User talk:Terry Bollinger

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Terry Bollinger 05:27, 28 April 2006 (UTC) - Nothing much to talk about yet!

Contents 1 Your article 2 Interesting... 3 Some notability stats 4 A question about flag timing 5 WikiPhages 6 Identity function and null function

[edit] Your article

I just tagged your article at Terry Bollinger with an 'importance' tag - it might be a good idea to get some credible references in there about you and your work; as it reads now, it doesn't really indicate notability as required under the biography requirements. Tony Fox 06:04, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interesting...

Hopefully you will see this; I'm still trying to get the hang of the interactions part of this. I didn't like the idea of adding to your discussion page until I find out if that is really the right way to do it.

I'm scratching my head a bit, but I believe I should qualify for a brief entry under:

... Published authors, editors and photographers who received multiple independent reviews of or awards for their work

and/or: ... engineers, and other professionals whose work is widely recognized (for better or worse) and likely to become a part of the enduring historical record of that field

Notable historical items? Publication of the report on U.S. DoD use of free and open source software, which very specifically derailed a multi-year DoD lobbying effort by a particular firm to get open source software banned outright in the U.S. DoD, and next (very likely) from the entire U.S. government and beyond. Some people were very, very unhappy with me about my report, and were not shy about it. On the positive side my name is now recognized by a fairly broad international community, including some folks in Ottawa to whom I still owe a promised class on dos and don'ts of government use of open source. Whatever else I may have done or not done, that report counted for something in the overall scheme of things. Terry Bollinger 07:11, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Addendum: Browncoat? Cool. Movie introduced me to the original series. Never got into Galactica, no big reason, just don't have much TV time.

[edit] Some notability stats

Goggle on "Terry B. Bollinger": 301 hits, 44 unique. All appear to be me.

Google on "Terry Bollinger": 988 hits, 299 unique. My best estimate is that about 280 or more of those are me. The first hit that is not me is hit number 48, which somewhat ironically happens to be on my Dad's deceased cousin, after whom I was named.

The current first five Google hits on "Terry Bollinger" are:

1. My personal web site
2. The Canadian/US Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK)
3. Wikipedia (the entry in question; it is clearly getting play)
4. O'Reilly
5. The DBLP list of publications by software engineering authors

About two months ago the above top-five list included a link from Bruce Schneier's blog pages regarding a very recent white paper of mine on quantum encryption.

I'm pretty sure that Eben Moglen, Bruce Schneier, and at least one or two U.S. Congressmen, as well as others, would vouch for my notability.

Those are appetizers. Googling on MITRE FOSS (no quotes) gives: 29,440 hits.

Minus a small number of hits on sites that somehow managed to discuss both religious hats and people named Foss on the same page, the above number is a pretty accurate upper limit for the number of international sites that link to, talk about, or quote from the report I wrote in 2003 on use of free and open source software in the US Department of Defense. The international variety is quite good.

Notably, the above hit number has continued to increase over time. In mid 2003, a few months after the report was posted on a U.S. DoD web site, the same hit count was at about 2,000. This 15-times growth in in hits over three years would seem to be a good argument that the relevance of my work should endure well over time.

What I still am not sure of is how any of the above translates into "credible references" for the actual text of what I wrote as a stub. Tony Fox, are you reading any of this? I'm still new at this. What kind of references am I supposed to be adding?

Terry Bollinger 22:55, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A question about flag timing

Yesterday was the first time I've ever devoted a full day of personall time to adding information to articles in Wikipedia, specifically to the Fredericktown, Missouri, Bollinger County, Missouri, and George Frederick Bollinger. The information was extensive, I think fairly well written and organized, and based on personal and older reference materials (both geological and historical) to which I've had some fairly unique access. In short, I hope and like to believe these were worthwhile additions.

My question is this: After sitting unnoticed for months, was it a coincidence that my name site was flagged for importance literally as I was doing final saves on my first full day's worth of donations of text to Wikipedia? Or did I somehow do something that attracted attention?

If so, could someone please explain what it was I did?

Terry Bollinger 23:07, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Posting to other user talk pages is indeed the right way to get someone's attention around here - I forgot to watch this when I left last time, so good call there. I noticed your article after following it from the article you posted about one of your children, which I noticed while doing new page patrol; often, when an article is posted by a registered user that winds up being speedily deleted for not meeting notability, there may be other articles connected to it that need consideration. Basically, it was a simple coincidence that I wound up there.
The main concern I saw with your article was that the links you provided were either self-referential or as part of a group, but did not include any real outside sources giving substantial indications of notability. You mention meeting the published authors category of WP:BIO; if you can turn up and include some media references to specific reviews of your work, references to awards received, or other media coverage to affirm what you've mentioned above, then that should be just fine. It sounds like you have some links you can attach. (I'd also suggest that while you're at adding those links, you take a look at adjusting the style to better conform with other WP articles. The style manual can probably help with that. The way the article is now is kind of hard to follow.) Tony Fox 00:15, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, now that makes sense. The timing coincidence was on my side. My son came by as I was busily typing, and he didn't believe what I was telling him about how easy it is to make an entry in Wikipedia. I demonstrated by adding a factually correct one-liner about who he is. I then discovered an interesting point: The help pages don't seem to explain anywhere how to delete a page after creating it. I ended up simply removing all the text about a half hour later, but by that time it had already activated the rapid-response immune system of Wikipedia.

[edit] WikiPhages

I cannot help but think of the members of that rapid immune response team as WikiPhages. The idea, after all, is for them to provide an ultra-fast front line of defense for detecting and removing invasive, intrusive, terminally damaged, or otherwise flatly unacceptable pages before they can cause any real damage to the main Wikipedia corpus.

The existence of the WikiPhages -- whose existence, BTW, someone needs to mention to newbies a lot earlier in the Wikipedia intro pages -- was both surprising and fascinating to me. In free software, the self-correcting mechanisms are generally centralized around a core configuration control mechanism, and run by a small number of people who are generally extremely familiar with the overall design and structure of the (software) corpus. While that sounds impressive, it's actually quite limiting: there is no easy way to scale up the size of core-based free software self-corrective mechanisms. In contrast, the Wikipedia use of WikiPhages allows true scaling up to global sizes by training more people in how to recognize and deal with terminally damaged pages.

The WikiPhage function seems to have self-developed over the years; I don't recall it being there in the earlier years. I also note that back in those earlier years, the articles were awful as often or more often than they were good, so there is something very interesting going on here. My suspicion is that without both WikiPhages and other associated long-term Wikipedia immune responses (banning and such, based in part on the "antigen" signatures that the WikiPhages and others collect), the Wikipedia corpus was unable to reach a point of sufficient internal trust for it to function well. The emergence of the immune system then allowed the Wikipedia to move fairly abruptly (2005 seemed to be the year) from an interesting but too-often unusable exercise in collecting essays to a true and exceptionally effective global encyclopedia.

So... If I try adding a short page on WikiPhages, will the WikiPhages immediately remove it (and likely flag me as a Dubious Entity) because it is a new term that does not yet exist in the literature... even though the very act of removing the page would be a prime example of the WikiPhage concept that the page defines?... 8^)

Terry Bollinger 13:57, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Interesting concept - and seems rather correct, on a fairly quick read-through of it. And yes, the way things work, a neologism like that would probably get dinged pretty quickly. (Take a look at the Articles For Deletion section some time. These are articles that either don't fit the speedy deletion guidelines or have been contested for some reason. Neologisms crop up there a lot.) Tony Fox 15:14, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Ah, good. If the description seems at least somewhat plausible, what I'll do is put together a little white paper on my personal web site. I'd love to do an editorial or article on the Wikipedia process for IEEE Software too, even though it's not strictly software. It's the process side that's relevant to global development in general, likely including software.

And anywho, if I understand rightly how Wikipedia archiving works, this dialog sort of captures the origination of the term anyway, yes? That would be nice if perchance the WikiPhages terminology worked its way into broad use.

Enough, I need to get a (stub only!) new web site in today, as it's a holiday on this side of the 49th parallel. I remain unclear about whether it must be you, Tony Fox, or someone else who removes the "importance" flag... although I did get the distinct impression I would be rapidly and throroughly fricasseed in racid butter fat by the Collective Powers That Be if I had the audacity to remove it on my own after making my own attempt at changes... and certainly deep fried in axle grease to boot if I simply removed it without first doing any changes... 8^) Cheers, Terry Bollinger 22:57, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Heh. You've got a good start on understanding the process for things like this. That most changes are done through discussion is something a lot of people don't get until they've been blocked repeatedly (if at all). As you mention it, the process here does certainly sound like it might be an interesting one to discuss in an open source context. You might want to touch base with a couple of active administrators if you do decide to get into that. (Drop by the Administrators' Noticeboard to find some of them.) And in the meantime, I'll pull that notability tag now. You're obviously making good faith plans to get some citations there. Cheers! Tony Fox 23:59, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey, thanks! The vote of confidence that my intentions are in the right direction (however flawed my initial execution may be) is much appreciated! Cheers, Terry Bollinger 00:22, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Identity function and null function

Hi. For now I reverted the text you added to Identity function where you mention that in programming an identity function is called a "null function".

I think things are a bit more complicated than that. Here, null function means what you say it means. Here, a null function is "one which does nothing and returns nothing". While from here one may think that a null function is a function which returns the null space. See also here, where "null function function that does nothing other than returning ag = 0."

If you wish, perhaps you could elaborate on all this at null function. But either way, due to the ambiguity of the term, I think mentioning at identity function that it is the same as a null function is not a good idea I think.

You can reply here if you have comments. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:31, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

No problem. Your analysis is apt and your reversion appropriate. I equivocated whether null function even merited an entry, and opted for redirecting.

Your first example does indeed match the mathematical meaning of an identity function. However, your second example in which nothing is returned is the dominant meaning in programming languages. Since that one does not meet the definition of an identity function, it should not be included there.

I think your suggestion is the best. I'll create a short direct text entry for null function, redirect null operator to that, and provide a link to identity function—the latter in hopes that it will entice some readers into looking at the far more precise world of mathematical terminology.

Terry Bollinger 22:18, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

OK. For now I redirected null function and null operator to null. When you create that short article, you can undo these, of course. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:11, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Done. I've added a (hopefully) more precise definition of the relationship to between null functions and identity functions, based on state spaces. Your actions/suggestions are welcome. Terry Bollinger 06:12, 21 January 2007 (UTC)