Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Carl Hewitt/Proposed decision

Question re. Carl Hewitt banned from autobiographical editing
Concretely, what does this cover? Carl's editing at Denotational semantics has been criticised in the evidence phase, but he was documenting the work of one of his PhD students here, not his own work. Is this still considered autobiographical work? What about work of colleagues who have visited him or with whom he has coauthored work on the actor model, etc.? What about edits involving colleagues with whom he has not got a close working relationship? What about edits on articles not on the actor model, but where the issues are of strategic importance for his editing? --- Charles Stewart(talk) 22:43, 7 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Two more things that might be relevant:
 * All of the outstanding content negotiations have been resolved.
 * The guideline has recently been clarified see Wikipedia_talk:Autobiography
 * Regards, --Carl Hewitt 22:17, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Having read most of the related pages and discussion, I find the outcome of this arbitration quite problematic and disagreeable. It is not disputed that User:CarlHewitt is Carl Hewitt, who is an expert on the subject matter of the actor model and denotational semantics pages.

Some of the complaints were about trivial things like whether "Actor" is capitalized (who cares?), or whether an article that is already too long should have other stuff merged into it.

Re: the physics pages. It is true that the connections between physics and the actor model seem to be taken more seriously by Hewitt than by other actor model researchers, who tend to see them as inspiration or motivational analogies rather than anything deeper. OTOH, there are some direct correspondances, such as the fact that GR and the actors model both avoid global time, unlike many other computational models. So it's not as though Hewitt is making anything up; just perhaps overemphasising a particular viewpoint. (The thing about hidden variables in QM may be an exception, but that was reverted easily enough.)

The "self-promotion" criticism is at least partly misplaced. It is not Carl Hewitt that is being promoted; at most, it is the actor model, which is the subject of active research and development by many people besides Hewitt. And why not promote it (on pages to which it is relevant)? It's a damn fine model, which successfully addresses many of the limitations of other approaches to concurrency.

Re: the denotational semantics page. There is nothing factually incorrect about Hewitt's view that the denotational semantics of sequential, deterministic and functional languages can be treated as special cases of the semantics of concurrent sytems, or that a substantial proportion of recent research on denotational semantics is about how to apply it to concurrency. Whether this is the best way of explaining the subject in an encyclopaedia article is a different question, but it's a debatable point. I disagree that the article necessarily has to present the sequential case first.

AFAICS, Hewitt's contributions have not been original research. They are partly his research, but were previously published in reputable journals. References to future publications were only made on talk pages, and that doesn't violate any WP policy.

In summary, some relatively minor offences -- combined with having strong opinions about topics about which Hewitt is qualified to have strong opinions -- seem to have resulted in a ban that is totally disproportionate, and amounts to unjustified censorship. DavidHopwood 07:58, 9 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is not a forum for scholarly debate. Fred Bauder 15:42, 9 March 2006 (UTC)


 * David - I found Carl's offenses to be far from minor. He would regularly take hold of an article or category and start mercilessly imposing his own POV on it.  He furthermore acted without consideration for the opinions of other editors and their concerns.  A careful look at the evidence will show this.
 * At the end of your posting you write about Carl Hewitt
 * having strong opinions about topics about which Hewitt is qualified to have strong opinions
 * Carl Hewitt was expresing opinions about general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the philosophy of science. He is not qualified to have strong opnions is any of those areas.  He is a computer science professor emeritus, not a physicist or a philosopher.  I assure you that Carl Hewitt was doing damage and being disruptive.  I thank the arbitration committee for helping to take care of this situation. --EMS | Talk 18:21, 9 March 2006 (UTC)