Hi Rupert,
as promised here is the other reply.
On Sun, 3 Feb 2013 14:52:40 +0100
rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com wrote:
hi shlomi,
what you are doing here might be perceived as having a conflict of
interest and/or doing self promotion.
you wrote a solver for black hole solitaire. then you create a
wikipedia article about black hole solitaire, mentioning your name and
your software in it, as well linking to your software.
OK, I realise it seems bad and it might, however - here is the longer story
from what I recall. I recall knowing of a Solitaire variant called
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_%28solitaire%29 , which was featured in
some places as similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCell and which due
to its technical features, I had some reservations about adding support for it
to Freecell Solver (can I give a link? oh well). Anyway, I read on its
wikipedia page that it was created by a certain creator of games, and that he
also created Black Hole Solitaire.
This interested me to check it out on and play it on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PySol , and play it and I noticed that I could
also create a solver for it relatively easily, which I did (I preferred not to
use Freecell Solver for that, because there was a much more compact way to
represent the states). Then after I had the solver, I decided to determine
which percentage of the deals was solvable, and with the help of
“Amadiro” (someone I know) who deployed my solver on the University of Oslo’s
high-performance cluster, I was able to solve a large number of deals.
And then and only then, I decided to write a page for that on Wikipedia, so
people may find it interesting. I realise there's http://cards.wikia.com/ , but
not too many people edit it or visit it, and there's otherwise also extensive
coverage of card games of all sorts on Wikipedia, despite some heat and
resistance from trigger-happy deletionists. I don't mind that someone improves
upon this page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_%28solitaire%29 - and
make it a little better (like the old “making soup out of stone” story), and I
noticed people making pages a little better in the past, or that I reverted
some temporary deletionism that I didn't like, into a better incarnation. But
removing it completely is cruel, and sort of like expecting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond to remove all traces of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetchmail off his servers, because people think
it is: poorly written/has too many bugs/too much hyped and talked about/not
very functional/whatever. All of these may be true, but Mr. Raymond (or ESR)
eventually decided that he has better things to do with his time, and could
not allocate the time to maintain it, so he passed the baton to some other
people who had more time, and possible were even more capable software
developers than he is.
Likewise, if someone wants to take the Black Hole Solitaire page and improve
it, then I say “Go for it!” (or “Drive safely, the keys are inside” like we
say in Israel based on a skit of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HaGashash_HaHiver ). But do and let do, instead
of do, undo, redo, undo, redo, etc..
(Sorry for the long post).
then you fill
an unrelated mailing list with this topic and link to it. your first
mail in this thread btw, the 30 page long mail, included links to your
website(s) as well.
I think what I said there about Aesop’s The Grandfather, The Boy and the Donkey,
Saladin, etc. were on topic here and could be useful
food for thought and to implement - it's just that I used associations from my
own experience. This is because I didn't think too straight now and because I
have some emotional attachment to what I did and experience and care about.
I apologise if I sounded too narcissistic (and I may have) but hopefully you
can forgive me and get past that and try to deal with my advice.
My primary intention in posting the message was to create a more positive
wikipedia-editing experience for everyone in the long run, based on
psychology, compassion, being “a bigger man”, and less about territoriality,
doing things “quick” in order to save time, and being an inconsiderate and
short-term thinking bastard (see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_a_dick ).
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
rupert.
On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Shlomi Fish shlo...@shlomifish.org wrote:
Hi Ole,
thanks for your useful and constructive advice. I'll reply below, but note
that I was speaking from the general/philosophical/strategical
Point-of-view.
On Sun, 3 Feb 2013 13:22:49 +0100
Ole Palnatoke Andersen o...@palnatoke.org wrote:
...
non-native speakers of English (like me) feel that they are
“men-of-the-world” and will reach a wider audience if they wrote in English
instead of in their
...
As a result, I decided to write
...
Solitaire game nicknamed “Baker’s Dozen”) and ... (ditto for “Black
Hole”) in the English wikipedia and do not
