Stern response The globules tried hard to find inaccuracies in my obituary for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Despite the "rigor" of the citizen journalists' investigations, they failed to discover a single error in the piece. This goes to show that a trained professional will always outclass amateurs.

The only part of the obituary that may be deemed over-zealous was my pronunciation that Jimmy Wales died. Apparently, he's still living.

This honest mistake, however, resulted from the inherent failings of Wales' own creation. I'm hardly going to take the blame for that.

Oddly, many of you seem to have taken my obit as some kind of humor piece, as you'll see in these letters. Again, I can't be held responsible for your failings either.

Dear Mr. Stern,

I am saddened and generally revolted. Other than that I quite enjoyed your humorous screed.

Otto A. Stern

Thanks, bro.

Take your hand and stroke it Otto. Just stroke it.

I love you.

Veronika Muchly

Um, thanks for the advice, Veronika. One question. How long do I have to stroke my hand? It's a glorious hand, but I'm not getting much out of the process, and my production has fallen off.

I've just been reading through several of Mr. Stern's articles on the Register. I have been laughing all evening! You can lump me into the group of people who enjoy Mr. Stern's articles & find them insightful. I've also gotten a complete kick out of the responses from the linux fanboys.

For the record, I'm an MCSE & VB.net developer who is employed as a system administrator. As you might imagine, my view of open-source is not charitable. Unlike the linux fanboys, I have an entire company that depends on the technology I support to get work done; a serious computer network is no place for a hobbyist. (That's what MSNBC is for!)

Mark Gibson

Good to see some sane readers out there.

Superb article, on so many levels. I especially liked the structure and the encyclopaedic style or prose.

John Ferguson

Yes.

Dear Otto,

"pediaphile" - just got to love it! So much more expressive than "geek". Definitely word of the year!

Long Live King Otto!

Charlie Clark

No.

My compliments for a factual and insightful look into a great pioneer's life. You did leave out that Jimmy was also involved in many, various contacts with alien cultures during his travels to the Aztec temples in Central Mexico. I considered these to be of great importance as this seemed to be an factor in Wikipedia being a large repository of Klignonese language and culture.

Dan Dietzer

Please make these changes to Wales' official bio on the Wikipedia page.

Hey pal, whats your problem in life? How do you justify your existence which consists of resting your butt on a cushion & typing out venom on others? The idea of wikipedia isnt that bad, its only HAMS(Hot Air Merchants) like you,create trouble. Hope you get carpal tunnel syndrome & are unable to curn out more rubbish. Merry Christmas

Krishnan

How dare you accuse me of curning?!@#$*#(#%%

Glad to see you wrangled in the pedophile joke. It was terrible and well done.

David Evans

---

I'm a fan of your articles in general, I'm also a fan of randomness for the sake of randomness, needless to say I loved this article, especially the line: "As for berating angels, Wales has never been accused of that, and we salute him for it."

Keep it up.

Tim Mortensen

---

Quality article. Quality. The writing style, the pace, the structured flow between topics, all pretty good for a ten year old child. Though in all honesty, if a child leaves primary school with writing ability like that they are in serious trouble. Clearly you have no journalistic talent; your apparently not intelligent; you have no proven IT/CS ability; your not funny and entirely lacking in insight. What is your gift to the world? Aside from your daily diatribes?

Gerry Steele

My gift to the world is of course my huge, throbbing membership at The Institute of Technological Values.

We can only dream!

Damien Jorgensen

---

Enough already with all the Wikipedia bashing! Who's paying for this smear campaign, anyway? One more such article and I'll unsubscribe from the Register rss feed. I know, that isn't much of a threat, but it's all I can do to make my point here. I can't _edit_ the articles I disagree with, on the Register web site, can I?

Hiram

See you in 2006. Otto, out. ®

Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for thirty years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, following Jimmy Wales, nursing an opal-plated prostate, spanking open source fly boys, wearing a smashing suit, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest.

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