Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Re: A Detailed Proposal - Mk I

[Imran Ghory]

On 20 Jan 2001, at 16:06, Simon Cross wrote:

> Poing!
> 
> A collection of replies and hopefully clarification of my ideas.


> The point here is that the five fields (articleserver, authorserver,
> authorname, articlename, articleversion) uniquely identify an article.
>  The meanings of the five fields are:
> 
> articleserver:        The server to which the article was originally
> submitted. author name:       The virtual name of the author who submitted
> the article.  author server:  The name of the author/reviewer server
> which has the GPG
>   Public key for the author name.
> articlename:  The articles name, as given by the author.  Hopefully the
>   author will use something sensible like the subject of the 
>   article.

What if the author wants to submit it to more than one server, or 
have their key located on more then one server ?

(Or if a key server disappears)

I think that unique IDing should be done on the content of the 
article not on data such as the server it was submitted to. After all 
we want two articles which are the same to be fingerprinted the 
same regardless of external facts such as which server it has been 
submitted to.

I think MD5 (rfc1321) fingerprinting of the article would be the best 
way to do this.

> The embedded server name forms part of the unique ID that you are
> suggesting.  See my reply to Marcos Mello's post above.  The beauty of
> using the ID that I suggest rather than some random number (like a MD5
> checksum) is that the ID that I have suggested provides meaningful
> information at a glance.  You don't have to go look the number up in
> some silly database.  You read the ID and you immediately know:

But information such as which server and article was submitted to 
is in all practical terms fairly useless.

The system in going to be databased anyway, and is probably 
going to have some algorithmically generated unique id key field 
anyway so having an generated ID field won't add very much 
overhead.

Also what about article/author names which aren't representable in 
the standard character set ?

> 1. Who the author was.
> 2. Which server the article was first submitted to.  This also gives
> you a
>    good place to start looking for the article.
> 3. What the subject of the article is. (Hopefully contained in the
>    articlename field).

How would you propose to get an article from a database using 
such data, would you have the key stored in a field or would have 
the data items that make up the key stored seperately in the 
database ?

Also put yourself in the position of the author, would you rather put,

<a-ID:afdsfer23445>Whales</a-ID> or,

<article articleserver="articleserver.gnu.org"
authorserver="gnu-authors-reviewers.gnu.org"
authorname="joesoap" articlename="whales" 
articleversion="2.1">whales</article>

Assume we could get both of these by going to the encyclopedia 
and saying "give me the link ID for this article", I would prefer the 
first as it would make the raw article "neater" and the authors own  
description would be enough to show what the link is.



> > I think you're obsessive about digital signatures.  ;-)
> 
> I'm obsessive. :)  But I can't see the proposal working without them.

Incidently I thik we should allow signing by proxy, that is if the 
author is unable (i.e. deceased, unwilling) to sign the article but is 
otherwise happy to have it go in the encyclopedia we should allow 
it to by signed by a proxy.
  
> 
> ** My reply to Imran Ghory, who wrote:
> 
> > I'd think that the filtering be kept seperate from the actual
> > articles, i.e the server could keep a copy of who has signed what,
> > this will allow for other servers setup which could allow different
> > systems of peer review
> 
> The reason for having the signatures with the articles is so that
> someone reading the article can confirm that the article was indeed
> written by the author it claims it was.

I was referring to the signing by reviewers, I agree that the authors 
signature should be with the article.

> > If we do this we really need to have a better implimentation of gpg
> > for windows to avoid putting authors off.
> 
> Having not used gpg on windows, I couldn't say.  But if people need
> it, people will write it.  That's part of what free(dom) software is
> all about.

It's basically a command line access, those of us who use *nix 
variants regularlly probably won't have any trouble with it, but the 
mainstream Windows audience probably will.

(Incidently you can't gpg for the Mac, I think this may have 
something to do with a lack of a command line on Macs)


> > I think we should also allow for editorial alternations on a server
> > so all the articles can have a unified style. This could be achieved
> > by having the alterations stored as diffs from the originals, this
> > would allow for the original article to be verified and at the same
> > time allow a overall editorial style to be overlayed.
> 
> The <header stuff> and <footer stuff> which is not part of the article
> itself can be used for altering the 'look' of the document to some
> extent.

I'm talking about allowing a diff to change actual text in the article 
to allow a better "flow" between articles.
 
> > <splutter>
> >
> > Physics and maths sections would be almost usless without 
> > formulas(formulae ?) and other sciences and engineering topics would
> > also suffer.
> >
> > (Maybe we should just have latex -> graphics)
> 
> Go read an encyclopedia.  They don't have that much maths in them.  An
> article on 'Calculus' for instance is more likely to contain
> information on when it was developed, who developed it, what its uses
> are, and so on than a bunch of formula.  

But not however specialist encyclopedias such as the CRC 
Concise encyclopedia of mathematics (AKA MathWorld).

Also encyclopedia do contain maths for instance,

http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?z=1&pg=2&ti=761568582
(Encarta's entry on Calculus)

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/9/0,5716,18919+1+18631,00.html?query=calculus
(Britannica's entry on Calculus)

Imran