Wikipedia

The Wikipedia has been capturing my interest lately, more so since David Weinberger gave his talk. I'm looking at a number of issues, mainly about the quality of information and the fringes of public understanding of issues. I took the advice from the wiki welcome email and got a little bold in my edits. I radically changed the entries for information hiding, abstract data type, and mathematical model (uncredited change). Although I corrected the information that was completely wrong on those pages, I want to clean the pages up a little bit more.. but that would mean axeing chunks of someone else's work, which I feel a little hesitant to do. They did offer time and contribution, but unfortunately offered it in the wrong entry. Maybe I can make a "misconceptions" heading to file it all under.

I'm convinced few people really understand the principle of information hiding, despite how fundamental it is to software engineering. The definitions in most of the books (even by the creators of C++, Java, and even the "Gang of Four" in Design Patterns) are wrong and kind of miss the point. I think the problem is a separation between the principle and how the principle is implemented (see my entry on ADTs for the separation between the ADT concept and the data structure concept). They are closely related, but not the same. Plus I think a better term could have done the concept justice. Perhaps "decision protection" instead of anything that uses the word "hiding?" Anyway, David Parnas does clue people the term in his seminal papers,from 1972! (I will save my rant about having limited access to scientific publications for another day.)

Coming up next, catching up on the lecture with Brewster Kahle, digital librarian.