from Hacker News

Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices

by jonny_storm on 9/13/16, 1:49 PM with 11 comments

• by _Codemonkeyism on 9/13/16, 3:22 PM

  From reading the entire talk page, for me the author has a limited view on what has happened.

  He asked about COI and got

  "As the author of the EOMA-68 standard, and as a co-creator of a crowd-funding campaign around several implementations of that standard, you have both a legal interest (as the primary author and copyright holder of the standard) and an economic interest (as an implementor) in the entities that this article is about."

  as a first answer. Which is what the author didn't like and asked for 'clarifications' holding the opinion that

  'do i have an interest in promoting the SUCCESS of EOMA68?" no i do NOT.'

  which sounds surreal if you are the co-creator of a standard and run a crowd campaign for a device based on that standard, irrespective of the device being and/or standard being open.

  The reasonable answer by the Wikipedian is

  "Here is a video of you promoting the EOMA-68 initiative. Here is another. And here is an interview, in which you say, in relation to EOMA-68 and its implementations, things like, 'Let me tell you a little bit about why I'm doing this and why people should buy these products.'"

  Looks like the author has also a very different view on crowd funding:

  "it is a common mistake that a lot of people make. crowdfunding is a gift economy"

  Otherwise read the talk page, it's much more fun than the blog post.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:EOMA68

• by sevensor on 9/13/16, 2:07 PM

  Good grief. Wikipedia has a problem with pages that can only be evaluated by experts. They could be perfectly good, or they could be advancing an agenda. I noticed this with their page on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, which is a somewhat scammy group decision making technique promoted by a cult-like group of business consultants. (I've compared it to Scientology -- it has a charismatic leader and even uses special electronic gizmos to make you feel like it's more sciency.) It's hard to fix the page because nothing on it is wrong, exactly. But its sheer length and loving detail, and the utter lack of criticism or reference to alternatives, makes AHP sound way more legit than it actually is.

• by bcg1 on 9/13/16, 2:33 PM

  Original title seems to have been "I’m Supporting the 'Deletion' of the Wikipedia Page" which is a tragic story of Internet bureaucracy.

• by _Codemonkeyism on 9/13/16, 2:33 PM

  From reading this I could not find out what was going on.

  From what I tried to understand, someone running a crowd funding campaign on a 'EOMA68' device denies he has any conflict of interest with writing a 'EOMA68' wikipedia page when there is $175k on the line.

  Not that I'm a friend in any way on how 'Wikipedians' act.