current sentence isn't such a bad way of giving him some credit. I'd rather see it more technically accurate - "necessary ingredients" isn't true, it's more of a convenience. But "first to implement the 'enclosure' feature" in itself isn't bad. Danja 23:52, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Danja, I'm glad to see you distinguishing your ideas from the vandalism of Nirelan. But --if you took your <implemented> tag and added it to some dialect of RSS, some brand of blogware, some brand of aggregator--went on beyond that to publicize its usefulness so more folks would adopt it--as Winer and Userland did all of this with the <enclosures> tag--then, I would agree you had implemented the tag. To stick a word between angle brackets is not the same as to put a new tag into "practical effect."

Yes, all the <enclosure> stuff happened long before podcasting took off. And all the CDF/RDF stuff happened long before RSS took off. Let's give people credit for the stuff they did in each case, without trying to deprive others who did other stuff of the credit for what they did before or afterward. Now, if somebody out there wants to ask stupid questions, like "But who deserves all the credit for RSS/podcasting/blogging/whatever?" Well, god help us all, because no matter what you say to them, they will hear some over-simple answer if that's all they are listening for.

My very lovable and good-natured husband Frank Wilczek is a physicist who is not and never has been feuding with anyone, AFAIK. Yet sometimes after a reporter interviews Frank, although Frank was enthusiastically trying to answer questions about the stuff he works on, the reporter goes on to publish something like "Frank Wilczek, who invented quarks and gluons...", stuff that had been developed by people Frank much admires back when he was just starting off in grad school, because some reporters just assume that if the subject talks about X, the subject must be claiming to have invented X.betsythedevine 01:12, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Betsythedevine, I take your point entirely about reporters getting the wrong end of the stick, simplifying stories and making mistaken attributions. But this is significantly different than an individual purposefully exaggerating their own work. Another Winer example: back in 1999 he claimed to have invented the collapsing-outline UI paradigm. Curiously in that piece he mentions Doug Engelbart in passing, who is generally credited with the invention some decades before. It might have been possible to put this claim to a simple mistake, Winer not having known about the previous work, had he not said elsewhere that he had been familiar with Engelbart's work at least since the 1970's. In more recent documents, Winer does give considerable credit to Engelbart, for example in this piece. However even that contains an exaggerated claim: "Frontier brought outlining to programming in the early 90s, with a script editor that worked with code in an outliner.". But the well-known (Lisp-based) emacs editor, popular amongst programmers, has had that facility apparently since 1978, and what's more Winer had already acknowledged prior art around Lisp elsewhere. As I suggested earlier, Dave Winer probably isn't the most reliable source of information on his own contributions. Danja 10:13, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Outlining

Immediately above, Danja discusses Dave Winer's role in outling, citing it as evidence that Winer chronically exaggerates his work.

As it happens, I have some knowledge of the history of outlining. I've known Engelbart and Nelson since 1987, I've worked with and written about Engelbart's NLS/AUGMENT as well as Winer's MORE, and I've managed products that competed directly with both. I'm also familiar with lots of other pertinent work in and around outliners in this era and with their creators: GUIDE (Peter Brown), TIES (Ben Shneiderman, Alan Borning), Xanadu (Ted Nelson), Boxer (Andy di Sessa), Gateway (Rosemary Simpson), Symbolics Document Examiner (Janet Walker), NoteCards (Halasz and Trigg) come quicky to mind for the 1980's.

There is absolutely no question in my mind that Winer's claim is reasonable. Engelbart's NLS is a monument, but in the late 1980's and early 1990's it was also a decayed monument, a fascinating and powerful early timesharing system that had inspired a generation of researchers -- the people now known as 'hypertext pioneers' -- but that had almost no progeny outside the laboratory and would clearly die with the PDP-10. NLS/AUGMENT was a collaborative, distributed hypertext system that possessed -- among MANY other things -- an ellision mechanism that anticipates the modern outliner. Winer's ThinkTank/MORE was a personal text processor for editing outlines (which subsequently accreted presentation tools). It was widely used, and has always had progeny. (The contemporary stretchtext solution, Peter Brown's GUIDE, packages the same tradition differently. Ted Goranson, incidentally, has published a superb, nearly book-length, review of outliners in serial form in ATPM.) There was lots of relevant work: Winer turned that work into a product. There were other products with ellision: the ones we recognize as 'normal' outliners are closer to Winer than to any of the others.

Danja's EMACS objection is easily dealt with. Stallman's original EMACS paper was, when it appeared, a brilliant and surprising effort that turned programming inside out. Instead of designing an ideal editor with optimal instructions and interface, Stallman showed that you could achieve DiSessa's vision of software that users could reconfigure to work the way they wanted, on the fly. It was a stunning demonstration and has been immensely influential. As a result, EMACS became a lot of things -- including (bizarrely at the time) a programming language. And that programming language did offer an ellision mechanism, which anticipates Frontier. You can see similar work in InterLISP editors of the period. The Smalltalk-80 browser is aiming at the same target with the same tools (and with a bigger UI budget).

Frontier, on the other hand, was (originally) a scripting environment, a replacement for the shell that was developed because the original Macintosh had no shell and people needed to do things for which DOS users used simple scripts. Outline editing had been a lab curiousity for years, a cute mode in some esoteric editors and some ambitious education systems; Winer put it at the heart of a shipping mass-market product. He took an idea that made people in the computer science education community scratch their heads (this was a *keynote* at IJCAI in 85 or 86 -- the one at UCLA) and put it into a software environment for casual computing. Frontier took stuff out of the lab and shipped it: that, in software engineering, is called "first to market". It's an achievement.

Danja, Nirelan, and all: let it be. The world is filled with people who do hard work. The endless sniping and derisory snipping that has characterized the entire discussion here is perfused with rancour and ill will toward the subject, with a hostily that has spilled at times onto those who are unwilling to join the chorus of detractors. Historians know that we can always find precedents: the hard part is recognizing what people achieve rather than in enumerating the limits of that achievement. A generous spirit should be looking for ways to acknowledge and reward work, rather constantly seeking reasons to minimize and diminish. A scholarly spirit would identify the individual's unique contribution rather than striving to shift each achievement to someone -- anyone -- else. Nothing is at stake here for you, save perhaps some tokens of respect for a colleague of whom you seem not to be overly fond. Let's have malice toward none, charity for all, and finish the work we are in: to explain who Winer is and appreciate what he has designed and built. MarkBernstein 17:02, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Mark, an eloquent summation. I hope there is some way your comment could be captured in a Wikipedia article. We have an article called Outliner which is reasonably good but very short. How about a History of outlining, for which yours could be the starting contribution? Of course there'd be the small matter of finding all the references, which could take some time. EdJohnston 18:24, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Mark, your talk of scholarly spirit and suchlike is charming. But I (like many, many other people) have been on the receiving end of hostility from Winer, and I've also wasted numerous hours working around coding problems that have arisen squarely from Winer's half-baked specifications. Like you say, the world is filled with people who do hard work. He may have made some valuable contributions, but that does not make him a saint, nor his influence necessarily positive. In the context of the Wikipedia I personally want nothing other than the information presented to accurately reflect the reality.

I don't see how your statements about the history of emacs and the commercial success of Winer's outliners change the fact that he didn't invent the collapsing outline UI (if you look at his claim it goes far beyond what we'd call outliners). His core claim was false. Also emacs certainly wasn't just the scientific curiosity you suggest. It's still a very popular development tool, with considerably broader adoption than Frontier (I use it myself, as it happens). But I'll accede to your wishes and let it be. My point this time was simply that Winer has a tendency to exaggerate his own contributions, it's not worth essays. Danja 80.104.221.203 18:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC) (hmm, lost my cookie)

History of Podcasting

From the podcasting article

"

The concept of Podcasting was suggested as early as 2000 and its technical components were available by 2001, then implemented in the program Radio Userland [37]. In 2003 regular podcasts started showing up on well-known Web sites and software support spread."

Seems like a good, concise explanation to me? I'm hoping to implement this into the Dave Winer article, considering his relationship to Userland.

I also have a few other ideas I'd like to throw out there.

I propose a vote by all in the discussion to (hopefully) remove the Dispute and Controversial Tags that loom over this article. Does anyone else think that is a good idea? A simple up or down vote should be easy enough and we can continue to clean up, improve upon and expand this article.
Secondly, speaking of expansion, I think there needs to be a trivia section, a detailed subsection on Outlining and an appropriate amount of info on Winer and OPML. Particularly the community servers that Winer hosts. That is one thing that is absent from this article. Did anyone know Winer at one time hosted Daily Source Code and Dawn and Drew. There's is also a need (imho) to explain in appropriate detail some of the highlights and details of Morning Coffee Notes, because I do not think that article is quite notable to stand on its' own and would probably be merged with this one. Notable Guests, the evolution of that show, what equipment has been used, the famous "Godcast", the podcasts that Adam Curry and Winer recorded at the onset of the podcasting boom, memorable Quotes, etc...

Bottom line, let's have a Vote please on removing the tags, I believe very few people dispute much of anything in this article and democratically we can move forward. Also, there is lots and lots of expanding to do here. Thanks! Tester er 04:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Some people will complain if you call it a 'vote' (See m:Don't vote on everything). But it's certainly acceptable to ask if anyone still has issues that they think have to be resolved before the tag can be removed. Here is the wording on the remaining tag:

{{totallydisputed}} 

Since Nirelan is not active at the present time, and since I don't object to any current claims in the article, I would be OK with removing the tag. EdJohnston 16:29, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I de-factualaccuracydisputed-ed the tag, someone else can remove it entirely if you think it's neutral enough. --Random832 16:58, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Good call on that, it's a good step, I personally won't remove the entire tag without seeing more of a consensus, if anyone else would like to be so bold, go for it, I'd just like to see some more opinions on this issue. Tester er 05:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Questionable EXT link

Eye on Winer A weblog devoted to criticism of Dave Winer

seems to be inherently not of a NPOV, it's also a rather obscure blog which may not meet the requirements of a good external link, if nothing else, the description "devoted to criticism" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as if this blog just might look for things to pick on. Not sure when it was added due to all the changes in this article, but it may be worth looking closely at. Not that links that aren't always favorable of Winer shouldn't be included, of course they should, but this one seems intentionally ANTI, maybe included here for "balance" but still, it seems rather questionable. Most importantly, is it a good place for readers to click through and gain real information about the subject? Is it actually related to Dave Winer himself, or just regularly opposes the things Dave Winer blogs about? Scripting News redirects to this article, which is a big mistake if you ask me, after all, TechCrunch doesn't redirect to Mike Arrington right? Daily Kos doesn't redirect to Markos Moulitsas Zúniga. Yet SN precedes both and, though not currently as widely read, maintains equal clout and respect in the blogging world. Someone should make an article about the history of SN. Scripting News isn't well described in this article, which is one of the problems, I think we still have a ways to go! Thoughts? Tester er 05:38, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't object to including ONE contrary link, http://www.eyeonwiner.org. It's not being used as a reference to back up any factual claim, so we don't have to qualify it as a reliable source. We have already admitted in the article that D.W. is a polarizing figure, and blogging is a rough-and-tumble world. If you don't want to include the link, perhaps put in some general comment that unfavorable views of Winer can be found on the web. EdJohnston 20:02, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Testerer that Eye on Winer is not very notable, but that link has been there for a long time. I say leave it. A general comment that unfavorable views of Winer can be found on the web? My vote is no. BTW, I just wrote up a little bit of (I hope funny) stuff about our travails on this article in my blog: [38]. I stumbled into the mess on George Washington Carver after reading some moronic gloating on Craigslist about how it had been re-edited to debunk him. But it's hilarious how similar the problem there is to what we've encountered here. betsythedevine 23:20, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Curiously, Dave Winer has begun including in the main page of scripting.com a brief list of his accomplishments. It may be of interest to those who have followed the past debates on this page:

Dave Winer, 51, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

I imagine that some of the Winer critics who have joined this Talk page would find reason to quarrel with his summary. I'd be interested to hear other views, mostly because it is relevant to our own past debates of the last three weeks. My own view is that the three quotes he offers are fair, his own summary perhaps overreaches slightly with the word 'pioneered', but is on the right track. It's easy to grant him the role of master promoter, and when he reaches for 'master inventor' then you run into more issues. But without his promotion, a lot of stuff would have happened much later, in my view. Of course, it's hard to give evidence for that kind of claim. EdJohnston 00:00, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

EdJohnston, I agree with your overall description of Winer's summary, although the O'Reilly quote is factually incorrect on almost every point. As you suggest, "pioneered" is a little strong, he was one of many, many pioneers. But that is his resumé, some self-promotion is to be expected. Putting the same viewpoint in a Wikipedia entry is different matter, as is filtering out any criticism. 80.104.218.221 16:17, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the POV of somebody's resume doesn't belong in Wikipedia.

I wonder what verb would please Dave Winer's detractors while still representing the fact of his early entry, technical influence, and longtime promotion of many things that are now widespread. "Developing" is kind of weak and weasely. "Helping to (whatever) " suggests that he worked as an assistant to some individual(s) who played a guiding role. "Promoting" implies that Dave had no role but puff-merchantry. "Johnny-Appleseeding"? "Pioneering" seems not too bad, given the alternatives. betsythedevine 01:04, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

How about using "technical influence" and "longtime promotion"? :) I think that, in all cases of the technologies we're talking about Dave made significant contributions. Using "pioneered" suggests that he used or developed the technology first, which isn't clearly true of any of them. If I were rewriting Dave's bio, as someone who is skeptical over this claims but looking for NPOV, it would look like this:

Dave Winer, 51, has made significant contributions to the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software, and is an early and long-term advocate of these technologies; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

Ianbetteridge 16:03, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Any NPOV issues remaining?

'The neutrality of this article is disputed', says the banner. A claim like this shouldn't just hang in the air with no disputer. Please speak now if you still see a problem, and indicate which section or which claim seems improper. If there are no further complaints about neutrality, it would be sensible to remove the tag. EdJohnston 19:48, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Not for me, and considering your last comment has been up for over a week with no qualms attached, I'll edit this article to improve it overall. As I have tonight, hope to see the progress stick- now that we've all discussed this to no end. =) Tester er 08:19, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Relationship to public section

I tried to go back to the archives with little sucsess. How about we only insert material that can be sourced very specifically rather than this sort of generalized statement of fact. Anyways, no idea how I ended up here but thats the beauty of Wikipedia :) --Tom 16:35, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Your change is appropriate, given the references. I have never liked the amount of hand-waving in this article. It seemed to be saying that Dave Winer is a colorful but cantankerous fellow. That's how newspapers might talk, but we need to more precise. EdJohnston 19:19, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

I also think this change is an improvement. The origin of this section's current version, IIRC, was that long ago somebody created a section called "Criticism of Dave Winer" which was about as POV as you might expect given that title. After lots of discussion, we got an admin's opinion to include something brief and balanced about Winer's "Relationship to the public", pointing out that the article's main content should not be overshadowed by the stuff in this section. Ben Houston (?) then wrote up the sentence just removed, followed by a paragraph or so quoting negative comments by Bray and O'Reilly. He asked me to write up a few positive quotes for balance, and I did. betsythedevine 02:54, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

NIrelan

Whatever the merits of NIrelan's unhappiness, it's a dispute between two parties and of little or no interest to the encyclopedia. NIrelan, a party to the dispute, has an evident conflict of interest. We're already approaching 3RR here. Sigh. —Preceding unsigned comment added by MarkBernstein (talk • contribs) 14 August 2007

I left a 3RR warning for Irelann (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log). He is the editor for whose benefit the article was semi-protected for so long. Also left a Talk message for User:Ryulong, the admin who last blocked Nirelan (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) on 18 February. Because of Nick Irelan's block evasion and use of multiple accounts, I think this qualifies for admin action without further ado. Wait to see what Ryulong has to suggest. EdJohnston 21:12, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Copyright Violation

The "blogsquatting" allegations from Nirelan are back (sigh), this time with a verbatim quote copied from Valleywag [39]. This dispute is interesting to NIrelan, but not (I think) to anyone else. It most certainly doesn't belong in the biography; it's a very minor incident.

I reverted, NIrelan reverted back. Someone else, please revert. Merits admin attention. MarkBernstein 17:56, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Mark, what part of this story do you really have a problem with? It shouldn't be the quote because there are other quotes on this page and the quote in the cybersquatting section is documented. Therefore there is no violation of copyright. Secondly, if it has been picked up by a major blog like Valleywag it is most certainly interesting to many people. (unsigned, 68.254.80.12, presumably NIrelan)

Procedurally, the section seems to quote substantially the entire Valleywag piece; this likely exceeds fair use. Second, the quotation you chose is not NPOV. But more broadly, this is an incident that is very interesting to you, but is a minor factor in the life and accomplishments of the subject.

Please do not continue to revert each editor who modifies or deletes your cybersquatting addendum. This violates the 3-revert-rule, and it's against policy. Wikipedia is not a platform for publicizing your particular concerns; if other editors do not agree with your priorities, you need to convince them on the talk page. MarkBernstein 21:11, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

I have tried to come to a consesous with the other editors here, however you and the other editors have not tried to be fair in this article. You attempt to delete anything negative about Dave. The cyber squatting problem was reported upon by a major blog. It definatly qualifies as a good source. I want to come to a consensous as much as the next guy, but if you refuse to allow information into the article that is discussed by a credible source and is properly refenced then I will not remove it.

No one is contesting the sourcing, but other editors, clearly, do not agree with you. When you write that 'you will not remove it', you appear to be asserting ownership; that's not the wiki way. MarkBernstein 22:48, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

You are absolutely right about it not being the wiki way, but the wiki way is not happening here. When something is discussed by a source that even you say is ok, the subject of the article, and is properly formatted you can not ask for it to be deleted simply because you do not like it.

It's not a question of likes or dislikes, but one of sense and proportion. Many people have traffic tickets; these aren't typically part of their encyclopedia articles. Many people have disputes with their neighbors; these aren't typically part of encyclopedia articles. I have proposed a brief, NPOV summary of the matter, but as you are far in excess of the 3RR rule already, no doubt you'll revert it, too.

Need permanent semi-protection?

My request for page protection at WP:RPP was granted here. The admins have chosen to fully protect the page through 30 August. My assumption is that, after Aug. 30, Nick Irelan will be back as an IP to start imposing his unique point of view again, regardless of what the Talk page may decide. The only future I can see for this page is permanent semi-protection, but admins are often reluctant to allow that. If you have ideas on how to deal with the situation, please propose them. EdJohnston 15:35, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Editor's Conflict of Interest

The subject of this page, Dave Winer, wrote on his blog Friday that Betsy Devine is one of his friends 1. She edits here as User:Betsythedevine and has made numerous pro-Winer edits and anti-Winer deletions 2 3 4 5 6. Is it appropriate for Wikipedia to allow a friend of the subject to edit the page in this manner? Dtdennis 16:23, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

In my view, there is less need to worry about editors who might have a COI in the case of mature articles that have had many contributors, and are on many people's watch lists. Unless you notice Betsy terrorizing other editors and bossing people around, a thing I haven't noticed. Let us know if you have a concern about one of her specific contributions. It's perfectly in order to discuss COI issues on the Talk page; I just don't see a big worry in this case. EdJohnston 16:47, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Influential workers in any field have a wide range of people they may call "friends". In one way or another, I know most of the people who work in my field; I say hello at conferences, I have dinner with them when they're in town, I buy them a beer or vice versa, I send them email. This is especially true, I think, when we think about relationships with writers and reporters! If we exclude such relationships from wikipedia, the only people who could edit biographical articles would be the individual's enemies and people who have never worked in the area. In this case, I have seen nothing less than appropriate in User:Betsythedevine's edits. MarkBernstein 17:27, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

I think the origin of this is a recent article at Eye on Winer--fans of that site perceive the Wikipedia bio of Dave Winer as unfairly sanitized, and somebody contends that I've done that all by myself, adding my POV and deleting theirs. That's not what I think I'm doing here or at any of the other pages on my watchlist. Mark and Ed, I'm grateful for your kind words and I will keep doing my best to be a part of what makes Wikipedia valuable to people who want information rather than spin.betsythedevine 17:46, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

MarkBernstein: Betsy describes herself as a "good friend" of Winer in a comment on Eye on Winer, and I think it's reasonable to take her at her word. There are 147 mentions of her name on Winer's weblog, according to a Google search I just conducted, and he even singled her out for praise once *because* of her Wikipedia editing 1. It reeks of quid pro quo to me. I wouldn't edit Winer's bio because I think he's a self-congratulatory gasbag who puffs up his own accomplishments to the point of ridiculousness, so there's no way I'd be neutral. The idea that it's acceptable for one of his close personal friends to edit it, excising criticism and inflating praise, boggles the mind. Dtdennis 20:08, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

I do not believe that betsythedevine has excised criticism that belonged in the article, and I see no evidence that she has inflated praise. Winer links to people quite a bit: Scoble has 1120 mentions, Valdemarin has about 300, Calacanis about 204. The Grateful Dead have nearly as many mentions as Devine. More to the point, Esther Dyson (another journalist) has about the same number, as do Philip Greenspun (effectively a journalist) and Tim Bray (wrt Winer, ditto). I think we're bordering on personal attack territory here, both on the editor and on the subject. If you have a particular *fact* that you believe people looking for this subject in the encyclopedia would find useful, let's discuss it. MarkBernstein 20:32, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

General observation: encyclopedias are not the place to assess praise and blame. Let's stop arguing about how we *feel* about the subject and lay out the facts that will be most useful to those consulting the encyclopedia. MarkBernstein 20:32, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Cybersquatting

I feel that the cybersquatting section is worded in a way that makes it inaccurate. It says "Winer and Nick Irelan engaged in a dispute, after Winer registered the domain NickIrelan.com." That makes it sound as if we got into a dispute only after he cybersquatted on my name. However, our disagreement began long before he began cybersquatting. Winer then registered my name as a way to retaliate.

Please edit the wiki to reflect the items that I have mentioned. -- Nick Irelan

This matter may be of great moment to you, but I think there is great doubt that it belongs in the encyclopedia. The current sentence was a compromise, intended to give you the greatest possible leeway and the most generous benefit of the doubt, while cooler heads and the better angels of our nature prevailed. This personal disagreement lies at the extreme edge of notability: if we covered every disagreement and discussion that appears in business gossip blogs like ValleyWag, we'd never see the end of it. Wikipedia is not the place to publicize your grievances or to punish those you believe to have wronged you. Please: many of us are busy people with real work to do; let's leave this be. MarkBernstein 17:40, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

The section's inaccurate as written, according to Valleywag's account. Winer registered Irelan's name in retaliation for a personal disagreement they had on Winer's blog. If you're too busy to correct the error, hopefully someone else will. Dtdennis 22:28, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree with MarkBernstein that not every dispute has to be recorded. This is Wikipedia, not Wikinews. I'd be in favor of removing the entire Cybersquatting section when protection finally gets lifted from this page. EdJohnston 00:27, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

IT is a shame that this scrap of disinformation remains in this article and is only referenced by a gossip blog entry. Someone needs to remove that promptly. Tester er 15:41, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Cybersquatting Revision

You guys were right. That section did need more not only to be worthy of Wikipedia, but to be fair. Please take a look at the new section and accept my apologies. -NickIre

The new section appears to rehash the old complaints, at greater length. I think this is an issue that matters to you, but I can't see why it belongs in the encyclopedia entry. It was mentioned (briefly) on the page during the protection interval, and attracted no support during that time. MarkBernstein 19:40, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Living Videotext

Us fighting over things like the cybersquatting section does not do this article any good. Lets leave that where it is and focus on providing information about Living Videotext. —Preceding unsigned comment added by NickIre (talk • contribs) 18:09, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

How many times can the same user be blocked?

The number of wikipedia accounts Nick Irelan has been through is fairly ridiculous. Every time one gets blocked, he makes a new one and starts doing the same things again. Surely there's a policy against that. Fuhm 21:06, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Nick Irelan started attacking this Wikipedia bio in early 2007, apparently to make some kind of point about his opinion of Dave Winer: [40].

Here are some of his previous incarnations which were blocked from editing back in February IIRC:

Nirelan (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
70.104.126.193 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
71.244.175.212 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log)
Nirelan2 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Here is an RfC from that period w:Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Nirelan. And now in August, we get NickIre (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log).

Does somebody have to go through the whole RfC process again every time an already-multiply-banned vandal gets a new nickname? betsythedevine 10:31, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Since the previous RfC involves Nirelan's edits of the Dave Winer article, we could start by adding more diffs to that one. That would help to show the long-term pattern of his activities. If a proper RFCU were created, asking the WP:CSN noticeboard to ban Irelan from editing Dave Winer is a possibility.

Another problem is that we still have the {{controversial}} template on this article. That blurs the issue for any administrators who look into this article; we should get consensus to remove that. (If you don't consider Irelan there isn't a controversy). EdJohnston 21:11, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

You forgot to mention Irelann (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) in that list above, created on Aug 14, and banned the same day. Fuhm 05:44, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

User:NickIre has been indefinitely blocked by User:Ryulong with the comment "sock evasion." Ryulong also closed the AfD debate on Nickirelan.com as Delete with the comment "the user is a sockpuppet of someone I blocked a while ago." EdJohnston 20:51, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Remove the 'controversial' tag?

Since both article and Talk page have been stable recently (except for an occasional visitor, who has been routinely blocked each time he appears), can we now remove the 'controversial' tag? If you believe the article still has problems, please explain what should be fixed. EdJohnston 00:47, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Dave Winer's thoughts on this article

I just found this recent post on Winer's blog [41]. It's mostly about Wikipedia in general, but he also mentions this article: 'my biography there is more of a vendetta, by anonymous people, who seem self-centered and immature'. Without any more specific criticism, I don't know how we can improve this article, but I thought his comments were worth mentioning all the same. Terraxos (talk) 19:40, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Dave Winer can create an account on Wikipedia. Our Talk pages are open to him. Let him share his thoughts here and explain just how we got it wrong. In a this posting on his blog he mentions a previous foray, as an IP, over to the RSS article. Does he really need to remain anonymous whenever he edits here? Presumably he's acknowleding that he made this edit of RSS. It's hard to respond to vague statements of Wikipedia's incompetence. Specifics would help. And if he can supply reliable sources to clarify his role in the creation of RSS, blogging and podcasting, those sources would be a good reason to make article changes. EdJohnston (talk) 20:55, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

If Dave Winer had created an account and attempted to participate here during the past year, NIrelan and his colleagues would have descended in droves. The discussion was long enough and bitter enough without the added fury of the subject's actual presence. Remember, that this page was spitefully RFD'd only a short time ago. In point of fact, the page is in much better shape than it was in the past, thanks to dedicated and tactful patrolling by BetsyTheDevine and others. The article as it stands unfairly diminishes Winer's role in podcasting and in RSS, but it is now (I think) defensible. But this has been achieved at great cost; I've personally checked daily for many months, as have several others. The page's history exemplifies the chronic weakness of wikipedia in biography, and why wikipedia must never be relied upon for biographies of living persons, but it's better than it was. MarkBernstein (talk) 15:21, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

How appropriate is the candid photo used to illustrate this article?

I would like to re-raise the issue of an appropriate photo for this article. The current full-length candid was inserted with a claim that a previous headshot was "blurry." [42]

I invite other editors to contrast our current "portrait" of Dave Winer to the professional-looking headshots used in the articles of, for example, Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Tim Bray, or ... Linda Tripp? Karl Rove? Michael Moore? I can't find one biography of a public figure that is illustrated with a picture like this one. Is there some more sophisticated editor who could enlighten me on any policies related to the choice of images to illustrate biographies? betsythedevine (talk) 01:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Can you offer a link to a better picture for our consideration? We need one whose rights can be cleared for our use. EdJohnston (talk) 18:02, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Here is a photo I took and uploaded to Wikipedia. [43]. It is far from artistic but it looks a lot more like the kind of photo we use to illustrate other people's articles than does the shot that is in current use. betsythedevine (talk) 18:48, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if we could get the rights we want but a quick search of Flickr turns up a good photo of Dave with Lockergnome [44] and one with Adam Curry by Laughing Squid [45]. I notice that our article for Peter Biddle is illustrated with a credited image from Laughing Squid, so maybe we could get similar rights for this article. betsythedevine (talk) 19:10, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I vote for the picture where Dave is next to Adam Curry. Do you want to write to Laughing Squid at Flickr? This photographer has other pictures released under Creative Commons (although not this one), so he might agree. From our point of view, the best way for him to do this is for him to go onto his Flickr page for this photo and change the licensing. What do others think? EdJohnston (talk) 21:14, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Ed -- I have left a message for Scott Beale on the Flickr page for that photo. In fact, thanks for all your thoughtful and tactful participation in making Wikipedia valuable. betsythedevine (talk) 13:46, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

No motion on the image since this discussion in August? I am going to replace the awful picture with the one that was there before it. Please find a better one if you want to replace it -- not a worse one. betsythedevine (talk) 12:58, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

How notable is the recent lawsuit whose only citation comes from Dave Winer's own blog?

Is this lawsuit as notable, for example, as Dave's "News River" work, which PC Magazine says has served as an inspiration to other developers? [46] Google News also picks up a news mention of Dave's software Techjunk. [47] Isn't [NewsJunk http://politics.newsjunk.com/] more worthy of treatment here than dead lawsuit gossip? Or how about Dave's recent TwitterGram also cited in (at least) the Guardian techblog? [48] There is a lot of interesting and useful stuff out there to write about; I regret I am not tech-savvy enough to do it myself. betsythedevine (talk) 20:39, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I am withdrawing the objection I made earlier regarding this edit. If I had realized that you were reverting a new edit made by an anonymous IP whose only contribution was to add negative edits to the page, I would not have objected. I apologize for my response. Because you asked for the removal of my complaint, I edited this page and removed the responses to my comments. If this is not the proper way to handle it, please edit accordingly. Jamesdennis (talk) 18:15, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your courteous and generous response, Jamesdennis. I withdraw my complaints and apologize for perhaps overreacting. I look forward to editing with you in the future in a harmonious way. betsythedevine (talk) 20:24, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Infobox

This page has for some time had the Scientist infobox, but a recent change to the (non-existent) Evangelist infobox is a wake-up call that "scientist" wasn't the best category for Dave Winer. There isn't an infobox template for "Blogger" or "Business person." How about "Writer" or "Journalist"? betsythedevine (talk) 08:02, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Trivia: character failings and notable German great-uncle

The Relationship to the public section has one single point, which is forcefully expressed in Tim O'Reilly's allegation that Winer can become "disruptive and abusive" when he's being opposed. The rest of this section is either padding that magnifies the allegation of character failings or cotton candy that attempts to diminish that allegation.

I'm aware that there are many people who will readily confirm that Winer will get "disruptive and abusive" when he's being opposed. Some of those people have started websites dedicated to that proposition.

Winer, in other words, has enemies; there are many people who dislike him intensely for a number of things that he has said and done. Let's assume that some, or many, of the things he's said and done were bad, stupid, wicked, and ill-advised, or that they betray inexcusable character failings, or all of the above.

Now, what is Wikipedia to do about it? Should it quote his enemies' allegations against his character but, in order to mitigate these allegations, add a quote or two from a friend who will vouch for the person's sterling character? Should it do so even if the statements from both friends and enemies are self-published and in the absence of an unbiased, reliable examination of the allegations by a neutral observer who isn't a party to any of the conflicts the person has been involved in?

The answer has to be no according to the guidelines: "If an allegation or incident is notable, relevant, and well-documented by reliable published sources, it belongs in the article—even if it's negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it. If it is not documented by reliable third-party sources, leave it out". This section does not present any reliable third-party sources for Winer's alleged character failings. I therefore nominate this section for wholesale and immediate removal without replacement.

I'm also going to rename the section and call it "Trivia" to see if I can get a reaction, as my initial comment under the Relationship to the public heading failed to attract any notice. ARK (talk) 18:46, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

You have made some excellent changes to the article. But this particular section, to which you object, exists because when it is removed it gets re-created only worse. There was a battle about this in 2005, at which time I was one of those trying to remove the section. [49] In 2007, the discussion was raised again. That discussion is now archived under 'Old threads.' I do agree that his great-uncle would do better in trivia, but that does not obviate the function of the rest of this section. betsythedevine (talk) 11:44, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

For the benefit of ARK and anyone else who wants to discuss this, here is his June 3 comment added to the Old Thread section marked "Archived discussion":'What relevance, if any, does this section have? Anyone who has spent two decades or more as a highly vocal public figure is bound to have both friends and enemies: listing testimonies to that effect seems entirely pointless, however notable and reliable the sources, however impartial the balance of friends and enemies. The testimonials, except for one, are also self-published. I suggest that the section be removed without replacement. ARK (talk) 02:02, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Looking at the articles of such controversial figures as Rush Limbaugh or Hillary Clinton, they do give some space to the existence of controversy. Not all self-published material fails WP:RS, and the blogs cited in this section are well-respected. Moving the trivial discussion of Winer's uncle out of this section makes good sense. Removing this entire section will be perceived by many -- not by me, incidentally, but by Dave's critics -- as his friends whitewashing the article POV. That is my opinion, the opinions of rational others may differ. betsythedevine (talk) 15:56, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, WP:RS prohibits self-published sources for statements of opinion when it comes to biographies of living persons. Obviously both O'Reilly and Bray are highly respected, but O'Reilly's statement is an opinion, while Bray's statement is an opinion masquerading as an observation of empirical fact. Moreover, if "reliable" under WP:WELLKNOWN is meant to exclude bias, then the inclusion of both O'Reilly and Bray's statements run afoul of that provision as well, as both O'Reilly and Bray have had a "rocky relationship" with Winer.

Technicalities aside: what if Winer repeatedly did fail to live up to the standards of respectfulness and civil discourse that he demands of others, I just don't see how this rises above the notability threshold, let alone merits a section in his biography.

Now controversies are a whole different matter, and I'd be all for it if somebody would draw up an account of the positions Winer has taken on a whole raft of controversial matters. I wouldn't expect that anyone seriously thinks of the Calacanis incident as a controversy, though. ARK (talk) 08:05, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, you raise some good points and have made some really good changes to the article. The main "controversies" are 1) RSS 2.0, which infuriates people who prefer Atom and 2) the shutdown of Weblogs.com. As you say, any figure active publicly for many years will generate some controversy. What I don't understand is the strange jeering squads who turn hating Dave Winer into their team hobby. I think that is less common now than it was the RSS/Atom split was taking off, so maybe this article will quiet down as well. Any other voices want to be heard here? betsythedevine (talk) 14:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words.

Winer goes back a lot further than his "autocratic" RSS 2.0 release and the botched Weblogs.com shutdown. In 1996, for instance, he caused an "outpouring of rage" amongst his users when, out of the blue, he decided to drop a piece of software that had gained quite a following. But passions -- even the most legitimate indignation, of which there's been plenty throughout Winer's career as a platform vendor -- will eventually die down, and I'm not so sure the disgruntled developers of 2002 and the malcontent users of 2004 are still eager to have Winer's "disruptive and abusive" character exposed. I'd further assume that Wikipedia's novelty has worn off by now, and that some of those who were most vocal on Winer's failings in the past may have moved on to other things, such as Twitter.

I for one wouldn't be surprised if the removal of this section were to meet with a great big show of absolute, resounding indifference. ARK (talk) 00:29, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I have just removed the Relationship to the public section as it only consisted of self-published opinions, which aren't admissible per WP:RS.

As an eventual substitute for this section, I propose an examination of what Winer has done as a platform vendor, much of which users and fellow developers have found irritating, and what he has said as a commentator, much of which other commentators have disagreed with, sometimes pointedly. Allegations about Winer's moral character ("irascible", "abusive", "obnoxious" etc.), ought not to be the focus of such an examination, I believe. ARK (talk) 11:10, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S. A few days ago I moved the reference to Winer's great-uncle Arno Schmidt to Family background and education and the Calacanis incident to News coverage and interviews. The Relations to the public eventually consisted only in Bray and O'Reilly's allegations versus the favourable quotes included to mitigate those allegations. ARK (talk) 18:00, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

ACM paper on early blogging

I recently delivered a conference paper that has a few observations on Winer's involvement in the emergence of early blogging. As author of the piece I may need to abstain from working it into article. At a minimum, I think it should go into the "Coverage and interviews" section, though. Thanks for taking a look.

Vital statistics:

Ammann, Rudolf (2009). "Jorn Barger, the NewsPage network and the emergence of the weblog community". Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia. Torino, Italy: ACM. pp. 279–288. doi:10.1145/1557914.1557962. ISBN 978-1-60558-486-7. Retrieved 2009-07-15. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)

ARK (talk) 17:37, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

This wiki reads like a self promotion piece. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.31.106.35 (talk) 18:29, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

^ "Podcasting: The latest buzz", ITworld.com, October 27, 2004. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
^ Louis, Tristan, 2000-10-13. Suggestion for RSS 0.92 specification
^ Curry, Adam, 2000-10-27 The Bandwidth Issue; server discontinued by Userland, late 2005.
^ Winer, Dave, 2000-12-25 RSS 0.92 Specification
^ Winer, Dave, 2000-12-27 Scripting News: Heads-up, I'm working on new features for RSS that build on 0.91. Calling it 0.92...
^ Winer, Dave, 2000-10-31 Virtual Bandwidth; and 2001-01-11 Payloads for RSS.
^ Winer, Dave, 2001-01-11 Scripting News: Tonight's song on the Grateful Dead audio weblog is Truckin...
^ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dave/cv
^ http://validator.opml.org/
^ http://www.opml.org/2006/03/04#a278
^ http://validator.opml.org/

[1] "Podcasting: The latest buzz", ITworld.com, October 27, 2004. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.

[2] Louis, Tristan, 2000-10-13. Suggestion for RSS 0.92 specification

[3] Curry, Adam, 2000-10-27 The Bandwidth Issue; server discontinued by Userland, late 2005.

[4] Winer, Dave, 2000-12-25 RSS 0.92 Specification

[5] Winer, Dave, 2000-12-27 Scripting News: Heads-up, I'm working on new features for RSS that build on 0.91. Calling it 0.92...

[6] Winer, Dave, 2000-10-31 Virtual Bandwidth; and 2001-01-11 Payloads for RSS.

[7] Winer, Dave, 2001-01-11 Scripting News: Tonight's song on the Grateful Dead audio weblog is Truckin...

[8] ttp://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dave/cv

[9] ttp://validator.opml.org/

[10] ttp://www.opml.org/2006/03/04#a278

[11] ttp://validator.opml.org/

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