Talk:Gene Spafford

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No question that Spaf is a "living legend" having just appeared before Congress, and no one I know would dispute his expertise - but does this violate the Wiki policy on living individuals? I am all for giving credit to Spaf, he has been both an inspiration and a teacher to me, but I think an encyclopedia needs to maintain its integrity by noting that which has lasted through time (which I think the "living individuals" policy meant to address). I defintely vote for Spaf as a very influential person in contemporary society in security, but does this constitute what encyclopedia provide? No offense to anyone, especially Spaf, but in my opinion, writings such as these diminish the importance and credibility of Wikipedia as a true encyclopedia.

Spafford is sufficiently notable to warrant a BLP entry in Wikipedia. Article does need a major cleanup, which I will try to do.--FeralOink (talk) 01:17, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

I made major excisions to this BLP article. You were so correct, unsigned commenter! Thank you.--FeralOink (talk) 14:22, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Old discussion

This text was recently restored:

and a historically significant Internet participant ("The Morris Worm", Usenet, net.god).

This is poor style. To a reader not intimately acquainted with the history of the Internet, references like this are essentially meaningless. I have added context about Usenet further down in the text; please do not restore it here.. If you want to add a reference in the body of the text to the "Morris Worm", put it in context, ie explain briefly what it is and how Spafford was involved.

This text:

Dr. Spafford is a self described curmudgeon and likely has been one since at least the age of seventeen.

belongs on a home page, not in an encyclopedia article.

Neither does the long list of awards.

Neither does the many links to his web pages; one, to the home page, is sufficient.

-- Viajero | Talk 11:43, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

OK, I'll agree that some of this doesn't belong here, but the awards are significant. Maybe the list of awards could be shortened a little, but some of these are big. Why did you destroy the formatting and restore incorrect information (e.g., professorships)? As far as links go, I think you got overzealous. The worm writeup is important.

Just because the subject of a biographical article edits it does not inherently make it vanity.

-- Xcali 18:07, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

1. As far as I can tell from the page history, spaf's contributions have been largely neutral.
2. I explained already above and will explain again, there is no description of the worm, simply a reference to it. There have been thousands of Internet worms; what is special about this one and what has he got to do with it?
3. No doubt all those the awards are important, but not outside the profession.
4. If I restored "incorrect information", by all means fix it, but if this article turns into hagiography again, I'll edit it accordingly.

-- Viajero | Talk 20:43, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Re: your #2, The Morris Worm was a major event in internet history. The Morris Worm was the first internet worm, and it effectively shut down the internet for several days. If the text was changed to say something akin to "analysis of the first internet worm", I could see it, but to dismiss this event just because you have never heard of it is a little extreme.

Re: your #3, in that case, just about every award ever mentioned in the Wikipedia should be deleted. You consider fellow of the ACM, AAAS, and IEEE to be minor? This are some of the greatest honors the computing profession has to offer.

--Xcali 21:28, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I have now just read our article on the Morris Worm, which I didn't see earlier. Great, but no mention of Spafford, only an external link to analysis of his, hence there is no obvious reason why that topic should be referenced from within this article. As I tried to point out above, simply including a link to it between parentheses is meaningless. How about summarizing in a line or two Spafford's involvement with the worm? Like most readers, I am neither a computer security expert nor a computer scientist; our target audience is the general reader, not industry insiders. -- Viajero | Talk 22:05, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

If you're not going to inform yourself on the subject sufficiently to edit correctly, perhaps you should limit yourself to making comments on the talk page. I'm now not very motivated to try to fix the mangling caused by unknowledgeable editors. Stan 22:15, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

---

Xcali, the added context for the Morris Worm was helpful. The awards list look ok. But still a few issues:

• Why did you delete the link to his home page Purdue? This should be first external link. A link to his C.V. is not necessary.
• Please don't add "See too" links to topics already linked in the text. One link per page is the usual practice.
• We don't use titles like Dr. in articles, cf. Henry Kissinger and Albert Einstein.
• We need to mention Purdue in the first paragraph; this is his primary professional affiliation.
• "Nugget" is not a neutral term. This is an encyclopedia article, not a fan page.
• Please don't keep restoring that link to a non-existent image. When that image is available, add the link. All Wikipedia articles are by nature works in progress, but at any given moment they should look as finished as possible. A "broken" image link is ugly.
• The section ==Background== is not accurate. It isn't background information, it is a combination of biographical and other kinds of info, such as research interests. In an article this length, subheadings are not so important.
• Regarding his research interests, you restored this text:

Computer-related failures may be the results of accident, or they may be caused by software faults present in software that was poorly designed and inadequately tested. And certainly, failures can occur because of malicious activity by vandals and criminals, either as intruders trying to obtain information, or through the application of vandalware such as worms and viruses."

These lines do describe his research interests. My version is more accurate and more succinct.

• Only the first word in a subheading is capitalized (cf, MoS). Please stop reverting these minor items. I won't get into an edit war over them, but I assure you if I don't fix them someone else will.

-- Viajero | Talk 18:15, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Refs for Gene's axioms

do we really need a ref to this Spafford's post after every his axiom and corollary? I think one would be enough. --grawity 13:51, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Nope, we don't need them! Nor do we need his axioms and corollaries! Editors long before me excised them. You were correct, and I'm glad someone listened. I pruned back more of the Spaf hagiography per WP:MOS. There's still plenty of kruft remaining, but it is better than before.-- FeralOink (talk) 15:35, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi Grawity. I put those ref's in there and I agree with you. There is a ref on all of them because every editor who commented on the issue (over IRC) said they each had to have a ref. ( At the time there was a huge effort being put forth on WP to require everything to have a source. I guess you could call it a Wiki-Fad. Frankly I think it was just another incident of academic standards disease, having little to do with real life and even less to do with the goals of WP. :-) Of course all that is very subjectively experienced, different for every person. ) Please feel free to somehow collapse/reduce the ref count. Hopefully in a way that will still show those quotes all came from the same source. Hang in there and keep up the good work! Jjk (talk) 14:28, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

minor linking prob

Sometimes links to google groups pages are leading people to google sign in pages and not to the articles referenced. Rather than force people to sign up for a google account to see the article, try to use links to things that don't require a registration of any sort to view them if such is available. Even people who already have google mail accounts are still being asked to sign up for a "google account" to see the actually referenced web page. Jjk (talk) 03:42, 22 October 2009 (UTC)