Very 'Billion Dollar Brain'.
John le Carre, of course, had his equivalent, which was an alcohol-sodden woman with cats and no life, who had apparently memorised the Circus's database.
I don't know why the spooks didn't get to wiki before WP. It's obviously ideal, when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff, to try to get NPOV pages, with Talk and sourced information.
Charles
----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
On 11/1/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't know why the spooks didn't get to wiki before WP. It's obviously ideal, when trying to >sort the wheat from the chaff, to try to get NPOV pages, with Talk and sourced information.
Traditionaly that would be done through a database. I suspect the main issue is that you lose a lot of the hierarchy and seperation of areas which causes security problems.
On 01/11/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't know why the spooks didn't get to wiki before WP. It's obviously ideal, when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff, to try to get NPOV pages, with Talk and sourced information.
Wikis were what I'd been expecting to find on the internet for ten years before I stumbled across enwp - they're a surprisingly elusive concept until you've actually encountered one. And as we seem to have become the first high-profile wiki *outside* of "people who already knew about wikis"...
On 11/1/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
John le Carre, of course, had his equivalent, which was an alcohol-sodden woman with cats and no life, who had apparently memorised the Circus's database.
That's still just a database, of sorts; Connie Sachs wasn't editable!
I don't know why the spooks didn't get to wiki before WP. It's obviously ideal, when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff, to try to get NPOV pages, with Talk and sourced information.
There was a news story earlier in the year that reported that something like half of the FBI didn't even have e-mail working yet, and that they (or was it the CIA?) were having endless problems trying to set up a standard database for their intelligence info. These guys seem to be constantly way behind the times in terms of individual computer technology. My purely speculative guess is that -- like large universities and other slow-to-change bureaucracies which have no profit motive, tight funds, and no customer-feedback systems -- they think in terms of big, uniform solutions that cost lots of money, are hard to upgrade, and are centrally controlled.
FF
Fastfission wrote: <snip>
My purely speculative guess is that -- like large universities and other slow-to-change bureaucracies which have no profit motive, tight funds, and no customer-feedback systems -- they think in terms of big, uniform solutions that cost lots of money, are hard to upgrade, and are centrally controlled.
On the contrary, universities *do* have profit motives, money available, and customer feedback systems. They still use big, uniform solutions that cost lots of money, are hard to upgrade, and are centrally controlled, but they generally manage to upgrade things at the end of each academic year.
On 11/1/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
<snip> > My purely speculative guess is that -- like large universities and > other slow-to-change bureaucracies which have no profit motive, tight > funds, and no customer-feedback systems -- they think in terms of > big, uniform solutions that cost lots of money, are hard to upgrade, > and are centrally controlled. >
On the contrary, universities *do* have profit motives, money available, and customer feedback systems. They still use big, uniform solutions that cost lots of money, are hard to upgrade, and are centrally controlled, but they generally manage to upgrade things at the end of each academic year.
They do have the summer to make upgrades, unlike most 24x7x365.35 government institutions.
That said, at one point I worked for someone closely involved with the N-1th US Internal Revenue Service major systems upgrade, and that was approximately criminally mishandled.