Major enhancement of Wikipedia article on Retrospect

[DavidHertzberg]

A friendly soul has just done a major enhancement of the Wikipedia article on Retrospect, bringing it up from around 2006 to the present.  

 

In doing so he made some statements in the section "Retrospect Macintosh 10 and Retrospect Windows 8" about the updating of Retrospect Windows 8 that may be open to question.  He doesn't know for sure, because he uses Retrospect Mac.  He would appreciate any replies with corrective information, and will try to incorporate these in the article.

 

Of course, this being Wikipedia,  there is nothing stopping anyone from editing the article himself/herself.  Just remember to: A ) Sign up as a WP editor to prevent your IP from being made public. B ) Spend a few minutes learning to Edit Source; it's not that difficult.  C  ) You must provide references for factual statements; use the Templates dropdown in the editor and fill in the minimum necessary fields—you'll get automated warnings if you don't.  D ) Keep a Neutral Point of View in what you write; WP requires it.

 

Thanks!

[DavidHertzberg]

A friendly soul has just done a major enhancement of the Wikipedia article on Retrospect, bringing it up from around 2006 to the present.  

 

....

 

The friendly soul, who goes by the Wikipedia handle DovidBenAvraham, yesterday ran into problems with a senior WP editor who goes by the handle Diannaa.  She wrote "The reason I removed the content is because the quotations were excessive, comprising 30 percent of the article."  He wrote back "The reason I put so many quotations into the 'Retrospect Macintosh ...' sections of the enhanced WP article is that I would find it difficult to succinctly paraphrase descriptions of software features, particularly when those feature descriptions were originally written by expert technical writers."

 

The quotations were mostly either from the "What's New" chapters of Retrospect Mac User's Guides since Retrospect Mac 9 (Retrospect Mac 10 is the version whose code seems to have become the basis—with a different UI—of Retrospect Windows 8), or from a 9 January 2009 e-mail from Mayoff announcing the beta of the infamous Retrospect Mac 8.  The User's Guides contain explicit copyright notices, but the e-mail—whose first part seems to be copied from an EMC press release—doesn't contain a copyright notice.  Nevertheless, Diannaa says,  "Under the terms of the Berne Convention, literary works are subject to copyright whether they are tagged as such or not. No registration is required, and no copyright notice is required." 

 

DovidBenAvraham has e-mailed Retrospect PR, trying to get at least the e-mail "contributed" to the world under a Creative Commons license.  Meanwhile, in order to read the major enhancement of the WP article before Diannaa did all the removals, you'll have to look here starting at "Revision as of 09:25, 8 October 2016". Ain't the Wikipedia processes, the WP facilities, and the Hunt-Szymanski algorithm grand?

[DavidHertzberg]

On 10/9/2016 at 4:00 PM, David Hertzberg said:

The friendly soul, who goes by the Wikipedia handle DovidBenAvraham, yesterday ran into problems with a senior WP editor who goes by the handle Diannaa.  She wrote "The reason I removed the content is because the quotations were excessive, comprising 30 percent of the article."  He wrote back "The reason I put so many quotations into the 'Retrospect Macintosh ...' sections of the enhanced WP article is that I would find it difficult to succinctly paraphrase descriptions of software features, particularly when those feature descriptions were originally written by expert technical writers."

....

 

....

 

DovidBenAvraham has finished rewriting the sections of the Wikipedia article that had "excessive" quotations from scratch in his own words.  The latest version of the (old) "Retrospect (software)" article is here .  Diannaa said she was happy with the first section of the rewrite, and DovidBenAvraham hasn't heard a peep from her since.

 

Please let me know of any changes you think should be made in the article, or make them yourself—but remember that DovidBenAvraham reserves the right to revert them if they seem unjustified.

Edited October 19, 2017 by DavidHertzberg
Wikipedia article has been significantly re-edited, but old version was saved

[DavidHertzberg]

Last weekend DovidBenAvraham ran into additional flak from a senior WP editor who goes by the catchy name 80.221.159.67 (s/he apparently works at  the formerly-state-owned Finnish telco, and—DBA thinks—doesn't want to register a handle with WP because that would restrict anyone else from using the same IP address for WP work).  His/her main complaints are "This article may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may only interest a specific audience" and "This article relies too much on references to primary sources".

 

DBA justified his reliance on primary sources (meaning the Retrospect User's Guides) by the fact that—because of the debacle of Retrospect Macintosh 8—there has apparently only been one review of Retrospect on an reputable site since then.  DBA accepted in part the "excessive amount of intricate detail" complaint, and deleted about 14% of the article that really just re-hashes User's Guide material rather than provides the intended informative overview of Retrospect—plus a few short paragraphs that tout speed improvements rather than describe new features.  The UG-level deletions have been copied into the Talk page for the article, where you can still read them if you care.

[DavidHertzberg]

Early this morning DovidBenAvraham  posted the following reply on 80.221.159.67's Wikipedia talk page : "Come on, you can't walk away from your criticisms this easily! You're the administrator who talked about proposing the article for deletion. I've just finished revising the article so that a full 50% (13 out of 26) of references are to third-party secondary sources, and—as I explained previously on my Talk page—the remaining references to primary sources are in the article only because there were no reviews of the Retrospect software for several major releases. I think my latest revisions would justify your deleting the tag that reads "This article relies too much on references to primary sources." As far as the "Original research" questions I myself raised for the "Documentation" section, I haven't had an answer yet from the Help Desk, but I think the two issues are simple enough that any WP administrator—including you—should be at least able to express an opinion. As for the "MOS" criticism, I'll try to deal with it this afternoon. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 05:12, 27 October 2016 (UTC)".  Note that the times in the signatures in this and the next paragraph are UTC (Universal Time Coordinated), which means non-DST Greenwich time (4 hours ahead of NYC DST).  80.221.159.67 apparently posts from Finland; Helsinki is 2 hours ahead of UTC.

 

A few minutes later  80.221.159.67 posted the following reply to the reply: "@DovidBenAvraham: I am not an administrator. I am an editor like you, but unlike you I don't have any knowledge of Retrospect. Any contributor can propose an article for deletion, where depending on community consensus a proposed article may be deleted. You're doing a good work. 80.221.159.67 (talk) 05:15, 27 October 2016 (UTC)".

 

P.S.: The reason DBA was able to revise the article "so that a full 50% (13 out of 26) of references are to third-party secondary sources" is that he belatedly found 3 reviews of Retrospect on the venerable and respected TitBITS.com.  Those reviews, although not as detailed as the corresponding Retrospect Mac User's Guides, contained information that was detailed enough to serve as substitutes for those UGs as references in the WP article.

[DavidHertzberg]

Yesterday DovidBenAvraham posted a reply to 80.221.159.67's Wikipedia talk page, giving a three-sentence explanation of administrators' use of Retrospect that assumed 80.221.159.67 was an employee at the Finnish telco Sonera.  80.221.159.67 replied that s/he is not an employee of Sonera, but only uses them as the ISP to his/her residence.  Since the 80.221.159.67 IP address is therefore probably a DHCP one that could theoretically be re-assigned to another Sonera customer, that in DBA's opinion is why 80.221.159.67 has not officially signed up for a WP account.

 

In the same reply DBA thanked 80.221.159.67 for suggesting that he use the Wikipedia-style paragraph-leading-asterisk format for bulleted lists.  80.221.159.67 thereupon removed the Manual-of-Style-violation tag from the Retrospect article, but added a "This article contains embedded lists that may be better presented using prose. (October 2016)" tag.  DBA doesn't think this is a good idea; his bulleted-list items are prose descriptions of Retrospect features, and are presented as part of bulleted lists because there were multiple feature additions to each major release of Retrospect.

 

*Indented bulleted list item doesn't work for Retrospect forum—must be a WP-specific feature.

 

It does not seem that 80.221.159.67 has actually proposed the Retrospect article for deletion from Wikipedia.  DBA therefore concludes that 80.221.159.67 is simply a carping kibbitzer who either doesn't like articles longer than the WP one on Time Machine, doesn't like DBA's prose style (I don't much like it either), or doesn't like Retrospect.

[DavidHertzberg]

DovidBenAvraham now has an interesting question about Snapshots in relation to the behavior of the Retrieve button in the Past Backups panel of the Console.  Since he and I discovered the question in relation to Retrospect Macintosh 12.5, I have posted it here in the "Retrospect 9 or higher for Macintosh" forum.

 

Retrospect Macintosh 8 officially did away with Snapshot as terminology, as noted in the last two sentences of the second paragraph in post #2 in the thread where I made my post.  However, since the question relates to the underlying mechanism of Retrospect—which is the same for Retrospect Windows as for Retrospect Macintosh, please feel welcome to contribute in that thread any knowledge you may have.

 

TIA.

 

P.S.: Corrected first sentence in second paragraph, in regards to precisely where in the linked-to thread I said that Retrospect Macintosh 8 officially did away with Snapshot as terminology.

[DavidHertzberg]

Mayoff made this post  in the "Saving backups to OneDrive for Business (Retrospect 7.7)" thread:

 

On 11/22/2016 at 12:01 AM, Mayoff said:

> What you'll learn is that Retrospect Windows 8 and following are totally different "under the hood" than Retrospect Windows 7.7.

This is not true. Retrospect 8 for Macintosh is totally different from version 6.x and earlier for Macintosh. Retrospect 7.7 for windows and version 8 for windows share probably 99% of the same code.

 

 

 

I pooh-poohed the statement in a subsequent post in that thread, but it now looks as if Mayoff was factually correct for Retrospect Windows 7.7.  In researching a couple of threads for the "Retrospect 9 or higher for Macintosh" forum, I discovered over the last few days that Retrospect Windows 7.5 was apparently retrofitted with most of the non-UI features of Retrospect Mac 8.  However there was no way I could have known that, because the Retrospect Windows 7.5 User's Guide did not have a "What's New" chapter and there seems not to have been any press release for Retrospect Windows 7.5.  I was getting my information from this section of the (old) Wikipedia article, which DovidBenAvraham wrote from EMC's Retrospect Windows 7.0 press release.

 

In writing for a WP article, any factual statement DBA—or anyone else—makes must be referenced to a source outside of Wikipedia.  In fact DBA is skating on thin ice in the last sentence of the linked-to-above section, because he doesn't actually show the YouTube video as a reference (which he didn't do because it would have been considered another "primary source").  "Original research" is not allowed, which IMHO—and that of DBA—would include any systematic comparison of the Retrospect Windows 7.5 UG with the Mac 8 UG that I—and DBA—have done.  So it looks like the linked-to-above section of the WP article will have to remain as is, accurate for Retrospect Windows 7.0 features but inaccurate for Retrospect Windows 7.5-7.7 features.

 

The explanation for why the then-current release of Retrospect Windows retained the name "Retrospect Windows 7..." for 8 years despite major enhancements, and for why there was no press release for any of the major enhancements, probably lies in the last paragraph of this section of the WP article.

 

I am making this post for belated accuracy, but also to be instructive to any budding WP editors who may be reading this thread. 

Edited October 19, 2017 by DavidHertzberg
Wikipedia article has been significantly re-edited, but old version was saved