A thought on collaboration

Question

Today I'm working on a profile for a man who was a prominent epidemiologist.  While reading a newspaper article about him I came across a statement he made about collaboration that I thought I'd share.

The article states that he always urged his students to work with others.  He said, "You can make a lot of mistakes by working individually, but by collaboration, you eliminate a lot of dumb errors."

This seems to go right along with our goals in WikiTree.  And it reminds me to thank all of you for all the help and collaboration I've received along the way.

Comments

WikiTreer Handshake To You Robin Shaules  

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Somehow I missed this previously, Gerald. Thank you for the wonderful image and the thought.

Answer 1

I completely agree! The collaborative effort of our fellow WikiTree members is a major reason why this is my favorite place for genealogy work.

Answer 2

Very interesting Robin, thanks for sharing.  Certainly some good advice.

Answer 3

There is a related statement in the field of software engineering, and specifically in open source software, which is another highly collaborative area (and an area where I have some experience in). It's called Linus's Law: which is the assertion that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

It means the same thing. Given enough people collaborating on a project, all errors ("software bugs" in the case of open source software) become shallow. In other words, "you eliminate a lot of the dumb errors".

This seems to be a general principle of collaboration. 

I would be interested in knowing more about this newspaper article and when it was published.

Comments

Eric, thanks for your comments. I have been working on this profile a lot today and have read many articles about this fellow.  Actually the comment I quoted was taken from one of his obituaries.  The link to it is https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/health/dr-warren-winkelstein-jr-dies-at-90.html?_r . He was quite an accomplished man.

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I think they're talking about a different kind of collaboration.  With software, you make the mistakes first, then people fix them.

Never heard of programmers being told that if they get tired of writing delicately-worded messages to fellow-programmers, they should scale back and stop fixing the bugs.