Talk:Blockchain/Archive 2

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Edits of this date

OUTSTANDING, OUTSTANDING ARTICLE, MATES, BRAVO/BRAVA. About the best tech article, in terms of WP:VER I have seen. I am beside myself with admiration. As for edits performed, they were almost all in service of removing the article tag, which calls for copyediting to present a unified citation style. One is beginning to appear as a result; my desire is not for this style, per se, necessarily (e.g., dates were of multiple styles, so I just chose one). Just that the biblio look encyclopedic, and not like a hodgepodge. Note, in the editing, some other substantive changes were made, if I found a source did not say what its appearing after a sentence implied, or if I confirmed an issue of an earlier editor.

But bottom line, this is a magnificent representation of what WIkipedia can accomplish. Making the styles consistent is immaterial to the content being accurate (since drawn from reputable sources), verifiable, and understandable. Cheers, all, and again congrats. Le Prof 50.129.227.141 (talk) 21:23, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I did a bit of research and found that the earliest contributions of dates were in dmy format. So per WP:DATERET, a part of WP:MOSDATE, that format should be retained. Fortunately, most of the recent citations added use that format, or the ISO format of yyyy-mm-dd, which some bot will come along and happily make all the dates consistent in due time. I've also added a dateformat template to the top of the article prose. Cheers. N2e (talk) 01:45, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

OUTSTANDING? I disagree if you mean anything related to the actual content. I came by to add a sidechain only to find an anonymous IP address removed every single sidechain except for Blockstream. The proper course of action is to request citations, not delete an entire sections content except for the one company. On that note there is entirely too many commercial efforts listed in this article, as a reminder of the many conversations there have been here on this talk page on the topic, there are very few proven and widely accepted implementations (such as bitcoin) and none of them are commercial to date, the only exception is possibly Ripple but they do not call their technology blockchain according to their website. Commercial references should be NOTABLE implementations that can be proven as fact, not "possible" things that companies are offering, this is not a place to advertise products and I mention this because it got out of hand before and seems to be creeping back. Microsoft and the Azure BaaS is a good example of a notable reference. "Deloitte and ConsenSys announced plans in 2016 to create a digital bank called Project ConsenSys." should not even be listed in this article. The "might-be's", "currently building", "going to implement", "currently offering", "planning to this or that" type references do not equate to actual fact. This article seems to be headed back to a bunch of "theory" again. It is also unreadable to the average person. For example what does "which hold exclusively data in initial blockchain implementations" suppose to mean? It uses a reference that links to a book page that has no reference to the term and the term itself makes little sense. Please refer to WP:CITEPAGE when using books and add sections, pages, and notable references so that they are verifiable, currently this one is not. This article is a mess. OnePercent

Agreed, the "which hold exclusively data in initial blockchain implementations" makes no sense, and it is actually unsupported by sources. Ladislav Mecir (talk) 12:15, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I removed the "which hold exclusively data in initial blockchain implementations" bit, since it had been tagged for a couple of months now with "failed verification" and no editor had attempted to clear up the matter. I don't know which is correct; just good practice to clean up the stuff after maybe two or three months, and let other editors write new prose when they have better/more sources. Cheers. N2e (talk) 04:45, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

N2e, you especially removed the tags marking a YouTube video unreliable as a Wikipedia source for several months, and marking another source as unrelated ("failed verification") to the actual claim. Both of these tags are still valid, and the claims you inserted into the article, therefore, classify as WP:OR. That is why your edits must be reverted to the WP:STATUSQUO. Ladislav Mecir (talk) 04:15, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Ladislav Mecir, thank you for your response here on the Talk page. And also thank you for your recent set of edits responding to specifically identified problems in the article, rather than making a massive revert. I think we'll be better served and obtain a better article by discussing items of contention here on this Talk page, in a item-by-item basis.

I suspect this Talk page section is, in general, the wrong place to continue the in-depth discussion, simply because these issues have nothing whatsoever to do with the section title, and are far removed from the date, two months back, when the OP topic of this section was set. Other editors are more likely to know what issue is under discussion with a more focused approach and clearer section heading names that approximate the discussion topic.

We can address various items better in new item-specific sections below, in whatever priority order we and other editors wish to identify and discuss issues. I will however just briefly respond to your last comment above on the YouTube video here, so the response is close to your comment, and that particular topic may or may not be the highest priority to take up below. That particular YouTube video is of a talk given at a technical conference, and is published by the formal organization that sponsored the conference. I believe it will thus stand scrutiny; but happy to discuss further and get other ediotr's views if you want to highlight that particular issue below in a new section. There definitely is not a blanket policy on Wikipedia that no YouTube video can ever be used as a source. Cheers. N2e (talk) 14:28, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

In addition to the fact that the claims discussing the structure of blockchains remain unconfirmed by reliable sources, they are also not discussed in the article body. This fact violates the policy that the contents of the lead section should be the most important claims discussed in the article body. Ladislav Mecir (talk) 06:25, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Blockchain Revolution — a book published in May 2016

I had mentioned above, in a Talk page item dated 31 May, that a new book had been published. I had a copy from the library then but only had limited time to work with it as a source at the time. I did use it to source some other articles at that time (probably findable in my edit history), and got it at least mentioned here. When I started editing today, it was mentioned in the Further reading section of the article.

I obtained another copy of the book today, and have now spent a few hours reading it. Have sourced a half-dozen or more citation needed requests, while cleaning up a variety of others that had been challenged for at least a couple of months. I also used the book to greatly expand the material in the article on permissioned blockchains, which seem to be a fairly big thing in the financial industry. Prior to this time, the article has mostly been about public (or "permissionless") blockchains, so good to get a bit more balance. I looked, but did not locate, any place in the book with a clear list of the pros and cons of public/permissionless blockchains, so that is legitimately something we may want to find, in this or other sources, to improve the article.

The book has been out for several months now, at least in the US, so I would guess others might be able to locate a copy at their libraries as well. There is a lot more information in Blockchain Revolution that might prove useful to improving this article, should others want to consider taking a look at it as well.

I'll have the book for while, and if I find the time, will come back here and endeavor to use it to improve sourcing on this article, as I believe it may be the first book-level treatment on the subject of blockchains. Cheers. N2e (talk) 21:21, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Great suggestion, I am going to read it as well. Here is a link by the author on TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_how_the_blockchain_is_changing_money_and_business?language=en Coincidentally I just watched it recently, very good. Jtbobwaysf (talk) 11:30, 31 August 2016 (UTC)