Talk:Fallacies of distributed computing

I don't understand the "Criticism" section of this article. I particularly do not understand the statement that "These are disputed facts.". In reality the list is not describing a controversy between parties about certain facts; instead, it is describing a tendency for programmers (and, more generally, system designers) to have misconceptions in certain areas. The point is not whether the facts are wrong or right (although the list is certainly not neutral on the issues); instead, the point of the list is the ease with which designers unknowingly make the listed assumptions.

In fact, one could argue it's OK for a system designer to intentionally choose any of these as an intentional simplifying assumption. The danger that the list warns against is in not knowing that the question even exists.

I removed the fictitious 9th fallacy, "All system clocks are synchronized." Although I believe this is a common fallacy, it is not in the list provided by Sun. I found no mention of it anywhere with respect to the fallacies of distributed computing. twimoki (talk) 19:49, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move Mike Cline (talk) 13:31, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

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Fallacies of Distributed Computing → Fallacies of distributed computing – There is strong evidence in books that capitalization is not needed: most books that use the phrase "fallacies of distributed computing" in reference to this list, in sentence context, do so in lower case (if you do a book search, click through to see if it can be found in sentence context, as Google books prefers to show title and heading snippets). Dicklyon (talk) 20:30, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

• Support. The evidence from sources is fine, of course; but this is first of all an internal style matter for Wikipedia, and the sources merely confirm that Wikipedia fits with the dominant practice. Our overarching principle is stated at the beginning of WP:MOSCAPS: unnecessary capitalisation is to be avoided. This article is about fallacies, not about some book about fallacies, with a title sometimes given upper-cased. Even single well-established fallacies are lower-cased on Wikipedia: Fallacy of division, Fallacy of quoting out of context, Gambler's fallacy, and very many more (see List of fallacies – where just a couple need to be fixed on that page, in fact; I'll do that now). This fits neatly with the provision for scientific laws and the like at WP:MOSCAPS. No need to cap, so don't do it. Noetica^Tea? 22:23, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. Firstly, I dispute that most books which use the phrase in sentence context do so in lowercase. My review of a Google Books search (looking at the actual pages, not just at the results page) seems to indicate that most books actually use uppercase (some use both, depending on whether they're treating the phrase generically or as a proper name). Which, coincidentally, leads me to...

  Secondly, while this is not a book about fallacies, it is a specific collection of certain fallacies, which has been given a widely-recognized and -used name: the "Fallacies of Distributed Computing" (often the "Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing"). An analogy would be to the Ten Commandments. Of course there are all kinds of commandments (and all kinds of groupings of commandments, too) that need not be be in uppercase; but when we talk about the ten commandments given to Moses on a couple of tablets, we give that specific collection a name: the "Ten Commandments". Same here; there can be any number of fallacies of distributed computing one can come up with, but when we talk about the list of eight specific fallacies given to us by some smart people at Sun Microsystems (on a tablet, perhaps?), we give that collection a name: the "(Eight) Fallacies of Distributed Computing". Dohn joe (talk) 23:10, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

• I did a slightly different search, excluding ones with "fallacies" in the titles, which knocks out some junk, and restricting to books with previews available, and found 5 of 10 had lower case in sentence context, while several had nothing in sentence context, so it was a clear majority. On your search, first page of 10, I have these notes (assuming you got the same books I got): a wikipedia mirror, over-capitalizes even "Fallacies" alone, mixed, no sign of editor attention, no appearance in sentence, lower case except in quoted paper title, lower case except in quoted paper title, lower case except in title and heading, lower case, none in sentence besides quoted tite, upper case, but implicitly a quote "referred to as ...". There's not much evidence there that it should be capitalized, unless you want to make the topic be the title document, which I think is seldom a good approach. But book evidence aside, I support Noetica's observations that we should just follow WP style. People name things all the time; that doesn't mean those names become proper names. Dicklyon (talk) 01:35, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

  Indeed. And if we look at an ngram for "these Fallacies of,these fallacies of" over the whole 20th century, we find a zero count for the capitalised form in a typical sentential context. That's how the fallacies in this article would be mentioned; they are generically and descriptively picked out, and any corporate, "commercial", or "proprietary" provenance is irrelevant. Noetica^Tea? 02:14, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. The caps should stay, to distinguish this particular list from the general topic of such fallacies. That's exactly what capitalisation is for in English. Andrewa (talk) 21:04, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.