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>From:    "Donald B. White" <[log in to unmask]>
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>We always found a lot of outdated info in every source we used, because publishers tend to reprint the same info unless they receive a correction or are asked to delete someone.
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Persistence of old information. A few years back I was arranging a
directory of histo presto sites on Open Directory, which was eventually
bought up by Netscape or Yahoo, I'm not quite sure where it is now. The
theory was that volunteers in specific interest groups would start up a
classification, my self-selected topic being histo presto, and then
would collect website URLS and/or review websites that submitted for a
listing. I was having fun with this, editing the category that I
created, doing it on an occasional basis, a gradual accumulaiton of neat
histo presto sites.

Very rarely did I have any interaction with anyone within the system,
suits me fine. Power in the system was obtained by how close your edited
categories were to the mighty ONE category of everything, how many
categories you could claim as being within your editing domain, and just
how much time you would have to expend on the project. My consideration
was that the power structure was skewed against expertise, as anyone
with real life expertise is too busy to spend 80 hours a week without
pay on building a search engine. A lot of expertise of students and
well-off idiots.

Then the "owers" hired knowledge-specialists. The thought was that all
the parallel efforts of so many volunteers was making a library with too
many duplicated entries. I don't remember what the knowledge specialists
were called but there is a profession for categorization of information.
Anyways, the experts somewhere off  at the other end of the spectrum
wrote up a white paper of rules and very quickly the rules flew down the
line, being distorted into all sorts of shades and nuances by the power
hungry with nothing better to do. Next thing I know, without anyone so
much as asking me my listings were raided and URLS that I had collected
were being disappeared and moved elsewhere. For example, if I had a
listing on ornamental plaster it quickly moved to to some other editor's
area under sheetrock.

I was feeling stressed and a bit peeved about the whole thing, and had
gotten to a point where I was not too sure I wanted to have the
responsibility any longer. I started writing nasty notes to the power
brokers. Feeling chipper I took advantage of my skills at sounding like
a raving fanatic. I insulted the intelligence of everyone involved and
was quite sarcastic and demeaning. I found one person, a woman in
England, who had some intelligence. She warned me to cool it. I thanked
her. I was not interested in cooling it. I then went in and began
removing all of the URLS that I had listed, mind you, I was having a
good time going nuts with a simulated virtual suicide.

The "administrators" of the list sent me warnings to cease and desist
with removing the URLS I had collected. To me the whole thing smacked of
my right of use in exchange for free labor and their sense of property.
They kept telling me that the listings I had compiled were not my
property. I agreed with them, though the were not as inclined to think
that it was not their property either. I was unreasonable. I believe
that we all have a right to be unreasonable and I was feeling out of
practice.

I kept pushing, removing more than 3/4 of the URLS in one late-night
flurry, and then I got locked out of the system. It also locked me out
of the contemporary short story and creative writing section that I had
cultivated. At this point I said piss on it. All this being as it is I
now find, several years later, that I can go on the web searching for
listings of historic preservation websites and I find the exact pattern
of the heirarchy of categorization that I had originally made. Seems the
one big list that I made a very small piece to, and was essentially
ignored for several years, persists and has become a backbone for a
variety of other lists.

I think the most important final criteriaon John Leeke's list, and one
often stepped over, is gut feeling. My mother was in a quandry about
which of three contractors she should select to replace the tile in her
bathroom. Mind you, my mother is particular enough, and knows enough
about trades work, that I myself would not want to do work for her
without sufficient pre-project begging. I did not know any of her
choices. We conducted the discussion on the phone. We went through
price, skill, references, and how each of their families was doing.
After hearing the pros and cons for each contractor we were nowhere
closer to a decision between them. They all sounded qualified and
experienced. I finally got her down to telling me which one she liked.
She went with the contractor that she liked and has not once expressed a
regret over the job.

][<en

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