Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 21:15, 15 August 2005

Wiped discussion

Archive of previous discussion. --MWMiller 00:55, 2005 May 29 (UTC) Wiped the whole discussion because none of it is relevant anymore. If you want to restore parts of it, you can of course revert this. However the previous discussions here were all about a desperately required cleanup, which has already taken place.--alfakim 01:01, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I've been avoiding this article for awhile, but recent edit comments (specifically the one regarding "hidden comments") revealed on my watchlist compelled me to look at it again.

I think the article is now fleshed up well, but there are a few concerns.

1. It's not usual Misplaced Pages behaviour for a user to decide on deleting the whole discussion of a Talk page - most people archive them. Nobody on wikipedia holds the right to delete a complete page of discussion merely because someone believes that the topic is cleared (if you observe other wikipedia talk pages, resolved issues still have their discussions retained).

2. I'm not too sure about the screenshot because it contains the artwork of other users on the website. Personally I think it would be silly to consider that a copyright violation, but maybe you could insert the mascot of the website instead to avoid issues.

3. Misplaced Pages discourages advertising because it would be severely POV. There are many instances in this article that raises eyebrows - it felt like it was written by the owner themselves when promoting the website to potential advertisers. This includes revealing it's the 560th most visited site online, "prides itself in being esocretic", and so on.

4. The whole Artform and Community categories seem lengthy and, uhrm, flowery. "Infinitely flexible"? "Tribute to worldwide growth"? "Thriving, ever-growing, highly integrated, supportive, and friendly"? With so much praise thrown it sounds very POV.

5. The Artwork section describes the most basic functions of an art archive website. It's irrelevant.

6. Unending Growth is a title that fits better in a press release than an encyclopedia article. The first, third and fifth paragraph are equally as unsuitable.

8. As a sidenote, by the time I finished writing this article, the number of deviations submitted had risen to 12,441,683. Please Misplaced Pages:Avoid_self-references!

9. I really don't think the last updated deviant count is necessary in an encyclopedia article (Yahoo!, much larger than dA, doesn't have it either).

10. Uh, as useful as it is to know the username of the owners in the Origins section, do we need a description of their icons?

11. The whole deviantART Summit category is non-encylcopediac. It may be worth a sentence (maybe "dA is planning a get-together called deviantART Summit in Hollywood Paladium on June 17th and 18th"). Describing people flocking to buy tickets, its star-studded guest list, it possibly being "a historic event" and having a "hot press coverage" is, once again, both advertisement and POV.

12. Well, at least this time the Criticism category isn't completely replaced with "deviantArt mods may ban members" like the last time.

I appreciate your work and enthusiasm in cleaning up and making this a better article, but it's with a few setbacks I mentioned here which may just stem from inexperience. Hope you would take this well. Thanks. --Grumpyhan 18:53, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

• Right. I've tried to see to everything you've said above. Firstly I removed the silliness that said "deviantART is a PORN SIRTE or something, and the other 'UR GAY' thing. Besides that, I've tried to remove all publicity stunts, and tried to un-POV the article. I've changed expressive adjectives "eg tickets QUICKLY sold", (in fact I've removed that section), and tried to keep it factual and informative. What's irrelevent, I've removed, but a lot of what was removed last time, I do not think was in fact irrelevant. To be honest, the 560th page count, I think, is a valid piece of information.
• The Summit is something that should definitely not be removed. It may even require a page of its own.
• As for describing $jark and $spyed's avatars, I think this is fairly worthwhile, but that little origins section could be cleaned.
• Sorry for deleting the whole talk page, if anyone is still upset about this, a cleanup of the talkpage to include the archive is worthwhile, but if you ask me, there hadn't been a discussion here since April, and I don't think it's that worthwhile. I'm not against it however.
• Screenshot: I think this is fine. It's been so downsized that its basically indistinguishable. The actual 'artworks' visible on it are less than a few pixels across. If someone REALLY has to change this, changing it to the mascot is a good idea.
• Cleanups of the more flowery sections still required. I think, 'condensing' is a better word. What is currently four paragraphs could easily be one or two.
• Otherwise I think this article is now pretty ok.--alfakim 19:30, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Layout

Is there any particular reason for the Features and Growth sections to be listed as subsections of Artforms? They seem rather unrelated to me.

Launch date?

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22-awarded%20December%201999%22%20deviantart

Those must be errors or it's just the date that is given to Deviousness awards wherein the original date is missing or hadn't been noted. --cheese-cube 04:31, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Looks like a mistake. Look at the awards text on http://fuzzydemon.deviantart.com/ - joined October 2001, Deviousness Award granted December 1999 - makomk 17:04, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

There's 100s of stupid things like this.

The main thing is, since the start, there hasn't been any limits on uploading, and the file size limit was a huge 10mb, although it's been increased even more. No difference from subscriber or not.

Compared to other "free" hosts,

• Imageshack has 1mb, but has a really infamous reputation of deleting things when they reach some barrier which is beyond their "unlimited" - I heard the forum was removed since it was just overflowing in complaints.

• Photosig - 360kb, limits dimensions to (around) 800x600 too. Also their peculiar way of limiting uploads by means of critiques, it's really the only site which doesn't brag about its "progress" by means of a number - saying how much people have uploaded, or how many accounts have been added.

• Photobucket - 250kb per image and 25mb total.

Going back to devart, I wasn't going to reply to this at all, but I happened to see

"I'm embarassed to tell people about my gallery. When they visit, they can't even get in during 'peak hours,' which seems to be all day. TIME OUT is the operative word here. I have very fast cable connection and when it comes to DA, I might as well have an early version of dial-up connection."

This has been going on forever and ever. They refer to errors that can be caused by nothing except all bandwidth being used up as "bugs" - "there's a bug causing small images to not show up, there's a bug causing large images to not show up, there's a bug causing thumbnails to not come up" - now the site is so broken even sending messages doesn't work as it should.

Of special note goes out to drop-shadows. People interested in that is the kind which drool at / customize their mouse cursors and screensavers all day. So? For several months - it could of been more than 1/2 a year (end of 2003, start of 2004), it took several days from when you uploaded something untill it showed up. Why you might ask? Drop-shadows added serverside.

I wish I had more references, but it happens to be with forums that there's no ability to browse older messages - eventhough they're still stored. It feels like the only thing the forum admins spend their time with, is seeing if someone replies to an old thread, to make a long clever message stating "don't resurect threads, butwipe!".

Also to not forget the genious act of removing a whole forum (although old changes have unintentionally done the same) - the "prints help" forum was removed, since anyone could reply there, as enough people didn't use the special prints help system instead - which I tried, took 2 weeks untill getting a reply, which also apologetically stated it's "run by volounteers"...

Actually, now I was reminded of the removing of an entire category (and its associated images) - anime wallpapers. At that time in the message center, one could read on the right side at the top when something important happened to the site, a "hot topic" - this wasn't marked so, and the removal happened 2 weeks after the news item. This also kickstarted the "remove something if it's in a wrong category" - as long as you didn't like something - just check its category - and report it to get it removed.

Maybe that doesn't seem like such a big thing - if it wasn't for site changes which made (a large portion of all) images end up in the wrong categories - if you had 100 images, you had to click through for 30+ secs each for them to get into the "right" category.

Hmm. Seems I can write an entire book on this subject. Oh. I'm perma-banned there too, which can be used as excuse if wanted to ignore all this. Misplaced Pages isn't a truthmonger after all, the most hilarious thing I've seen is "Is it good enough for kids to write a school report on the subject?" - so the only thing this information is used for is bore-to-death "can you state as many facts as possible" writings. If you're going to write on something which can consist of a million facts spanning a billion pages, there's no way to compress it unless... brain empty.

/Peace 20:45, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Well hey! I wrote that. Think I'll just make a page with a collection of this stuff. {Seas 01:29, 12 August 2005 (UTC)}

Co-Founder Scott Jarkoff Forced To Resign

Read this

Link and title says it all actually. I think the article has to now incoporate this piece of information, but I don't know how or where to put it. It's stirring up more than a few feathers on deviantART. A.K.R. 03:22, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree that this should be put under the crits sub-section. The situation is most definetly notable, since the dA community is in an uproar. (My deviantWatch is full of journal entries arguing about Jark's departure). But I'm not sure if it should be under it's own heading, or under "dA as a corporation", since it focuses on the termination of one of the dA community leaders. --LBMixPro 11:01, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

I'm putting this page on watch, just in case. A.K.R. 13:40, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. You know, you should add all the articles you make edits to to your watchlist. I think we need to explain why Jark was so important to the community as a whole, or readers won't understand why the community is so pissed off right now. --LBMixPro 08:54, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

I'd love to hear someone explain his "vision for a true art community". Maybe this explains it best? {Seas 20:09, 3 August 2005 (UTC)}

An alleged email from Jark to Spyed and McCan, July 19th, talking about "Serious Business Matters".

Ok.... Who wants to cover the jark stuff?

I think that we should wait until more information is available. --cheese-cube 12:37, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Uh should we maybe include the number of staff resignations that have taken place since august 1st 2005, all related to the jark issue. --mtekk 3 August 2005

This Page has links to everything you could ever need for this section. angrysquirrel 10:43, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

This whole section plus any changes that are made should be scrutinized closely; the situation is rather tense and unscrupulous members of either faction could easily use wiki to try to force their own perspective as fact. wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a news website, so perhaps it would be better to step back from the issue a little until it is better documented and less likely to change overnight.

I agree. Even though I'm supporting Jark, it's important to remain neutral when writing Misplaced Pages articles. I'm going to look through the article and look for signs of bias from both sides.A.K.R. 06:34, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, I have done all I could to clean up the article. I have also reinstated two deleted sections, but have cleaned them up. Also, a reminder: please keep all the jark-spyed war thing to the section concerning jark's resignation; try not to spill it over to the other sections. A.K.R. 07:14, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Removal of founders

To whoever is removing the four founders of deviantART from the opening paragraph, please state your reasons here. Otherwise, prepare for another revert. Signed, a fellow neutral friend of deviantART. —RaD Man (talk) 07:38, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Jark and Matteo were the actual co-founders, and Spyed claimed to be a 'third' founder in a site-wide comment on April 10th, 2003. However, Andrew McCann is not a co-founder amd has never been 'considered' one. disastrophe 11:26, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Jark Considers he and Matteo to be the founders, and Spyed to have joined later, and spyed claims to have been with deviant art from "day 1", and to be a founder himself. Basically there is disagreement, so the article should discuss the opposing veiws and have relevant links to sources but not make a decision if it wishes to remain neutral.

I doubt that Jark "considers" only him and Matt to be the only co-founders. I think his comments have been misconstrued that way. But regardless, Spyed did not join later. This is a fact. deviantART was an entity of the DMusic Network which Angelo started under Ovitz, who had taken interest and ownership in DMusic (Dimension Music) several years before. The DMusic Network was a 'last big push' in Angelo (Spyed), Scott (Jark), and several other people in the realm of digital music. Part of this "push" was an effort to synergize and incorporate areas of interest of DMusic's current and potential audience. DMusic had supported the FIRST skinning effort in the late 1990s - it was a natural fit. deviantART was developed alongside DMusic from April 2000 until deviantART became a seperate entity a few years later. I have chatlogs of this matter. I was on staff with the DMusic Network when it became "the DMusic Network" until Ovitz pulled funding.

http://mikeylove.deviantart.com/ was also present at this time, and for an excerpt of chatlog, in the #DM (DMusic) staff channel, I present this:

(@jark):so, does ANYONE have anything to offer (@jark):towards deviantart in the way of ideas?

• • SNIP, some staff in channel express confusion**

(@jark): it is going to be the DMN's official skin/art site

• • SNIP

(@Gagarin): : Has this been meantioned before? I don't remember reading any kind of mail about it (@aahz): hmmm interesting (@jark): it has been mentioned here before, no mail sent out on it because the domains were just bought yesterday (@Gagarin): ah, probably during the week I was away from a computer terminal (@jark): quite possibly

This is from April, 24, 2000.

Nice. I wish there was another way to cite this though. If you can find one, please add this info to the article. --LBMixPro 03:01, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

As far as I understand it Matteo and Jark founded the idea of deviantArt and Spyed Invested £15,000 and it was hosted on D-Music servers, as mentioned above. And Investor classed as a Founder is debatable. This infomation is based one source http://arc.deviantart.com/journal/6103648/ can it be posted?

We'll have to lighten the restrictions of Misplaced Pages:No original research a little for cases like this: I believe that a single webpage from the appropriate source should be good enough. It's not like we're going to be able to get peer reviewed articles.... so add it, but make sure you include the link, and the date of retrieval. — Ambush Commander 14:24, August 14, 2005 (UTC)

Sponsors

"The second way are sponsors: that's why a deviation about documented abuses made by another corporation that one day might become a sponsor of deviantART should be seen as undesirable."

I remember seeing a news post for foldershare ,and it happens to be I see ads for this site all the time - been going on for months. I think it's really disrespectful to artist, which should be above the mere mortals, in having FREE in ads, but then, it might just be hard to find any ads but those. Something a little disturbing is viagra ads , as the average age is 15-16. Also seen in the screenshot is intimate dating and hot local single - for a site which censores (male) sexual imagery so much... Then we have poker and roulette - what kind of morals are these?

1 - there used to be "browse old news", and going to news.deviantart.com just redirects to front page - gotta love those feature additions. {Seas 17:26, 14 August 2005 (UTC)}

Please, No More Assumptions And Conclusion-Jumping

I had had enough of the edits made by someone (who isn't a registered user). Not only is it poorly written, but it makes many assumptions and jumps to conclusions, and is heavily biased. I have resorted to adding a comment on top of the page, at the top of all affected sections, as well as sections that may become the target of such edits. Do not remove them. To whoever is making such edits: I urge you to either stop, or gain a better understanding of the situation before making any future edits. The situation is extremely complex, and is also easy to write things supporting your own side of view, but Misplaced Pages is not for that. Remain neutral and state all points of view if necessary. If you want to state only your own point of view, go somewhere else to do that. A.K.R. 18:06, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, I'm getting really pi••ed off. As I said, NO MORE CONCLUSION-JUMPING. Any direct accusations of anything to Scott Jarkoff or any other person, and any more bad prose, will be removed instantly on the spot, and will not be tolerated. This is my last warning; one more time, and I will get some higher power to protect this article. A.K.R. 05:24, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, enough is enough. If any of you see any more edits made by someone coming from the 151.44.*.* IP range, just revert to the last edit prior to the edits made by him. Ignore all the edits made by him; whoever this person is is really determined to add his own points of view (including false accusations) into this article. A.K.R. 12:08, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

This is it. Third revert in 24 hours. Request for article protection and vandalism alert over this article is now up. I can now safely assume whoever is behind 151.44.*.* is a vandal; he has been warned here. Revert all edits made by him if you see him. A.K.R. 15:35, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

The answer:

All we have written is DOCUMENTED. You are a support of Jarkoff, as you admit here. We are here to establish the only important thing: truth. Truth is truth, is documents and evidences. We are not supporter of anything but truth. This is the difference between us and you. Sorry if truth scars you. Do you have different evidences? Well, PRODUCE them then, and stop your threats and your insults. We will be extremely happy to read and examine your different evidences .... if you have them, of course.