A while ago I read this article on crooked timber about an expert being badly treated when trying to correct information about himself and his research. I thought at the time, "Well, that was stupid, but Chalmers could probably have avoided the whole thing if he had behaved a little more cooperatively, and not made Annie Hall references and such."
But today I happened to read the wikipedia article on Binary-coded decimal, and it contained some pretty odd, unencyclopedic comments belittling the value of BCD. Knowing that it is still in widespread use in business for apparently solid reasons, I looked at the talk page, and noticed I wasn't the first to protest. A poster with the nick mfc defends the use of binary coded decimal against people saying that the article isn't negative enough: "Why doesn't it say why BCD is so bad?"
mfc links to a FAQ he's written, and asks the other participants to read it, which they obviously don't. He argues patiently and politely against the various common misunderstandings, and gets thrown at him phrases like "And oh, mfc, do you realize that for every digit shown on screen a lot of calculations are done just to show that digit?"
mfc is Mike Cowlishaw, IBM Fellow (sort of IBM's equivalient of tenured professors) and perhaps their top expert on floating point issues. He is an important contributor to the IEEE floating point standard, and he convinced IBM to add a decimal floating point unit to their new POWER6-servers.
Yes, I think he knows about the calculations needed to display a decimal digit! But from his initials, people don't see his credentials. They all think they are the resident wikipedia expert on floating point. It shows.
Posted by vintermann at April 4, 2007 01:24 PM