Hello, It seems that I'm getting sucked into this argument solely due to my unwillingness to allow people to damage useful content that has been added to the Haskell wiki.
This started a couple of weeks ago when a user by the name Marypoppins decided to arbitrarily remove all the Euler Problems solutions from the wiki. I treated this as vandalism and immediately reverted all the changes. I'd like to state up front that I otherwise have no personal stake in this, since the solutions pages are not ones that I've made significant contributions to, nor have I even spent a significant amount of time working on Project Euler problems. (They have not enough universal quantifiers in them for my tastes.) I do however, think it's important to not allow valid contributions to the wiki to be damaged by people without good reason. On 23/02/2008, Daniel Fischer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > I try not to be too rude, although I'm rather disgusted. > I know there are several sites out on the web where solutions to PE problems > are given. That is of course absolutely against the sporting spirit of > Project Euler, but hey, not all people are sporting. > I've found http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Euler_problems irritating for a > while, but wasn't overly annoyed by it while it only contained code for > solving a few dozen problems. > Today I learnt that it now contains code for all problems. > Really bad! Why is this even the least bit bad? If you publish a bunch of problems, expect people to publish a bunch of solutions to them. They will do this regardless of what you demand, since there's educational value to others in doing so. If you're running a contest and you don't want people to be able to look up all the solutions, then simply produce a bunch of problems to which nobody has the solution, and make them available all at once, with a time limit on solving them. If you want to see how this is done correctly, have a look at what the ICFP does. If Project Euler is instead, not a contest, as people on the Talk pages on the wiki have claimed, then nobody should have any problem with publishing solutions, as the only person one could possibly cheat by looking up the solution is oneself. However, if one had already given up on solving said problem, then there would likely be significant educational value in reading a solution to it. > On top of that, the code for many problems isn't even Haskell, but C, WTF! This indeed is a problem, as it is the Haskell wiki after all. However, I feel that it's more valuable to keep such solutions until such time as their Haskell counterparts are made available. > Other code was submitted without consent of the author, copied from the PE > fora, which are restricted access and so, even if perhaps not legally, but in > spirit, do not fall under the legitimate resources for haskellwiki: > "You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a > public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK > WITHOUT PERMISSION!" This is a legitimate concern. If the copyright of the original authors can be proved, said solutions should indeed be removed. However, any claim that the content as a whole, or the list of numeric solutions violates the copyright of PE is clearly ridiculous. The problem statements do not appear on the wiki, and the exact solutions, even if PE were to publish them (that list doesn't appear to be anywhere on the PE site), clearly qualifies as fair use. > To make matters worse still, there was a page containing nothing but the > answers. That was changed, but Cale chose to reintroduce that crap. > I just removed it again. Your turn, Cale. I will not tolerate people coming along and arbitrarily blanking pages for inappropriate reasons like this. Sorry. Such a list of solutions would be useful to someone working on the problems, as a fast way to check their solutions, for instance. It doesn't harm people wanting to solve the problems on their own, as they can simply avoid looking at it. > I call on the Haskell community to vote for immediate removal of these pages > from the wiki! > Show that you're a sporting bunch. I call for the opposite. Sorry. - Cale _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe