devRant - A fun community for developers to connect over code, tech & life as a programmer

Just wasting a little bit of time here on Wikipedia, reading some pages on this and that subject.. and I noticed in some of them this.

"This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed."

Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

It got me thinking about these high school teachers I had to keep up with (and failed to do so because my personal values vastly exceeded quietly sitting down and listening to their constant stream of bullshit) that kept on telling the students that sourcing stuff from Wikipedia is invalid, because it's "unverified material and could often be wrong".

Now I do get the "real untold reason" that would be a valid one - critical thinking and doing verification of your own. Wikipedia is too easy to reach, and too much prechewed. That being said though, I do think it's an excellent source of information and no less valid than any other encyclopedia (which is generally prechewed too - I loved reading them as a kid because of that, and because it's such a compact yet vast collection of information). And the main issue.. I feel like those teachers all fail to grasp the concept of quorum.

Now, quorum is a term that's used in distributed computing among other places like politics, and essentially it means that a larger than 50% consensus needs to be achieved for any further actions (or commits) to be made to the general structure, whichever that structure may be (compute nodes, storage, political decisions, whatever). On Wikipedia it essentially means - as far as I can tell - that people can, and generally will as a result of frequent vandalism, refute additions due to their undocumented and therefore unproven nature.

I've been using Ceph for a while now, a distributed filesystem that heavily relies on quorum via corosync. The filesystem will not allow *any* actions to be committed when a critical amount of quorum members (in Ceph known as monitors) goes down. That's quorum. And when a less than the critical amount of nodes goes down - say 1 out of 3 - and the failed node comes back up again, it will by nature sync back to what was decided during the period of time it was down by the other members that still achieved quorum. In other words, it's a matter of agreement by majority. That's the essence of distributed computing pretty much. A complex yet so fundamentally simple means of orchestration, that is self-sustaining.

I know that there's more to it than this when you get deeper into HPC, YouTube's eventual consistency (https://youtube.com/watch/...) and such, but for the purposes of this topic, this should suffice.

Wikipedia - while not a very good means of showing that you spent a good amount of effort on sourcing your sources - is very much a valid resource. And quorum is the reason why.