Talk:Brian Fox (programmer)

Why a deletion candidate?

Gad zooks! Why is this a deletion candiate? Brian Fox is the author of bash for pete's sake! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.245.140.148 (talk • contribs) 17:54,2005-06-19

VFD

On 19 June 2005, this page was nominated for deletion. The result of the debate was keep. See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Brian Fox for a record of the discussion. - Sikon 07:07, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Citations

Hey Brian, {{fact}} tags don't necessarily mean the person doubts the material -- citations are also important because they give Wikipedia editors an easy way to confirm facts (which helps protect against vandalism like people sneaking in fake facts) and they give readers an easy way to research the item more deeply. A potential citation, then, could be a link to a copy of the source to check it out. But usually citations should be from third-party sources (where the item is mentioned in a professionally fact-checked newspaper articles, etc). [Britta] Dreamyshade (talk) 15:11, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Would this citation be acceptable from USCB? http://engineering.ucsb.edu/events/681 Teksquisite (talk) 10:02, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Bash maintainer

This page says that Brian Fox was the primary maintainer of Bash until 1992, while Bash says that he was the primary maintainer until 1990. The Bash page sites: [1] Attys (talk) 07:08, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

He was the maintainer until at least 1993. I've added citations and corrected the dates both here and on the bash page. Msnicki (talk) 15:53, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Other works

This section is either completely uncited or, in the case of the claim he wrote Wells Fargo's online banking, relies on only the marketing claims from Fox's own website. As it stands, the claim he wrote the Wells Fargo application is particularly suspect; it strains credulity that he wrote the whole thing himself is especially in need of a better source (WP:REDFLAG) if only because WF is a huge bank with (presumably) a huge IT department; surely other people must have been involved. If we can't find some actual citations, I think this section should go. Comments, please? Msnicki (talk) 16:00, 10 November 2010 (UTC) (With apologies, fixed some wording that really came out wrong the first time. Msnicki (talk) 05:29, 15 November 2010 (UTC))

I worked with his FSF buddy Joseph Arceneaux in the Fall of '94 at Wells Fargo on what may be the same project, and actually met Brian in October '94. I didn't know Brian started in '95. Having interacted with them both, I imagine Joseph had some non-trivial part, but I wouldn't dismiss that Brian did a great deal of the final application. --72.37.171.204 (talk) 14:55, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that his personal website is a self-published source, meaning we can't use it. The source needs to be reliable. Msnicki (talk) 15:28, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Can't Wiki entries contain alleged or claimed points? I acknowledge that I'm just some person, but not all documentation of this sort will ever rise to be linkable. Evidential reasoning must eventually creep into Wiki-dom. Anyway, thank you for your diligence to our Wiki Msnicki. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.37.171.204 (talk) 20:07, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, no. Every claim must be verifiable or it's supposed to be removed. But here's what could be done: If you have some personal, first-hand knowledge and you're willing to sign your name to it, you can publish it (e.g., to Scribd.com), then we can use it. Or if you know someone else with personal knowledge, you can ask them in email to confirm the facts you seek to document and then (assuming they give permission) publish that. Msnicki (talk) 20:18, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

A week having gone by, I'm concluding from the discussion that there are no big objections to deleting this section based on the lack of verifiable, reliable sources. Obviously, if we can later find some appropriate sources, it can go back. Thanks to all for considering the question. Msnicki (talk) 17:25, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Confirmation of relations

Sometimes the references that people link to in Wikipedia do not provide hard evidence of the facts they are trying to support. For instance in this case the links for Brian's relation to Dan Fox were a reference to a newsletter that is difficult to obtain and from what I've seen, doesn't really provide direct evidence of his relation and a link to his father Herb Fox through a profile page which also doesn't confirm relation. On the surface, it could seem to some that the references were either fabricated or made up to support misinformation. So I took it upon myself to contact Herbert Fox whose profile page at UMass is linked to in the article and he was able to confirm the relationships mentioned in the article. Going back through the history of the edits of this article, I found that the person that added the link to Herbert's UMass profile page was none other than the User:Brianjfox. Given Brian's own accomplishments as first employee of the Free Software Foundation, writing Bash (a major supporting piece of the free software and open source movement) and having written the first interactive online banking software, I think it's quite interesting that his grandfather created a cultural icon commonly associated with wealth and power. I'm happy that I was able to confirm this as fact instead of finding out that someone had made it up. -- Deltaray3 (talk) 02:54, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Work on Orchid

Please add a section about his work with Orchid. --CasperBraske (talk) 14:10, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

External links modified

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