Every contributor to an article retains the copyright to their contribution. In general, you keep the copyright to anything you write, unless you sign the rights over to someone else. Wikipedia does not require you to give up your copyright, they just require you to license your materials under GFDL. It's exactly the same with your contributions to Linux.
which is why we're never gonna see a printed version
The complete German Wikipedia has been repeatedly issued on DVD, and large parts of it have also appeared in print.
Well, I know that you can assemble an arrow from its pieces, and that's what I ended up doing, but I assumed that a drawing program in the 21st century should be able to draw an arrow for me. The "correct" way of drawing arrows in inkscape is to first draw a path, then Object|Fill and Stroke|Stroke style|End Markers and choose the arrow head. That took me about 10 minutes to figure out, never having used inkscape before. The next twenty minutes I spent trying to get the arrow head to show up in red. I still believe it's impossible.
I don't understand your comment. To the best of my knowledge, inkscape is not able to create red arrows. I spent half an hour of research in inkscape tutorials, help files and google to arrive at that conclusion. What do you suggest I should have done instead? Spend only 5 minutes of research? Use some other software, because this task is too "trivial" for inkscape? What other software do you suggest? Gimp doesn't have a feature for creating arrows either.
Inkscape is crap, face it. It can't even perform the most trivial tasks required of a vector program.
All laws apply to the president just like they apply to all other citizens. If he believes that a law is unconstitutional, he has to go to the Supreme Court, like the rest of us. Of course, the constitution's text does not spell out a a presidential power to do whatever he deems helpful during wartime.
Inkscape is a piece of crap. The other day I tried to add a red arrow to some jpeg, to point out a feature. Standard use case of a vector program, I'd say. After half an hour, I gave up: it was impossible to get the arrow's tip to show up in red. Back to the stone age: drawing the arrow from two paths in gimp...
However, like many laws, things simply aren't clear
The law that forbids the NSA from listening to communications in the U.S. is very clear. Nothing in the text of the constitution as written gives the president the right to ignore a law whenever he deems it helpful during wartime. You need a good deal of judicial activism to construct such a right out of thin air. And once such a right is constructed and openly acknowledged, Congress will never ever again agree to declare war.
The Constitution gives the executive branch the power to do pretty much anything to defend the nation.
As the strict constuctionist that people of your ilk usually are, I'm sure you can point me to the words "pretty much anything" in the text of the constitution?
There have been a couple of cases where I've tried to make some changes to a particular article that I knew were accurate, but I got some a-hole, who believed they owned the page, reversing my changes because they disagreed with them.
This does indeed happen, but there are things you can do. First, get yourself a user account, and put something about you on your user page. Anonymous users generally have lower standing in Wikipedia discussions. Next, support your changes with citation of a reputable source, and explain them on the Discussion page. In your edit summary, refer to your explanation on the Discussion page. Don't come off as a prick, but be open to changes and improvements.
Now if you are still being reverted, there are two possibilities: the editor is trying to push a certain agenda, or you are. If you are certain it is the former, you can bring up the matter at the Discussion page where editors for that particular field typically hang out; for instance there's a "Wikiproject Chemistry" and a "Wikiproject Chinese cities" etc. If nothing helps, you can post a "Request for Comment" (RfC), but that's a major undertaking.
Wikipedia should really link authors, books, and movies to sites like amazon.com.
Well, Amazon is evil, so we don't really want to send traffic to them. Furthermore, if we did that, we would have an incentive to praise every author and every book to make people buy; that's not neutral. Lastly, we try to encourage use of local libraries, which is one of the choices you get if you click on an ISBN link in Wikipedia, such as .
I cannot confirm that. Wikipedia is slow for logged-in users, because the squid proxies cannot be used, but for anonymous users it is faster than answers.com, at least from here, right now. Try for yourself: log out of Wikipedia and click on
Wikipedia should offer search functionality to the highest bidder, assuming they only insert google type text adverts along the side of the content (not even at the top), maybe max out at 5 or so.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Free in every sense: you don't have to pay, you can modify and redistribute the content, and you don't have to watch ads.
Even a nonprofit should have some rational business plan.
You may want to communicate this deep insight of yours to the Red Cross and to your neigborhood church.
Just take a look how Turkish left and right wings play around with articles that have some relevance in relation to the Kurdish or the Armenian issues...
I claim that politically controversial articles are one of the big strengths of Wikipedia. If you review the article's talk page and history, you will get an excellent and very rounded view of any given controversy, including the positions, arguments and lies of all involved parties. No other medium today, be it TV, a newspaper, a peer reviewed journal or an encyclopedia, comes even close.
I still can't get if they're just trying to push/bundle their ISP service, or what... just what is ManyOne?
I don't get the ISP stuff either (neither did the marketing droid who wrote their pages). As to ManyOne, I see it as a clone of Google Earth. You fly over nice pictures, and every once in a while you can click on stuff and a browser window opens.
If it fits anywhere is in a class of religious studies.
I think it should be covered in political science. It is an extremely interesting case of a campaign to get an idea into the public arena. Pretty much every week the New York Times has a major article on Intelligen Design. How did these people pull that off? After all, the Intelligen Design "theory" is essentially empty: "I can't understand how it came about, so it must have been God."
The Christians were forbidden from teaching creationism in the public schools, so they invented Intelligent Design, wrote text books, started scientific organizations dedicated to its study. A conservative law firm travelled around the country to find a school board that would buy into this, just to get more publicity. This is a wonderful case study in political science.
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic?
As you know, when it came to major errors, both encyclopedias had the same number, four. As to minor errors, Wikipedia had four per article and EB had three. EB has had over 230 years to fix these mistakes by now. Wikipedia is not yet 5 years old.
That's an endorsement alright!
The main endorsement, also reported in the study, is that 12% of Nature authors consult Wikipedia on a weekly basis. These are all academicians, so they typically have free web access to the Encyclopedia Britannica through their library's subscription. Why would they even bother with Wikipedia I wonder?
Slashdot Mirror
You can check here how others have done it.
Every contributor to an article retains the copyright to their contribution. In general, you keep the copyright to anything you write, unless you sign the rights over to someone else. Wikipedia does not require you to give up your copyright, they just require you to license your materials under GFDL. It's exactly the same with your contributions to Linux.
which is why we're never gonna see a printed version
The complete German Wikipedia has been repeatedly issued on DVD, and large parts of it have also appeared in print.
Well, I know that you can assemble an arrow from its pieces, and that's what I ended up doing, but I assumed that a drawing program in the 21st century should be able to draw an arrow for me. The "correct" way of drawing arrows in inkscape is to first draw a path, then Object|Fill and Stroke|Stroke style|End Markers and choose the arrow head. That took me about 10 minutes to figure out, never having used inkscape before. The next twenty minutes I spent trying to get the arrow head to show up in red. I still believe it's impossible.
I would suggest not trusting those either.
Inkscape is crap, face it. It can't even perform the most trivial tasks required of a vector program.
All laws apply to the president just like they apply to all other citizens. If he believes that a law is unconstitutional, he has to go to the Supreme Court, like the rest of us. Of course, the constitution's text does not spell out a a presidential power to do whatever he deems helpful during wartime.
Inkscape is a piece of crap. The other day I tried to add a red arrow to some jpeg, to point out a feature. Standard use case of a vector program, I'd say. After half an hour, I gave up: it was impossible to get the arrow's tip to show up in red. Back to the stone age: drawing the arrow from two paths in gimp...
The law that forbids the NSA from listening to communications in the U.S. is very clear. Nothing in the text of the constitution as written gives the president the right to ignore a law whenever he deems it helpful during wartime. You need a good deal of judicial activism to construct such a right out of thin air. And once such a right is constructed and openly acknowledged, Congress will never ever again agree to declare war.
As the strict constuctionist that people of your ilk usually are, I'm sure you can point me to the words "pretty much anything" in the text of the constitution?
Why wouldn't services like this not be available for land-lines (at least to PI's)? See also this comment.
So, is it possible to (legally) get a working cell phone without ever giving out personal information?
This does indeed happen, but there are things you can do. First, get yourself a user account, and put something about you on your user page. Anonymous users generally have lower standing in Wikipedia discussions. Next, support your changes with citation of a reputable source, and explain them on the Discussion page. In your edit summary, refer to your explanation on the Discussion page. Don't come off as a prick, but be open to changes and improvements.
Now if you are still being reverted, there are two possibilities: the editor is trying to push a certain agenda, or you are. If you are certain it is the former, you can bring up the matter at the Discussion page where editors for that particular field typically hang out; for instance there's a "Wikiproject Chemistry" and a "Wikiproject Chinese cities" etc. If nothing helps, you can post a "Request for Comment" (RfC), but that's a major undertaking.
Well, Amazon is evil, so we don't really want to send traffic to them. Furthermore, if we did that, we would have an incentive to praise every author and every book to make people buy; that's not neutral. Lastly, we try to encourage use of local libraries, which is one of the choices you get if you click on an ISBN link in Wikipedia, such as .
I cannot confirm that. Wikipedia is slow for logged-in users, because the squid proxies cannot be used, but for anonymous users it is faster than answers.com, at least from here, right now. Try for yourself: log out of Wikipedia and click on
I have seen over 100 of those.
The bottleneck is database access, not the PHP script.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Free in every sense: you don't have to pay, you can modify and redistribute the content, and you don't have to watch ads.
Even a nonprofit should have some rational business plan.
You may want to communicate this deep insight of yours to the Red Cross and to your neigborhood church.
People are happy to support a site they like: comprehensive information, free in every sense, even free of ads.
Wikipedia, and every other freely available information store, will have to find news ways to generate income.
The current model works beautifully.
You can check here whether your donation made it into their account.
I claim that politically controversial articles are one of the big strengths of Wikipedia. If you review the article's talk page and history, you will get an excellent and very rounded view of any given controversy, including the positions, arguments and lies of all involved parties. No other medium today, be it TV, a newspaper, a peer reviewed journal or an encyclopedia, comes even close.
Nine of the 42 reviewed articles were biographies, one of them highly political (Lomborg).
I wonder why you didn't ask about the fields of technology and popular culture.
I don't get the ISP stuff either (neither did the marketing droid who wrote their pages). As to ManyOne, I see it as a clone of Google Earth. You fly over nice pictures, and every once in a while you can click on stuff and a browser window opens.
Wolves and chihuahuas are pretty different. Not a different species quite yet, but close.
I think it should be covered in political science. It is an extremely interesting case of a campaign to get an idea into the public arena. Pretty much every week the New York Times has a major article on Intelligen Design. How did these people pull that off? After all, the Intelligen Design "theory" is essentially empty: "I can't understand how it came about, so it must have been God."
The Christians were forbidden from teaching creationism in the public schools, so they invented Intelligent Design, wrote text books, started scientific organizations dedicated to its study. A conservative law firm travelled around the country to find a school board that would buy into this, just to get more publicity. This is a wonderful case study in political science.
As you know, when it came to major errors, both encyclopedias had the same number, four. As to minor errors, Wikipedia had four per article and EB had three. EB has had over 230 years to fix these mistakes by now. Wikipedia is not yet 5 years old.
That's an endorsement alright!
The main endorsement, also reported in the study, is that 12% of Nature authors consult Wikipedia on a weekly basis. These are all academicians, so they typically have free web access to the Encyclopedia Britannica through their library's subscription. Why would they even bother with Wikipedia I wonder?