Talk:Dave Winer

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• /Archived debates 1 contains various debates and related attributed quotes regarding the sections Relationship to the Public (at one point called Criticism) and Credit (currently removed from the article) up to December 2005. A compromise was reached regarding the section Relationship to the Public. You are welcome to edit the section, but please read the archived debate first.

If you wish to add to the archived debates, please do so on this page, not on the archive page. You can create a new section for your comments or add to an existing section by clicking the Edit link next to the section header.

Contents 1 General Discussion 1.1 Discussion about Dave Winer article, from which Danny Ayers has removed all his own comments 1.2 How encyclopedia-quality sources describe Dave Winer's role wrt SOAP, RSS, blogging, etc. 2 External links discussion 2.1 Bloglines 2.2 Eye on Winer

[edit] General Discussion

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

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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).

[edit] External links discussion

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)