Stephen Kurkjian: admit your error

Stephen Kurkjian, a writer for the Boston Globe, reported today on the resignation of Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn. Kurkjian failed to mention that his poor reporting one of the causes of Quinn's resignation.

The background to Quinn's resignation involves his controversial initiative that will require that all Massachusetts government computer systems store documents in OpenDocument format by January 1st, 2007. Microsoft, the major software supplier to the government, would naturally prefer that Massachusetts mandate the use of their new non-standard XML formats. The alternative, OpenDocument, is a standard already used by software shipping today; additionally, it is approved by an international standards body, OASIS, and has been submitted to the ISO.

In the past few months, Microsoft has been trying to argue against the new policy. In the middle of all this, Stephen Kurkjian, a veteran reporter at the Boston Globe, wrote an article entitled: "Romney administration reviewing trips made by technology chief." The article alleges that Peter Quinn made sponsored trips to technology conferences without filling out the correct forms. The "review" was instigated by the Globe, as described in this quote from Kurkjian's article: "The state launched its inquiry after the Globe began asking questions about the trips earlier this week; it is being conducted by Thomas H. Trimarco, the head of Administration and Finance."

That was on November 26, 2005. About two weeks later (December 10, 2005), the Globe admitted that, in fact, Peter Quinn had done nothing wrong. Specifically, Kurkjian writes that, "[Quinn's boss at the time, Eric Kriss] confirmed that he had verbally approved all of Quinn's requests to travel to conferences in 2005. Kriss said he relieved Quinn of the responsibility of filling out the forms for the trips this year because he felt that the reason that the regulation had been put in place originally -- the fiscal crisis of the mid-1990s had cut out all state-funded travel -- had expired."

Two more weeks pass, and on December 24, 2005, Quinn sends an email to his staff announcing his resignation. According to a report from Robert McMillan of Macworld, his email included the following: "'Over the last several months, we have been through some very difficult and tumultuous times . . . Many of these events have been very disruptive and harmful to my personal well being, my family and many of my closest friends.'"

In his article today (December 28, 2005), Kurkjian quotes the same phrase, "some very difficult and tumultuous times." Kurkjian's next line is: "Quinn had been the subject of a review by his current boss, Administration and Finance Secretary Thomas H. Trimarco, following a report in November that Quinn had failed to fill out the required state forms to allow his appearances at numerous out-of-state conventions in 2005, where his visits were, for the most part, paid for by convention organizers. Trimarco's review found that Quinn had authorization to make the trips and had not violated any conflict of interest provisions."

It's shocking that Stephen Kurkjian, while explaining that Quinn was quitting because of the stress of recent events, fails to mention that he was personally the cause of one the most significant events. Kurkjian mentions "a report in November that Quinn had failed to fill out the required state forms." This fails to acknowledge that the report was a newspaper article, not a formal report of any sort; that the report was wrong; and that the report was written by Stephen Kurkjian, the same guy now reporting on Quinn's resignation.

It's certainly possible that most of the stress that pushed Quinn to quit came from other sources-- for example, the testimony of Microsoft's Alan Yates, or the strange misunderstandings of Representative Pacheco. However, given that Kurkjian wrote the erroneous report, he should take responsibility for his error.

RSS + SSE and Greasemonkey turns the web into Wikipedia

I've been thinking about the SSE extension and how it might be combined with Greasemonkey to fix a lot of shyste. Here's an example: you're reading a webpage, and you see a spelling error. You highlight the word, right click on some icon in the status bar, and select "spellcheck" or something like that. The point is that somehow, a Greasemonkey script records your correction, and whenever you visit that URL, it applies your correction. Then, on a periodic basis, your browser contacts a website (THIS IS WHERE RAILS WOULD BE USED!) and updates an RSS + SSE feed of your corrections to the web (er, "the living web"). These feeds get aggregated, so as I'm browsing, I have a cache of Greasemonkey scripts shared and maintained in concert with people that I trust through RSS + SSE. The spelling example is minor-- it could be expanded to be website commentary, adblocking (ooh! controversial!), or whatever. In fact, it has the potential to make the entire web as unreliable as Wikipedia! I suspect that there could be scalability problems with this idea. There could also be stupidity problems.

RSS aggregators

I don't understand why RSS aggregators don't suck. I've tried lots of different RSS aggregators over the past two years or so, and as far as I can tell, the basic effect is to take all the news websites and blogs that I visit, strip out the graphical elements, and cram them into a paned interface reminiscent of Outlook. Why is this better than tabs with the sites open in them?

Daniel Brandt and Wikipedia's reliability

Daniel Terdiman has posted an interesting interview with Daniel Brandt about his efforts to locate Brian Chase, the man who inserted false information into John Seigenthaler's biography on Wikipedia. I thought that a remark Daniel Brandt made in the comments attached to the interview was interesting. Talking about tracking down the Chase, he said: " Yes, I got lucky because there was a server on that address. I have never claimed that I was anything but lucky. Non-technical journalists frequently see the Internet infrastructure as some sort of black box, and 'cyber-sleuth' makes better copy than 'I got lucky.' That's not my fault." That's an example of a journalist spreading misinformation about him. Brandt has no recourse, and he doesn't care. He doesn't care because it's a minor distortion, not libelous, but it's strange that he offers that defense for himself but agrees with John Seigenthaler's righteous fury. Couldn't Seigenthaler also say "That's not my fault"? I think taking Wikipedia to task for permitting libel despite their best efforts is silly. Wikipedia is about as dangerous as me writing "Special Lecture at Harvard, 7 pm, December 22nd. Professor Henderson will discuss John Seigenthaler involvement in planning the Kennedy assassination," on a piece of paper and posting it in Harvard Square. The levels of traffic and exposure are about the same. It's true that Wikipedia in the aggregate gets lots of traffic, but not Seigenthaler's page. If Seigenthaler's page were a high traffic page, the error would get caught sooner. The police are not fact-checking flyers in Harvard Square, so why police Wikipedia? If the Harvard Square example is ridiculous, then pick any other forum or mailing list on the internet. Since I was in 3rd grade, people have been telling me "Don't believe everything you read!" and "Don't believe everything you see on TV!" Those are educational cliches. When Nature looks at Wikipedia vs. Britannica statistically, Wikipedia does pretty well. So what's the problem? Note: Terdiman's article bears the ZDNet tag "open source." Why? Is Daniel Terdiman tagging his own articles about Wikipedia with the tag "open source," even though he wrote an article last week arguing that the term "open source" was inappropriate for Wikipedia?