Once upon a time, I was a big part of the Webcomics Wikiproject on Wikipedia.
Like other Wikiprojects, we worked together to establish a consistent framework of notability requirements for webcomics; we culled out freshly-minted vanity cruft; we welcomed and nurtured new articles; we maintained lists of deserving webcomics which did not yet have articles; the works. Most importantly, we had a process, carefully arrived at through discussion and consensus (involving some of the premier names in webcomics study and criticism, I might add), under which everyone could operate reasonably.
It worked.
I myself ran some entries through the AfD (VfD then, but still) process because they didn't fit (one that I recall was a webcomic with four pages, two of which were single-image "splash" pages); on those occasions, I took the trouble to carefully explain the community criteria involved, and encourage the overly enthusiastic contributors to keep working on their comic, and to stick around and contribute more to Wikipedia in the meantime.
For comics which did fit the inclusion criteria, I would go to the comic's forum, where inevitably someone would have just posted a "Hey, I just created an article about [xxxx] on Wikipedia!" message, and I would welcome them to Wikipedia, explain the process involved and why their webcomic was suitable for inclusion, explain how to get started editing, and how to avoid the standard eager-puppy newbie editing mistakes.
Like I said, we had a mutually-agreed upon framework in place; while not perfect, it succeeded in keeping WP free of vanity cruft, and, at the same time, kept contentious disagreements to a minimum.
And then I took a little vacation.
At the same time, a couple of the other major contributors took a break; as a result, there weren't enough people minding the store when two people, who had no real knowledge of webcomics, swept in and started tossing articles to the VfD buzz saw, right and left. Never mind the established process; never mind the carefully-negotiated group consensus -- they simply swept in, substituted their notions of notability for those of dozens of previous contributors to Wikipedia, and eviscerated the webcomics field.
After which, of course, most of the people who cared about webcomics simply gave up on Wikipedia. Some of their efforts moved over to the GFDL Comixpedia, but its user base, obviously, lacks the scale of Wikipedia's. Mostly, the folks who had devoted so many hours to webcomics articles simply found themselves deflated by the whole experience. In my case, it more or less chased me away from Wikipedia for a couple of years; and even now, I'm very careful about which articles I work on; I only have just so much time and attention I can spend, and I cannot afford to play guardian angel to every article I work on, to make sure that someone doesn't just delete it.
Since the dawn of the Great Webcomics Purge, Wikipedia's history with webcomics articles has been one long string of increasingly absurd "Oh my Gawd -- can you believe they {deleted, tried to delete} that?" moments. Time and again, articles have been proposed for deletion which would normally have served knowledgeable webcomics experts as reductio ad absurdam examples of articles which could never possibly be proposed for deletion.
I dropped out of Wikipedia almost completely for a couple of years, thanks to exactly this issue.
After a particularly busy stretch of writing and editing, I took a little break from Wikipedia, to rest and recharge my all-too-easily drained batteries; and while I was away, the Great Webcomics Purge began. I was, frankly, nauseous when I saw what had happened upon my return.
These days, I pretty much limit my Wikipedia work to articles on women's soccer, because I know that there are enough Soccer Partisans on WP to protect any soccer article from ever being run through the shredder. They may not follow women's soccer themselves, but they would swarm all over any attempt to AfD an article on, say, Bente Nordby.
Exactly. The reason why routine vandalism doesn't shatter Wikipedia is that undoing vandalism is a one-click process, more or less; it takes no more effort to undo the work of a vandal than it did for the vandal to vandalize (compare that to the real world, where a $2.50 can of spray paint and fifteen minutes can result in hundreds of dollars of city employees' salaries spent in cleanup; or, more to the point, one free rock can destroy one expensive plate glass window).
Excessive article deletion, however, is a type of damage that cannot be undone as easily as it was done. Once the article is gone, it's gone, and all of the fan-hours sunk into it are lost forever (yes, I know there is deletion review; yes, I've seen it reverse some of the more egregious mistakes of the AfD process; but no, it's not enough -- citing it is like telling people not to worry about a spate of innocent people being convicted in show trials, because there exist appellate courts which sometimes reverse wrongful convictions). Excessive deletion causes asymmetrical damage to Wikipedia in a way that casual vandalism never can.
The great ongoing pop culture notability purges are an ongoing failure point for Wikipedia.
Maybe some admins and users have taken the various "Wikipedia vs. Britanica" comparisons of years past a little too much to heart, and are trying to "improve" Wikipedia by removing all of those articles which wouldn't ever appear in Britanica, but that's an extremely short-sighted thing to do. I mean, "A page for every Pokemon" may be a catchy (if inaccurate) joke about Wikipedia, but it also represents a strength, not a weakness: After all, there are lots of places one can go on the internet to find information about, say, France, or The Battle of the Nile, or Channel Island Politics; there aren't nearly as many places you can go to learn actual facts about Patrick Farley's award-winning comics, or the differences between all of the various Gundam Wing incarnations, or the full internet career arc of Star Wars Kid.
I am pretty sure that even California — home to Hollywood, the MPAA, and all that — has specific statutory limits on the duration of any contract of this sort. I think that's one of the things Courtney Love nailed her record label on in court.
However, one sense (the original one, in fact) of the word "very" is "truly" ("very," from the Old French "verrai," is arguably the only common French loanword to displace its Germanic counterpart — in this case, "sore," from the Germanic "sehr" — from the English language after the Norman Conquest); so while saying "somewhat unique" is meaningless, saying "very unique" can be legitimate.
Better yet, giving people the benefit of the doubt on "very unique" allows me to keep my blood pressure from spiking even more often than it already does, while still allowing me to get pissed off at "mostly unique" and the like.
My wife used to work for Netbank, at their HQ here in Atlanta.
After her previous company downsized, she talked to Netbank about a job; her first in-person interview was scheduled for September 11, 2001. Oooops. We saw the second tower hit live on the Today show right before she left; once she got there, the nation's entire financial industry went into lockdown, and she spent the whole day sitting in the lobby of their offices. Heh. Was that some kind of omen?
Anyway, she got the job, and went to work doing business analysis -- which promotions actually drew in new customers, what percentage of new customers retained their accounts, et cetera; she also maintained the list of ATMs that were in service and in their network; and was responsible for generating the customer lists for both the various e-mail contacts and the annual privacy policy mailings (<geek_meat>SAS and SQL, mostly</geek_meat>).
She really liked her job, and she liked her co-workers.
The turning point for Netbank, IMHO, came after the retirement of one of its founders and a merger with another online bank called RBMG which was located in Columbia, SC (which is, ironically, where we lived before we moved to Atlanta years ago). There were the usual issues of corporate culture which arise during mergers; there were issues regarding differing customer expectations (she ran studies on customer surveys which showed dramatically different attitudes, expectations, and opinions between customers from RBMG and customers from Netbank); there were issues arising from the fact that, although the company retained its Netbank name and identity (and the deal was structured as a Netbank acquisition of RBMG), the center of gravity for the new company was in Columbia, with the former RBMG; and, frankly (again, IMHO), there were issues with RBMG's upper management and corporate strategy.
Netbank "Classic" had been focussed on, and content with, being, well, a bank. Checking and savings, CDs and Money Markets; you know the drill. RBMG, though, had aspirations both grander and farther afield, starting with mortgages (in fact, the "MG" in "RBMG" stood for "Mortgage Group").
That didn't work out too terribly well.
By last year, there were some signs of strain. While the overwhelming majority of folks working in Atlanta and Columbia (and Jacksonville) were really great, and on the ball, there was a bit of a corporate malaise; RBMG ran what seemed to me to be a less employee-friendly operation (one of the first things they did, for instance, was move Netbank's Atlanta HQ from its basic "A" or "B" office space into a semi-crappy converted former retail space which was, at best, a high "C" quality office space). The bad vibe was subtle at first, but it was certainly there; and as the mortgage business began sucking more and more, money got tighter and tighter, and things got less and less functional.
Finally, as last year began to wind down, more and more employees started to jump ship from my wife's group. Eventually, it got to the point where she was more or less forced to jump ship, simply because everyone else already had, and she would be left in department that couldn't possibly do all of the things it was expected to.
By the time she left, right at the end of the year, there was a really grim air about the place; and we got to look on in horror this year as her company stock shares rapidly declined in value to the point where it wasn't even worth bothering to sell them.
We still have a Netbank account with a small amount of money in it, and a lingering bittersweet fondness for the brand and the people who worked for it; but we're certainly not regretting her decision to leave, that's for sure.
Is it horribly churlish of me to mention that all of this happened the better part of a week ago?
I've already had pictures run through my Flickr contacts feed of happy winners (Geri Sullivan posing with a soda bottle stand-in for her statue for Science-Fiction Five-Yearly) and so forth.
How is it that it took this long for someone to submit this to Slashdot?
[n.b.: I was away at a Science Fiction convention last weekend; that's my excuse]
We must remain vigilant: This could be provide all the training would-be terrorists need to run around buying furry porn, attachable penises, and sparkly glowy rotating particle effects in real life.
Ah, "art": that most bloodied and sacred of semantic battlegrounds. For centuries it will be fought over by the classicists and the abstract impressionists, neither side ever holding the line for long [....]
...and then some Dadaist crushes the lot of them beneath a giant inflatable dog poo, and runs off, cackling gleefully.
That's the main reason why our oldest A1000 is, as I mentioned, hooked up to the TV: My wife and her mother love the two-player mode.
Many is the morning I have woken up to the sound of my wife yelling at her mother, and her mother cackling with glee in return, over some sudden trick which has allowed her to "steal" her daughter's lemmings.
Loki Games produced and sold a Linux-native port of SMAC for a while.
Of course, I'm personally still not able to get either SMAC or my Loki Railroad Tycoon II actually running under FC6, but they do still run on my ancient RH 7.3 box across the room.
Let me second this post. Not everyone has the temperament for teaching, of course, but if you do, then small technical colleges and night schools are a terrific environment for part-time teaching. Coming in cold, they would probably want you to teach some kind of "Computer literacy" course (or perhaps some application-specific training course like "MS-Office for Beginners") just to see how you teach, before they turn over a programming class to you; but IMHO it's a great experience.
I doubt this is true. There are probably more than a hundred different archives, tarballs, and tape backups from which they could salvage most, if not all, of the poor woman's e-mail.
Especially if they do business in any of the many countries with stricter-than-nonexistent data retention laws (yeah, I know, lycos.co.uk is undoubtedly a completely distinct corporate entity, yada yada yada).
I think some folks on the commons got in touch with the folks at Flickr and have tried to persuade them to show a history of licences and there would be no further problems - but so far they haven't obliged.
If they even track license change history, that would be very useful. In the other hand, if they don't currently track and retain history on things like that, it could well represent a non-trivial amount of work for them to start.
I'd love to see a straight remake of Lemmings that included the Amiga's two-player mode. Many is the hour I've whiled away listening to my wife and her mother play PvP Lemmings deathmatches in the living room (heck, I've got my oldest Amiga hooked up to our entertainment center downstairs just for Lemmings).
When I passed on reports that Lemmings 2 was among the launch titles for the PS3's online gaming service, I practically had to stop my wife from getting in line right that instant.
If you have a Windows machine and the Hauppage software, I *think* (don't quote me on that - I don't use Windows some I'm not 100% on this) that you can rename the Hauppage dongle.bin file to something else and replace it with the mvpmc one (the Hauppage software has a stripped down DHCP and TFTP server).
I am completely gobsmacked by the sheer whydidntithinkofthat-edness of that solution.
Our setup here is that we have the MVP in our bedroom, and a Pinnacle ShowCenter downstairs in the living room; in my wife's computer room we have a ReplayTV and my wife's computer (which has proven utterly and completely resistant to having Linux installed on it, despite several full-fledged attempts on my part); and in my computer room we have my computer, which runs WinXP and Fedora Core 6 (we also have a decrepit RH 7.3 box and three Amigas, but those don't factor into the media equation, much to the Amigas' chagrin). I wired the house with Gigabit, so we don't have any bandwidth worries when it comes to shuttling media content back and forth. Currently, we run the Windows back-ends for both the MediaMVP and the Pinnacle media center on both of our computers (although something in the Hauppage software a couple of revisions back nuked the MediaMVP's ability to switch from one server to the other); so whenever I boot into FC6, my computer vanishes from the media-serving equation.
Because of the Pinnacle media center downstairs, if nothing else, both computers really need to primarily run WinXP for the time being (I've actually kicked the tires on one or two Pinnacle software replacements, without much joy), so I'd have to run mvpmc under Windows for the most part.
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time, I was a big part of the Webcomics Wikiproject on Wikipedia.
Like other Wikiprojects, we worked together to establish a consistent framework of notability requirements for webcomics; we culled out freshly-minted vanity cruft; we welcomed and nurtured new articles; we maintained lists of deserving webcomics which did not yet have articles; the works. Most importantly, we had a process, carefully arrived at through discussion and consensus (involving some of the premier names in webcomics study and criticism, I might add), under which everyone could operate reasonably.
It worked.
I myself ran some entries through the AfD (VfD then, but still) process because they didn't fit (one that I recall was a webcomic with four pages, two of which were single-image "splash" pages); on those occasions, I took the trouble to carefully explain the community criteria involved, and encourage the overly enthusiastic contributors to keep working on their comic, and to stick around and contribute more to Wikipedia in the meantime.
For comics which did fit the inclusion criteria, I would go to the comic's forum, where inevitably someone would have just posted a "Hey, I just created an article about [xxxx] on Wikipedia!" message, and I would welcome them to Wikipedia, explain the process involved and why their webcomic was suitable for inclusion, explain how to get started editing, and how to avoid the standard eager-puppy newbie editing mistakes.
Like I said, we had a mutually-agreed upon framework in place; while not perfect, it succeeded in keeping WP free of vanity cruft, and, at the same time, kept contentious disagreements to a minimum.
And then I took a little vacation.
At the same time, a couple of the other major contributors took a break; as a result, there weren't enough people minding the store when two people, who had no real knowledge of webcomics, swept in and started tossing articles to the VfD buzz saw, right and left. Never mind the established process; never mind the carefully-negotiated group consensus -- they simply swept in, substituted their notions of notability for those of dozens of previous contributors to Wikipedia, and eviscerated the webcomics field.
After which, of course, most of the people who cared about webcomics simply gave up on Wikipedia. Some of their efforts moved over to the GFDL Comixpedia, but its user base, obviously, lacks the scale of Wikipedia's. Mostly, the folks who had devoted so many hours to webcomics articles simply found themselves deflated by the whole experience. In my case, it more or less chased me away from Wikipedia for a couple of years; and even now, I'm very careful about which articles I work on; I only have just so much time and attention I can spend, and I cannot afford to play guardian angel to every article I work on, to make sure that someone doesn't just delete it.
Since the dawn of the Great Webcomics Purge, Wikipedia's history with webcomics articles has been one long string of increasingly absurd "Oh my Gawd -- can you believe they {deleted, tried to delete} that?" moments. Time and again, articles have been proposed for deletion which would normally have served knowledgeable webcomics experts as reductio ad absurdam examples of articles which could never possibly be proposed for deletion.
I dropped out of Wikipedia almost completely for a couple of years, thanks to exactly this issue.
After a particularly busy stretch of writing and editing, I took a little break from Wikipedia, to rest and recharge my all-too-easily drained batteries; and while I was away, the Great Webcomics Purge began. I was, frankly, nauseous when I saw what had happened upon my return.
These days, I pretty much limit my Wikipedia work to articles on women's soccer, because I know that there are enough Soccer Partisans on WP to protect any soccer article from ever being run through the shredder. They may not follow women's soccer themselves, but they would swarm all over any attempt to AfD an article on, say, Bente Nordby.
Exactly. The reason why routine vandalism doesn't shatter Wikipedia is that undoing vandalism is a one-click process, more or less; it takes no more effort to undo the work of a vandal than it did for the vandal to vandalize (compare that to the real world, where a $2.50 can of spray paint and fifteen minutes can result in hundreds of dollars of city employees' salaries spent in cleanup; or, more to the point, one free rock can destroy one expensive plate glass window).
Excessive article deletion, however, is a type of damage that cannot be undone as easily as it was done. Once the article is gone, it's gone, and all of the fan-hours sunk into it are lost forever (yes, I know there is deletion review; yes, I've seen it reverse some of the more egregious mistakes of the AfD process; but no, it's not enough -- citing it is like telling people not to worry about a spate of innocent people being convicted in show trials, because there exist appellate courts which sometimes reverse wrongful convictions). Excessive deletion causes asymmetrical damage to Wikipedia in a way that casual vandalism never can.
The great ongoing pop culture notability purges are an ongoing failure point for Wikipedia.
Maybe some admins and users have taken the various "Wikipedia vs. Britanica" comparisons of years past a little too much to heart, and are trying to "improve" Wikipedia by removing all of those articles which wouldn't ever appear in Britanica, but that's an extremely short-sighted thing to do. I mean, "A page for every Pokemon" may be a catchy (if inaccurate) joke about Wikipedia, but it also represents a strength, not a weakness: After all, there are lots of places one can go on the internet to find information about, say, France, or The Battle of the Nile, or Channel Island Politics; there aren't nearly as many places you can go to learn actual facts about Patrick Farley's award-winning comics, or the differences between all of the various Gundam Wing incarnations, or the full internet career arc of Star Wars Kid.
I am pretty sure that even California — home to Hollywood, the MPAA, and all that — has specific statutory limits on the duration of any contract of this sort. I think that's one of the things Courtney Love nailed her record label on in court.
However, one sense (the original one, in fact) of the word "very" is "truly" ("very," from the Old French "verrai," is arguably the only common French loanword to displace its Germanic counterpart — in this case, "sore," from the Germanic "sehr" — from the English language after the Norman Conquest); so while saying "somewhat unique" is meaningless, saying "very unique" can be legitimate.
Better yet, giving people the benefit of the doubt on "very unique" allows me to keep my blood pressure from spiking even more often than it already does, while still allowing me to get pissed off at "mostly unique" and the like.
My wife used to work for Netbank, at their HQ here in Atlanta.
After her previous company downsized, she talked to Netbank about a job; her first in-person interview was scheduled for September 11, 2001. Oooops. We saw the second tower hit live on the Today show right before she left; once she got there, the nation's entire financial industry went into lockdown, and she spent the whole day sitting in the lobby of their offices. Heh. Was that some kind of omen?
Anyway, she got the job, and went to work doing business analysis -- which promotions actually drew in new customers, what percentage of new customers retained their accounts, et cetera; she also maintained the list of ATMs that were in service and in their network; and was responsible for generating the customer lists for both the various e-mail contacts and the annual privacy policy mailings ( <geek_meat> SAS and SQL, mostly </geek_meat> ).
She really liked her job, and she liked her co-workers.
The turning point for Netbank, IMHO, came after the retirement of one of its founders and a merger with another online bank called RBMG which was located in Columbia, SC (which is, ironically, where we lived before we moved to Atlanta years ago). There were the usual issues of corporate culture which arise during mergers; there were issues regarding differing customer expectations (she ran studies on customer surveys which showed dramatically different attitudes, expectations, and opinions between customers from RBMG and customers from Netbank); there were issues arising from the fact that, although the company retained its Netbank name and identity (and the deal was structured as a Netbank acquisition of RBMG), the center of gravity for the new company was in Columbia, with the former RBMG; and, frankly (again, IMHO), there were issues with RBMG's upper management and corporate strategy.
Netbank "Classic" had been focussed on, and content with, being, well, a bank. Checking and savings, CDs and Money Markets; you know the drill. RBMG, though, had aspirations both grander and farther afield, starting with mortgages (in fact, the "MG" in "RBMG" stood for "Mortgage Group").
That didn't work out too terribly well.
By last year, there were some signs of strain. While the overwhelming majority of folks working in Atlanta and Columbia (and Jacksonville) were really great, and on the ball, there was a bit of a corporate malaise; RBMG ran what seemed to me to be a less employee-friendly operation (one of the first things they did, for instance, was move Netbank's Atlanta HQ from its basic "A" or "B" office space into a semi-crappy converted former retail space which was, at best, a high "C" quality office space). The bad vibe was subtle at first, but it was certainly there; and as the mortgage business began sucking more and more, money got tighter and tighter, and things got less and less functional.
Finally, as last year began to wind down, more and more employees started to jump ship from my wife's group. Eventually, it got to the point where she was more or less forced to jump ship, simply because everyone else already had, and she would be left in department that couldn't possibly do all of the things it was expected to.
By the time she left, right at the end of the year, there was a really grim air about the place; and we got to look on in horror this year as her company stock shares rapidly declined in value to the point where it wasn't even worth bothering to sell them.
We still have a Netbank account with a small amount of money in it, and a lingering bittersweet fondness for the brand and the people who worked for it; but we're certainly not regretting her decision to leave, that's for sure.
Is it horribly churlish of me to mention that all of this happened the better part of a week ago?
I've already had pictures run through my Flickr contacts feed of happy winners (Geri Sullivan posing with a soda bottle stand-in for her statue for Science-Fiction Five-Yearly) and so forth.
How is it that it took this long for someone to submit this to Slashdot?
[ n.b. : I was away at a Science Fiction convention last weekend; that's my excuse]
We must remain vigilant: This could be provide all the training would-be terrorists need to run around buying furry porn, attachable penises, and sparkly glowy rotating particle effects in real life.
Someone should send it to Z'ha'dum to die.
The way I was going to phrase my essentially identical snarky comment was that the way to get Windows XP to surpass Vista was to... get Windows XP.
"Eeeew! Blows!"
Many is the morning I have woken up to the sound of my wife yelling at her mother, and her mother cackling with glee in return, over some sudden trick which has allowed her to "steal" her daughter's lemmings.
Plus, Lemmings looks surprisingly good on the big TV in the living room.
Of course, I'm personally still not able to get either SMAC or my Loki Railroad Tycoon II actually running under FC6, but they do still run on my ancient RH 7.3 box across the room.
Let me second this post. Not everyone has the temperament for teaching, of course, but if you do, then small technical colleges and night schools are a terrific environment for part-time teaching. Coming in cold, they would probably want you to teach some kind of "Computer literacy" course (or perhaps some application-specific training course like "MS-Office for Beginners") just to see how you teach, before they turn over a programming class to you; but IMHO it's a great experience.
Especially if they do business in any of the many countries with stricter-than-nonexistent data retention laws (yeah, I know, lycos.co.uk is undoubtedly a completely distinct corporate entity, yada yada yada).
If they even track license change history, that would be very useful. In the other hand, if they don't currently track and retain history on things like that, it could well represent a non-trivial amount of work for them to start.
Finally, I changed my default upload permissions to ©, on the theory that I could always CC-license the pictures after I was finished uploading them.
Duh. No, I was completely opaque.
Freezepop also wrote a song for Achewood , so obviously they're all hip to that whole webcomics scene, man.
When I passed on reports that Lemmings 2 was among the launch titles for the PS3's online gaming service, I practically had to stop my wife from getting in line right that instant.
That is the best name not involving the words "Electric Boogaloo" that I have ever heard for a sequel.
I am completely gobsmacked by the sheer whydidntithinkofthat-edness of that solution.
Our setup here is that we have the MVP in our bedroom, and a Pinnacle ShowCenter downstairs in the living room; in my wife's computer room we have a ReplayTV and my wife's computer (which has proven utterly and completely resistant to having Linux installed on it, despite several full-fledged attempts on my part); and in my computer room we have my computer, which runs WinXP and Fedora Core 6 (we also have a decrepit RH 7.3 box and three Amigas, but those don't factor into the media equation, much to the Amigas' chagrin). I wired the house with Gigabit, so we don't have any bandwidth worries when it comes to shuttling media content back and forth. Currently, we run the Windows back-ends for both the MediaMVP and the Pinnacle media center on both of our computers (although something in the Hauppage software a couple of revisions back nuked the MediaMVP's ability to switch from one server to the other); so whenever I boot into FC6, my computer vanishes from the media-serving equation.
Because of the Pinnacle media center downstairs, if nothing else, both computers really need to primarily run WinXP for the time being (I've actually kicked the tires on one or two Pinnacle software replacements, without much joy), so I'd have to run mvpmc under Windows for the most part.
I think I might have to give this a try.