[conspire] BALE & what's _not_ happening at Noisebridge

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> The consistently greatest difficulty with alleged user groups has been
> verifying their _continued_ existence and activity [...]

So, here's an example:  I'm about to purge all of these from my list of
places on the Web to periodically check[1], because I pretty much think
they're all bullshit:

Noisebridge:

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/LinuxDiscussion 
  allegedly meeting We 18:00-20:00 Turing Classroom  
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Linux_%26_FreeBSDiscussion 
  alleged meeting We 18:00-20:00 Turing Classroom  
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Linux_%26_BSDiscussion  
  allegedly meeting We 18:00-20:00 Turing Classroom  
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Linux_System_Administration_Study_Group  
  allegedly meeting offsite Th 15:00-17:00
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Linux101 
  allegedly meeting Tu 18:30 to 20:00 Turing Classroom

(Why do I call bullshit?  There are multiple tells; perhaps any
interested readers can spot a few.)

Not bullshit, but useless for lack of indication of where/when:
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Linux_System_Administration_class


The first three of these pages appear to be successive iterations of the
same thing.  Around 2013, the wiki page maintainers decided 'Oh, this
Linux Discussion Group thing is going nowhere, so let's think _bigger_ 
and draw in those with FreeBSD interest.'  Then, a while later, 'You
know, that's not working well either, so let's go _bigger_ and make it
be about the entire BSD family plus Linux'.  And at no point did anyone 
bother to go do the obvious, and make the old pages be redirects to the
new one, or in some other way less misleading.

The Wednesday evening thing was real for a while -- definitely in 2013, 
and allegedly for a while in 2016, but then ceased.  And, here's the 
point, nobody bothered to remove the misleadling wiki pages' claims.

The _real_ tragedy is that, if someone does [re-]start a similar Linux
and/or *BSD effort at Noisebridge, there will be an unfair but
inevitable credibility challenge.

Anyway, I'm finally deleting all of those wiki pages from my roster of
places to check -- so I stop wasting my time rediscovering that 'Oh,
right, this is bullshit.'




[1] http://linuxmafia.com/bale/groups-to-check
My list of holidays (most of which) I include in BALE for their general
interest and addition to human civilisation may also be of interest:
http://linuxmafia.com/bale/holidays.html  (Ugh, looks like that's going
to need work soon.)