Ben Kovitz humble graduate student at Indiana University, study Cognitive Science. Move here from San Francisco great city, after working Palm Inc on Pre. Him witness Omnigon International from inside, both shame and glory, then learn heap good math. Before that, him work on CORBA ORB for embedded systems at Vertel. Ben work long time ago on parsers, compilers, languages. Him also once work as technical writer, later as developmental editor for Manning Publications company.
Don't worry. In person, not sound like Tonto.
INTP.
mailto:bkovitz@indiana.edu
Ben is responsible for the wiki prefix in the biggest encyclopedia ever
Ben Kovitz is the one who suggested to Larry Sanger, Nupedia's editor-in-chief, to transfer the online encyclopedia to a wiki support! Larry and Jimmy Wales accepted and from that time, Wikipedia took over Nupedia and became a huge success!
Read this: (copied from en.wikipedia.org 
)
Wikipedia was founded as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier (now defunct) project founded[citation needed] by Jimmy Wales to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate multi-step peer review process, and required highly qualified contributors. The writing of articles was slow throughout 2000, the first year that project was online, despite having a mailing-list of interested editors and a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger.
During Nupedia's first year, Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to supplement Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Wales has claimed that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept of a wiki. Independently, Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's wiki (the Wiki Wiki Web), introduced Sanger to wikis over dinner on January 2, 2001. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a Use Mod Wiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:
“ No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine.”
Read the record of the Tacos conversation between Ben and Larry here:
en.wikipedia.org
Well, thanks Ben for your suggestion to Larry Sanger. You put wikis on the map with your excellent suggestion!
Could we then say that Ben is one of the three Wikipedia founders? One of the Three stooges? Surely.
[For the record, Jimmy Wales officially asked Ward the permission to use the word wiki. Ward kindly accepted and added that since he never recorded Wiki as a trademark, anyone could use it. Why isn't this episode also recorded in the History of Wikipedia?]
It should be! -- Ben Kovitz
I don't actually recall Ben saying, "You should use a wiki for your new project" or anything like that; it didn't happen quite that way. I have a fairly clear recollection on this precise point: when we had dinner, Ben was just talking about the latest geeky thing he was up to: wikis! It was not long after he merely described the concept of a wiki that I was thinking that it might be the tool that would do the job. We definitely talked about the notion of a wiki encyclopedia, once he explained his wiki hobby to me and I explained my encyclopedia-building problem to him, but I was never of the understanding that Ben said, "Here is the solution to your problem," whereupon I said, "Yes, that's it!"
Jimmy Wales never asked Ward Cunningham for permission to use the word "wiki," to my knowledge. [Jimmy telephoned me once and asked if I had any plans to protect the name wiki. I said no. He said good. -- Ward Cunningham]
I was managing the project, not Jimmy, who was busy being CEO of Bomis at the time. Perhaps what the person above has in mind is this little exchange, which can still be seen on the Wiki Pedia page:
"My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- Jimbo Wales"
"Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- Ward Cunningham"
To which I responded:
"Indeed, Wikipedia has a totally different culture from this wiki, because it's pretty single-mindedly aimed at creating an encyclopedia. It's already rather useful as an encyclopedia, and we expect it will only get better."
Anyway, Ben told me about wikis. Yay Ben!
-- Larry Sanger
More wikis
I've written a wiki (the Green Light Wiki, because you have the green light to edit) and started a few wikis about some odd topics:
greenlightwiki.com All about heuristic (very new, as of 19-Aug-2003)
greenlightwiki.com Improvisational comedy tips, techniques, and insights
greenlightwiki.com Trying to figure out the writings of Lenore Thomson, someone who wrote a book with lenore-exegesis a very unusual spin on Myers Briggs
Yo, Ben? You might want to explain to Green Light visitors that the cookies are necessary to edit and what other conditions have to be met. I reflexively deny cookies to all servers except the ones I absolutely have to use, so I couldn't participate. Oh, well. -- Marty Schrader
Thanks, Marty. I'd love to have your participation, even without your name showing up in Recent Changes. I'll try to set it up so cookies are optional, once I finish adding change bars. (Actually, it worked that way up until two weeks ago.) -- Ben Kovitz
Favorite Wiki Quote:
"Use an if statement, even." -- Ron Jeffries (I think)
Here are some Wiki pages that I've started and that I'd like you to improve:
My Mind Keeps Wandering (please help!)
Advice From Nowhere (this one especially sucks)
Others that I didn't start, but have poured some passion into:
Very fine piece about the Electoral College. Bravo! -- Ole Andersen
There's been some noise on NPR and in other locations about how Thomas Jefferson was elected by "Faithless Electors". -- Dan Hankins
I don't think it's possible under any scenario for a sitting Vice President running for President to cast a tie-breaking vote for himself. It isn't clear the Vice President has the power to break a tie vote in the Senate for that purpose. More importantly, if the Electoral College is deadlocked, the House votes for the President and the Senate votes for Vice President, and so the sitting VP would possibly break a VP tie, not a Presidential one. -- Eric Jablow
Thanks! :)
I knew that Jefferson got elected by the House of Representatives, but I hadn't heard about Faithless Electors getting him there. Yet more neat stuff to research. Has anyone written a book on the history of American presidential electoral hijinks?
About the rules not being clear about what happens when the House fails to elect a president -- yep, they're not clear. I heard the thing about Gore being able to cast the tie-breaking vote for himself from some knowledgeable-sounding person on National Public Radio. The 12th Amendment does not even seem clear about whether the House that elects the president is the current House or the newly elected house. The Founding Fathers were not good Technical Writers.
In 1800, the year of the Jefferson-Burr race, the rules were different: the man who got a majority of the electoral votes became President, and the second-place vote getter became VP. Unfortunately, Jefferson and Burr split all the votes equally. The House voted many times until one of Burr's electors defected.
There was an interesting case in 1968, when George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate, hoping to get enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House. Wallace hoped to be able to shut down racial integration efforts by making deals with one of the other candidates. The US author James Michener, one of the slate of Democratic electors from Pennsylvania, tried to make deals with both Democratic and Republican electors to arrange that they'd vote for the leader if he had only a plurality, in order to avoid letting Wallace influence the outcome. This became moot when Nixon won a majority on election day.
Oh, and the House that would elect the new president would be the newly-elected one. The new House and Senate, after swearing in the new members on 4 January, opens and certifies the Electoral College count; if no one has a majority, the House starts voting for a President and the Senate a VP. -- Eric Jablow
Is this the same Ben Kovitz that wrote "Practical Software Requirements"? (ISBN 1884777597). I tremendously enjoyed that book, and think it has one of the best discussions of "problem framing" I've come across. -- Stu Charlton
Yup, that's me. I admit it. Glad to hear you enjoyed the book, Stu! BTW, Michael Jackson has recently written a new book on problem frames. It's just come out. ISBN020159627X. -- bk
Great! I'll take a look at it. -- SC
Ben, thanks a lot for the big refactoring of Better Syntactic Sugar. I think that I will want to create another page about my idea that easier programming leads to more productivity, so I appreciate your offer of returning the material on that subject. But rather than reuse some of the original Sugar material, I think I should work a bit on having a more clear and concise starting point for that discussion. So feel free to discard your copy of that material. Thanks again for the help. -- Chris Baugh
Ben, you modified the page on Blah Blah Blah removing the assertion that the Critical Spirit page was condescending and offensive, and my response to it. I'm not sure why you did that, I am just puzzled because you were not the original author of that assertion. There are so many possible motivations for such a thing (including disagreeing with the original assertion, having an off-wiki consent of the author, agreeing with the assertion but being tired of seeing my name and my not so pleasant style in yet another wiki page, and so on) so I can't just figure out which one, anyway I saved the text just in case, and I was a little curious. Thanks for your contribution to wiki (especially including some disagreements and opinions contrary to mine) and for writing the book. -- Costin Cozianu
Glad you liked the book, Costin! About Blah Blah Blah, I took the text out in hope of averting a Pissing Contest. There's a certain super-nice-nice style of writing that tries to be non-offensively super-accommodating to "all points of view" and ends up backfiring. It's got nothing to do with the "critical" stuff you've posted about, which is actually quite the opposite style. I thought analyzing the two topics on the same page didn't shed light on either. -- Ben Kovitz
Ben, I got cold feet on the metaconversation comment. I was afraid people might misinterpret the tone, just seeing how everyone's been on edge lately. Glad you liked it though. -- Steve Howell
Oh well. Yeah, I hadn't been on much in a while, and have recently been amazed at how accusatory and offense-taking much of the text is right now. It seems that Wiki has degenerated to Usenet, at least regarding ratio of bile to content. -- Ben Kovitz
In a more perfect Wiki world, the following would happen:
1. Before introducing any more metacommunication pages to the Wiki, any good reader would read Ben's clublet.com , which is the definitive page on the subject, in my opinion.
2. One, just one, of our great political thinkers would take the initiative to start a political wiki. For all its alleged faults (too religious? not to this agnostic), Clublet at least establishes the precedent that you can start a separate Wiki while still keeping a thoughtful, active audience.
3. The guy who keeps posting on Replace Documentation would end his little tirade.
4. We'd have more posts like Lots Of Screen Shots, Customizer Pattern, and Tele Commuting, where real-life software developers simply weigh in on their feelings about day-to-day software issues, inviting civil community discussion and feedback.
I thought this page was as good as any to put this rant, Ben, but you're welcome to move it to my page or delete it. -- Steve Howell
Most people have less experience with what happens when bitterness is heard without judgement, censorship, or argument. The option to hear seems unthinkable, like opening Pandora's box.
Reciprocally, Ben, I thought the above was just great. -- Laurent Bossavit
"Hear Hear"
Hey Ben, up for the Wiki Sprint on September 6? -- Pete.
Hey Ben:
If you give support to Richard for a wiki, please make it a pre-conditions that he should not steal content from other wikis. He is entitled to copy and paste his own contributions but nothing else without the express permission of respective authors.
He has repeatedly advocated stealing content, not to mention his intellectual dishonesty, so it'd be a shame to do it under your watch. -- Costin Cozianu
Hi, Costin. Indeed my own preference is to treat other people's wikis and writing with respect, and not to copy text. I haven't even copied the heuristic stuff that I posted to Why Clublet, even to my heuristic wiki, simply because Richard Drake refused to give permission. I value the cooperative attitude that comes from letting people have control over their own things in this way.
However, I'm just planning to provide the hardware and software for Richard's wiki. It'll be his wiki, not mine. On Richard's wiki, he makes the rules. For that matter, he doesn't need to make any rules; he can rule by whim. If he copies stuff from other wikis, I'm not sure what to do. No doubt some people will be unhappy about this, and no doubt if they raise angry protests, that will make Richard happy and he'll keep doing it and probably crow about it. The only thing I can think of is that if he copies stuff, you and everyone who doesn't like it might simply avoid his wiki. That would turn his wiki into little more than a blog, and would deprive him of the joy of baiting people and seeing them throw fits. There's nothing more boring than an unread wiki, especially to a megalomaniac who rules it. There may be better solutions, though. For the contingent who likes throwing angry fits and would thus be grateful to Richard if he did something bad, perhaps... an Angry Fits Wiki? -- Ben Kovitz
I wanna thank you for the comments you added months ago to Open Source Communism. This was the first contribution I've made and it was very nice to see your answer. -- Aureliano Calvo
"If you don't like fringe views to be expressed and criticized, then perhaps wiki is not for you." (Ben to anon coward)
Maybe some people just get irritated when imposture is being promoted so blatantly, ruining the wiki experience for everybody. This is one of the hard (and possibly irreducible) problems of current wiki technologies and wiki social fabrics. It's not specific to c2 or to RK, it's all over the map of the wikidom. Speaking of which, any help with Wiki Change Proposal, especially suggestions or refinements vis-a-vis Wcp Use Cases coming from the guy who wrote 1one f the only two books on software requirements would be greatly appreciated. -- Costin Cozianu
In my view, what spoils wiki is insults, edit wars, and Thread Mess'es. I wish you the greatest success with your Wiki Change Proposal, Costin. However, my current thinking is that the social norms are the primary factor in making a wiki good or bad. If there is a shared understanding that we are here to write and edit text to be clearer, more attractive, and more persuasive, and thereby explore a wide variety of ideas, then text and on-topic ideas will emerge which are more wonderful than any individual could have come up with alone, and we'll all have a good time. If the shared social norm is that we are here to prevent the expression of bad ideas, and cast shame on people who post them or believe them, then people will be trying to make others back down instead of finding ways to cooperate. That understanding of the purpose of wiki is what leads people to post insults aimed at humiliating people they disagree with, delete or drown out ideas they disagree with, create Thread Mess''es where nearly all the words are accusations that another participant didn't meet some burden of proof or assessments of the other participants' intelligence. I think c2 reached its current decrepit condition because of incivility, not technology. -- Ben Kovitz
Strongly agreed (with reservations about the final sentence). -- Doug Merritt
Doug, I love technological solutions. Let's hear more! -- Ben Kovitz
Ben, some people have egos (and big egos at that), some people are on occasion stupid, some people come on wikis with bad intentions. Even people with good intentions can spoil it. Those are invariants across the history of most wikis that I know of (including Wiki Pedia, of course). That all should behave nicely like motherhood and apple pie, is all nice and good but doesn't actually solve anything. If imposture and merely incompetence is treated just like legitimate discourse, then what you end up with is one big pile of junk, that may have entertaining value for its contributors, but no value to Wiki Readers. So like it or not, wikis need a mechanism to select (or better said distinguish' ) the "good stuff" from the "bad stuff", if they are to have any finality. And it's not gonna come because impostors will suddenly feel the urge to stop posing or that people trolling from the position of ignoramus will suddenly feel the urge to read more and write less, or that people with over-inflated egos will discover the value of humility. You can try to be the apostle for that change, and I wish you good luck with it, but I just do not see it happening, and there's hardly anything in the history of human culture in general to give you hope in that direction. In addition there is the fundamental epistemic problem that people with the best behavior have the right to be wrong, and don't quite know it on time when they are wrong, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And what is to you "clearer", "more attractive", "better", can be "much worse", or even "non-sense" to somebody else.
So what technology should provide is Comfortable Space For Disagreement. In absence of that, I just do not see how the social factors can change. And how do we know that the problem of evolving the social factors to the point where a large public wiki with current technology can work, is even solvable? While having the space for comfortable disagreement, it is likely that your preferred social solutions will work much better, because there will be fewer incentives to misbehave. And even the people that want to misbehave, will not be able to spoil the experience of everybody else. That's what I am after with Wiki Change Proposal. -- Costin
I think you're attacking a straw man with the notion of everyone behaving perfectly at all times. I can't tell if we are disagreeing about anything. -- Ben Kovitz
There are two basic problems: the first one is that you need a tiny minority misbehaving and the whole is ruined - the solutions to this one are many with lots of trade-offs, but WCP solves it by letting people misbehave as much as they want, they just do not have the possibility to ruin the whole thing. The second problem is that even with the best of intentions, there's just fundamental to human condition that shit happens between humans. Without getting personal, I think your history on "why clublet" would be an example. So there's Comfortable Space For Disagreement to solve (or at least greatly reduce) the second problem. -- Costin
I agree with you about all those things (except that I don't know much about WCP yet). -- Ben Kovitz
I only meant that I think the current state of things resulted from complex causes rather than simple easily separable ones.
Also I have reservations about calling the current state of things "decrepit". I see some positives and some negatives.
But yes, also that technology might help, but that's not to say I have something new to offer on the topic. My limited understanding of Costin's favored approach strikes me as a direction that might indeed assist. But that is irrelevant to Wiki Wiki Web itself so long as Ward prefers Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work over an all-out technological assault on the issues. So I have reservations in that direction too.
Thus my original terseness. Explaining what I meant didn't really yield much, eh? ;-) -- Doug Merritt
Ben, your edits on Denial Of Service suck. Please stop. I can't be certain it was you but I'm fairly sure you deleted a rebuttal to a whole line of argument and then you proceeded to enshrine that line of argument as fact. And Costin is right, that whole "up and down" the protocol stack is a bunch of crap. -- RK
Ben, Costin's role in life is to kill possibly bad ideas. My role in life is to promote possibly good ideas. As a result, Costin doesn't bother reading what I'm writing, just disparages it. And Dave doesn't bother reading anything period, he said as much, even when he's responding to it. [Really? Where did I say that? -- DV] Now you see your role as the "attractive and convincing presentation of ideas" except which ideas? From your actions, it's pretty clear you're not neutral about it but refer rather either to majority ideas or your own ideas. And that's pretty damned frustrating. Do you seriously think that I should prefer your "attractive and convincing" assassination of my ideas over a threadmess where a few people (notably absent Dave and Costin) might be able to get some inspiration? I think not. And don't presume to put the burden on me, either. -- RK
Please see my remarks at the top of Make The Client Pay. I have not intentionally distorted any idea you've posted. -- Ben Kovitz
See original on c2.com