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User talk:Gmaxwell

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Carnildo's RFA

Regarding your edit summary here . I'm sorry you feel hurt. Perhaps the explanation here will go some way to explaining why I too feel very hurt here . Giano | talk 09:27, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Regarding Xytra.jpg

Regarding Image:Xytra.jpg, I am actually using it in a userbox so something is actually referencing it.

Thanks though. — natha(?)nrdotcom 00:19, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Please read the tag attached to the image, it would appear that you had incorrectly tagged this image as fair use. Fair use images are only permitted in Misplaced Pages articles, not on user or project pages. I see that the tagging has since been corrected, so you shouldn't have to worry. --Gmaxwell 13:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Wikimania

Hi Gmaxwell -- I just wanted to remind you that the deadline for submitting Wikimania panels & workshops is coming up soon (this weekend). Much earlier, you had suggested several workshop ideas that sounded really good (http://meta.wikimedia.org/Wikimania_2006/Program_ideas#Tutorials). I hope that you are able to attend & host something. Please submit proposals here: http://cfp.wikimania.wikimedia.org as soon as you can. Thank you so much. Brassratgirl 21:57, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Image:PanBK-logo.png

] The image is referred to from my user page. Kindly adjust your robot to notice such cases properly. Thanks!

You have incorrectly tagged this logo with a fair use copyright tag (logo). As mentioned on the pages linked from the orphan tag, our policies do not permit fair use outside of the articles. You need to change the image to a GFDL-self or PD-self tag. If you don't wish to submit this work under a free license, we need to remove it because we do not accept unfree contributions when the copyright holder is the uploader. --Gmaxwell 13:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Question from what Roomba did

These five images: http://en.wikipedia.org/Image:Ebay_safe_payment_response_email_5_of_5.png http://en.wikipedia.org/Image:Ebay_safe_payment_response_email_4_of_5.png http://en.wikipedia.org/Image:Ebay_safe_payment_response_email_3_of_5.png http://en.wikipedia.org/Image:Ebay_safe_payment_response_email_2_of_5.png http://en.wikipedia.org/Image:Ebay_safe_payment_response_email_1_of_5.png

Are uploaded here: http://en.wikipedia.org/User:DyslexicEditor/Ebay/safepaymentpolicyemail3_20_2006

As evidence for the ebay article. They are also on its talk page.

Am I to understand that the images must be in an article or be deleted? DyslexicEditor 00:08, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

"Changed tag because of dangerous bot and no response from bot owner after days". So you give me less than 24 hours to respond before dishonestly tagging the images, and placing a dishonest claim that you went days without response? Why should you not be blocked from editing? --Gmaxwell 00:49, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
I somehow mistook the time for several days. Also my tag was not dishonest because screenshots one's private email is questionable as possibly self-made instead of fair use. To recap (1) I screwed up on the time. (2) It was not intended as dishonest.
To prove it was not dishonest: If I meant it as dishonest, I would use another account with another IP to reupload the images. DyslexicEditor 00:34, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Mindspillage suggested I put a notorphan tag. Letting you know. Please assume good faith DyslexicEditor 00:39, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Image:Three_right_feet.jpg

I did not contact the copyright holder of this image. The usage rights are on the stock exchange page and are good enough for me. I don't know who made the tag about contacting the copyright holder for stock exchange. Can you direct me to the relevant talk page about this? I do not consider it policy, but if it is you are welcome to nominate the image for deletion. The image is not mine and I really do not care about it. -Nv8200p talk 15:08, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Wiki 100

Hey G, I was just wondering if you were planning on updating Misplaced Pages:List of Wikipedians by number of edits. I can kinda see you're stressed so I hope you feel better soon. Highway 15:51, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Sure. I'll run it again tonight. Unless I forget, in which case I won't. :)--Gmaxwell 16:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for helping, I may try... oh meh I'll make it work... by the way, I love my new ranking score :P Highway 10:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
During the night while my report was running, access to the enwiki database was removed from toolserver because the enwiki database was moved to its own databases. Based on the trackrecord of our administration with prior DB moves, I honestly expect that it will never be fixed. :( I'm sorry I can't run this anymore. --Gmaxwell 12:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
It's okay, it isn't your fault. Who exactly can do this, or is there a way to allow you on? Highway 20:49, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Image:007.svg

I can tell you are stressed out at the moment, but I just had a query Image:007.svg that you uploaded. The "logo" copyright tag seems to be meant for logos of sports teams, organizations and companies, not for the logo of a "brand"... my bet is that it is fair use, but it seems a bit odd that the image copyright tag doesn't explicitly cover this situation. :-/ TheGrappler 14:46, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

You've got me man, it's a brand logo... and our fair use there is as valid as it is for any other brand logo. The older template was more clear. But someone changed the template without considering all the places it was used. --Gmaxwell 16:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Category:Images with unknown source

Hi. Could you take a look at Template talk:No license#Why include images in two categories?. We'd like to move the images from the top level unknown source category, but want to make sure we don't break report_orphan_unsure.py or other tools you've got going. Thanks. ×Meegs 18:51, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Replag

Replag of the toolserver is finally below 6 hours. Would you have a look at your suspected_living_people.py and re-activate it? -- User:Docu

Sure. --Gmaxwell 16:14, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
It now only runs once an hour, on the hour. Replag might be down but the query is quite expensive, and I don't want to make it worse. :) If you could suggest some other good cats to indicate personhood, it would be useful right now it only looks for a birth cat and no death cat. --Gmaxwell 16:35, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Great, thanks. I will try to compile a list of categories from the People by year queries. -- User:Docu


The server appears to be back (current lag: approx. 12 hours). BTW Misplaced Pages:Village_pump_(technical)#Wikimedia_Toolserver. -- User:Docu
The lag is now down to 26 minutes, 39 seconds. Would you consider re-activating your report? -- User:Docu
Replag for the English Misplaced Pages seems to be around eight days and rising. --Carnildo 21:45, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
Indeed. I had looked at instead of or whatever. Forget about my previous comments. -- User:Docu
I now have root on toolserver, so I'm staying informed (and working on) such issues these days. (At least, in theory, I've been rather busy with other stuff). Once replication is solid again I'll put all my tools back up. --Gmaxwell 03:05, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Coordinate your bots, please

I've spotted what looks like an unfortunate interaction between Roomba and OrphanBot: see the edit history of Image:Fate of Norns.jpg, which should be a perfectly standard fair use album cover. The image was first uploaded with a {{Don't know}} tag, orphaned by OrphanBot, then retagged as {{albumcover}} but then, being still orphaned, tagged as {{or-fu}} by Roomba. I was about to delete it per CSD I5 when I noticed something funny was going on. If I'd been slightly less attentive (and with a backlog of about 1600 week-old orphan fair use images, one can't expect too much attention from admins) the image would've been deleted (again).

I'm not sure what the best way to avoid such situations would be, but I though I'd bring this to your attention. I'd tentatively suggest that Roomba should not tag images as or-fu if they've been previously orphaned by OrphanBot and now have a valid tag. Of course, it'd also be nice if OrphanBot could watch the images it has orphaned and restore them if a valid tag was provided.

(Posted to both User talk:Gmaxwell and User talk:Carnildo.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:07, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Thats not unfortunate, it's pretty much intentional. Orphan bot makes a note it so anyone can reinsert it if the claimed use is valid. We can't keep 'fair use' images around if they aren't in use. Roomba doesn't delete anything, humans do... it's your responsiblity to check for obvious things like a list of articles it's been removed from. :) We can't expect bots to put fair use tagged images back into use because they can't make a decision about the the correctness of the use. --Gmaxwell 15:58, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
More specifically, it's admins — like me, for instance — who delete images after they've been tagged. And we're not keeping up with the bots, as evidenced by the 1600-image backlog as reported by your own tool. So it would be nice if the bots could do as much as they can to reduce that bottleneck. For example, if a bot tags or orphans an image because of missing information, and said information is later provided, it would be a good idea for the bot to undo its action even if the user who provided the missing information doesn't do it themselves.
The underlying problem is that people don't realize that all this tagging and orphaning is being done by bots. So when they see that their image is tagged as unsourced, for example, they'll just add the source (or fair use rationale, or whatever) without removing the tag. That would, after all, seem like the polite thing to do if the tag had been added by a human editor, who could be expected to notice the change and remove the tag if they felt it was no longer justified.
A partial solution, which has been done to some extent, is to add a notice like "Please remove this tag if it no longer applies." to the templates. But it assumes that every editor reads all the small print in the templates and understands it. It would help if the bots could do this in the cases they can detect, and if they could at least refrain from making the situation worse.
Of course, this does in some cases require a degree of cooperation from the bots: for example, in the situation described above, Roomba ought to have noticed that the image no longer matched OrphanBot's criteria, and therefore shouldn't be orphaned any more, and therefore definitely shouldn't be tagged as or-fu. Maybe that's wishful thinking. But the current situation does feel rather Kafkaesque, with one bot orphaning images and another then tagging them for deletion as orphans even if the reason for the orphaning no longer applies. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:11, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Well the tags do get removed. I've personally removed hundreds of them... In fact I was doing 100% of the de-orphan-tagging on wikipedia on my own for months before I burned out, and came back to find myself 150 images behind. The tool that people have been using to find orphan images to delete only shows ones which are still orphaned (and still fair use) and have not had their image page edited for 7+ days. Another tool shows images which are tagged as orphaned but are used in the main NS. When the backlog on that second tools grows over 100 I nag people and it gets taken care of.
Regarding backlog. I really only have one comment there: We never had substantial standing backlog when Carnildo was an admin. In my eyes the backlog is the direct fault of those who opposed his adminship, and of the arbcom who decided to give him a harsher punishment than other users who behaved worse than him. What makes the arbcom decision even worse is that the 'only temp deadmin carnildo' measure had unanimous support of the arbs while the 'send him back to RFA' option had one oppose. Carnildo taking care of most of these images, ... Can our 800 admins not do the work of a single admin who the 'community' had decided isn't qualified to be an admin anymore? .. as you can tell, I'm pretty jaded by this.:::Off of my rant and back to your discussion... We can't have the bots simply go and undo based on other edits. In my experience, at least half of the 'corrections' made by users are invalid... For example, I've seen people hide fair use images as ~8px wide inline bullets in articles just so we wouldn't delete an image they wanted to use on their userpage. Once someone has changed the tagging, we will likely never look at the case again. My argument is that once an image has been caught as incorrectly tagged once, we *must* have a human who knows something about our policies take at least a glance at it. Obviously I don't want images that have been put back into use deleted... which is why the orphan image tools exclude images which aren't tagged as fair use or aren't orphaned in real time.
... which brings me to my finally issue: Toolserver is now broken for enwiki. I have no clue if or when it will ever be fixed. This means that roomba will, quite possibly, never be run again. Since roomba is doing something like almost all of the orphan tagging, I suspect your backlog issue will go away rather quickly. :) --Gmaxwell 22:13, 12 April 2006 (UTC)


Another odd case I spotted was Image:First portuguese flag.png, which was tagged as or-fu by Roomba despite having the {{PD-flag-50}} tag. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:14, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Ahh, thats because the pd-flag-50 template is incorrectly putting category:Flag_images on the image. The flag_images category has historically been exclusively fair use images, and this has been maintained inspite of the confusing name because free flag images should be on commons instead of enwiki. --Gmaxwell 15:58, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Mille Bornes

Your bot is tagging various images related to this article as orphaned. They're not orphaned; they're displayed at the moment on a talk subpage while we discuss what to do with them and how to get more. John Reid 18:08, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

In the future please include an example, since I'm not sure what images you are talking about as there are no such images on the pages talk page right now. --Gmaxwell 18:13, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Here is an example I think. Image:CastleExcellentReal.png is now used in Talk:Castlequest and there is a debate going on to determine if this is what the article is about or the other image in the main article space. Please remove the orphan tag. - Eagle 19:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't see how that image would be fair use anywhere in Misplaced Pages. Why would I remove the tag? It isn't even clear to me how the image is helping the discussion on the talk page... if it is, you may remove the tag.. but it will be added again in a week or so. --Gmaxwell 22:32, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Shacknews article images

Hello, your robotic servant should be able to read discussions :( sikander 22:22, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

If the image is not inlined for some technical reason, you should be using the {{not orphan}} tag. --Gmaxwell 22:35, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Oooh ok. I did not know of that tag. Thanks! sikander 23:48, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Fair use

Thanks, at least we can agree on some things ;) ed g2s • talk 22:39, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Re:Image:Scripps ibsys logo.jpg

I was directed here by User:Roomba. I have fixed the problem. I forgot to add it to the directing article!!! My apologies!!! --WIKISCRIPPS2K6 WED APR 12 2006 2:35 PM EDT | 6:35 PM UTC

Thats the sort of thing that Roomba is supposted to help catch. It's no problem. Thanks for fixing it. --Gmaxwell 21:53, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Toolserver

What is this about enwiki database beeing unaccessable from the toolserver? I know there is a lot of lag and stuff, but the WP:PROD list and other tools seems to be working so surely that was just a temporary problem. As someone who find your tools and reports there very usefull I hope you will reconsider terminating your acount there. I would not worry too much about such database outages being permanent, the toolserver have become an important part of many housekeeping tasks around the wiki so an outage of any length of time is bound to get the attention of someone capable of fixing it fairly quickly, even if they don't repond to complaints directly. Or so I would hope. --Sherool (talk) 21:07, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Nope. If you'll notice that the 'replag' is linearly increasing... it isn't going to go back down: Enwiki was moved to its own database cluster from the master, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.. However, Enwiki text was moved some months ago in a similar manner, and the Asian wiki's were moved to the Korea cluster. Toolserver has never regained access to these databases. The loss of text access killed three tools of mine representing weeks of work, including the Bayesian suspect-edit irc bot which was used by at least a dozen users. I've been begging, complaining, whining and offering to help for months now... and it has basically gone nowhere. So I hope you can forgive me for having no confidence that this latest loss will ever be repaired. The problem appears to be that the primary Wikimedia developers are busy with more important things, and the main person who had the knowledge, skills, and interest to run toolserver (Kate) has gone mostly missing. Really though, I'm sure that it will someday be fixed, ... I hope that my noise making will help convince people that it's important. But I'm unsure if I want to have anything to do with it anymore: It's very disheartening to spend many hours working on tools just to have the facilities they depend on yanked out from under you... and worse when you know others depend on the tools but you can't provide a quality service... and far far worse when you realize that it's not due to real limitations but just to apathy on the part of the people we have assigned to run the resources. If you'd like to post to the Wikitech list and tell them why toolserver tools are important to you and others, it might be helpful.--Gmaxwell 21:53, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Interesting posts related to toolserver:

--Gmaxwell 22:33, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Oh, dang... I thought the replag counter was going down (from over a day a little while back), so I asumed everything was ok (I se PROD have been "suspended" too now). Hope they come up with a solution soon, I'd say the toolserver is near essentual for routine housekeeping at this point (detecting untagged images, orphanded fair use images, prod deletion etc etc), at least unless they release database dumps a lot more frequently. I guess one solution would be to have a dedicated enwiki toolserver set up (though that won't solve interwiki problems like the checkusage they use on commons and such). Too bad this is not seen as more of a prioroty, though I guess hardware and server admins don't grow on trees :( --Sherool (talk) 00:02, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I'd previously offered to donate hardware for exactly that purpose, but it would be under the condition that I decide how it gets operated under various mutually agreeable constraints (i.e. like I'd operate it myself)... I'd certantly be able to do such a thing... but that proposal didn't get any traction, and my interest in it is decreasingly marketidly as I'm seeing signs all over that Wikimedia is seriously broken and failing to scale. :( I don't have the time to fix it all myself. --Gmaxwell 00:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Question

Hi GMaxwell.

I'm in an editing dispute with SlimVirgin. I bring this to your attention because you have experience both pro and con with her. I suspect this makes you the ideal objective person to ask.

Is there any official Misplaced Pages policy about editors having some knowledge of an article before they do extensive edits? If this has this been hashed out, can you please direct me to the appropriate policy page?

In all fairness, I should tell you that I brought a somewhat different complaint to Mindspillage's attention, but she could not hear it. If you have the same reluctance to advise me, I will understand.

Thanks! --Cyberboomer 23:01, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

My only advice is that arguing on Misplaced Pages isn't worth your time. There is a huge number of things which need to be done and your efforts are better spent on subjects where people are interested in working with you rather than against you. It is my opinion that Misplaced Pages is culturally and procedurally deficient in that we are almost completely unable to demand that established useful editors discontinue their harmful habits. To me the true spirit of wiki is cooperation, even with people you disagree with. When you encounter someone who will not work with you rather than against you, the best course of action is to walk away. Misplaced Pages will still be around 50 years from now, so there is no rush to make any single aspect of it perfect. ... In any case, If the people you are having problems with truly follow you from subject to subject then eventually the behavior will become so obviously abusive that even our broken process will be able to do something about it. I think you'll find, however, is that people who manage to stay around are the ones who know how to avoid crossing that line. --Gmaxwell 00:18, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Fair use bot

I have a complaint! ... It didn't remove enough. ;) on Image:KanishkaI.jpg it was also linked from template Template:Greco-Buddhist_art. I removed it by hand, but it left me wondering if it was a feature or a bug that it wasn't removed by the bot. --Gmaxwell 02:45, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

The bot doesn't touch templates because they're too easy to mess up. Instead, it logs a note on its talk page so I can remove the image by hand. --Carnildo 03:44, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Image:PaintedCyclists2005_1.jpg

Based on your other uploads it does not appear that you are the copyright holder of this image. How do we know that "The copyright holder allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that copyright holder is attributed."? Have you communicated with the copyright holder? --Gmaxwell 17:57, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Toolserver

I am thinking about trying to stir up support for a toolserver we can count on, colocated with the main server cluster. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, the most general being a system like that, with low barriers to entry (as opposed to code changes in mediawiki) and relatively little or no threat to the database is a better system in principle than changes to the code. More people and lower barriers mean more responsive change and tools that suit the needs of sub-communities within the larger wikipedia community. Also, I think as usage increases handling some aspects of wikipedia cannot be done in a pure wiki environment. Images and the prod system are excellent examples.

I was wondering about your thoughts on this, I don't want to rush into anything, but even if it comes to fund raising, I can't imagine it would be that hard to raise the money for one box.

I see Sherool and you discussed this above, I will put a message on her talk page as well. I think the problem is, since the toolserver solution is largely decentralized, people sometimes don't understand how vital a role it plays in some key processes. I'd like to discuss this, and see what types of next steps are available though. - cohesion 22:57, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I talked a little with Interiot and Sherool, and decided to be bold and make a page for discussion, it's at Misplaced Pages:Toolserver. Please join in with any ideas :) - cohesion 01:00, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Google Watch links

I noticed you removed the Google Watch links on these two articles: , with comments that they are blacklisted and that the link no longer goes to google-watch. I wasn't aware that the WP community keeps a list of external links that are blacklisted - can you point me to it? Also, the link does indeed go to Google Watch, so I don't understand why you're stating that it does not. --mtz206 21:49, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

The links don't go to google-watch: Brandt as set all his sites to check the http referer and if the browsers came from a Wikimedia site, it redirects them to wikipedia-review, a third-party site that we've had persistent problems with links being spammed all over Misplaced Pages. This alteration caused hundreds of Misplaced Pages pages to link to wikipedia-review inappropriately, and many of these pages had no cause to link to a Brandt site in the first place (they were spam in any case). If you'd like to see this for yourself, go view a prevision revision of one of the pages and follow the links. Although it's not yet official policy, I fully expect our standard practice in the future will be to spam-blacklist any sites that play referer games with us.--Gmaxwell 21:59, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
I see now, my mistake. I had cut/pasted the link to my browser rather than click from a WP page. --mtz206 22:03, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
One thing about Misplaced Pages that provides endless amusement is that there's always someone who comes along that's new to my case, and instantly figures it's time to teach me a lesson. The archive.org approach won't work; I told them to block access to my sites 18 months ago. I don't know why you refer to links on Misplaced Pages to my sites as "spam." None of my sites has ever had any ads, and they are all nonprofit. The dozens of links from Misplaced Pages to NameBase were put in by odd Misplaced Pages editors who wanted to enhance their sources. But I do enjoy the fact that my sites are on the "spam blacklist." That's because I'm trying to get my sites, and the articles specifically about them, out of Misplaced Pages. You see, I consider the trickle of traffic from Misplaced Pages users to be "spam," because it's of much lower quality than any other traffic I get. I prefer to be on your spam list. That way your servers assume the load of blocking links to me, rather than my servers. If you get all of my sites into that spam blacklist (you're missing a few), and I'm satisfied that it's working properly, then I can take my redirects down and let your servers do the filtering. Your spam list stops Misplaced Pages users from getting to me, and I like that. --Daniel Brandt 68.94.172.187 02:57, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
The sites became spam when you redirected them for Misplaced Pages users. Some, but not a majority, of the links to your sites were already inappropriate. Your lack of a direct commercial interest doesn't, in any way, make the links any less spam for our purposes. I have no desire to 'teach you a lesson', as it's apparent from months of observing your interactions with Misplaced Pages that you are an old dog who will learn no new tricks. In any case, I look forward to my entry on your Misplaced Pages stalkers-hit-list. Cheers. --Gmaxwell 03:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Jeff Merkey

]

He is removing duly installed sockpuppet banners from proven sockpuppets which were indef blocked for WP:NLT, WP:V, WP:NPOV, etc under color of authority from Danny Wool and Tony Sidaway. Please tell me wikipedia is not going to stand for that too. Vigilant 20:06, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

This isn't being ignored, but there is a lot of activity right now. It's taking a while to straighten things out. Please have patience, and thanks for the pointer.--Gmaxwell 20:15, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

SXC

A couple of points with regards to you sxc-warning tag. Firstly, the category it creates is a violation of their database protection rights, as has been warned by Villy numerous times. The what-links-here of the template is also probably a violation, but is at least the lesser of two evils here. Secondly, the warning is far too long, which will only discourage people from reading it! It only needs to explain that the license need to checked, and where possible, obtain explicit permission. ed g2s • talk 22:45, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

lockout/tagout page you started

FYI: I just redirected the Lockout/tagout page you started to the more complete Lock and tag. I liked your picture so I put that on Lock and tag too. btw, where did you take that (specifically)? Just curious. -Snpoj 02:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

I was tagging along with a contractor friend of mine on the job at a decommissioned progress energy power plant in central Florida (I think Enterprise, Florida). Thanks for taking care of the article... I'd only started it to act as a placeholder for the image! :)--Gmaxwell 02:55, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

The ad thing

I don't know. Sounds like too little gain for too much pain to me. The pain includes people saying "Look, wikipedia now has ads in some form", which is bad enough, and the possibility of people later saying "See, those ads didn't break the thing, so let's make IPs look at them", which is far worse. I really can't see the gain amounting to much, considering that we're now talking millions in yearly costs. Nobody is going to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars for ads, unless we become a regular medium and we don't want to be regular, right? Zocky | picture popups 06:36, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Hm, "what sort of gain would it make worth it" is a good question, and a hard one. The fact that we're the only absolutely non-commercial major website is priceless - we are the proof that you can do something big without being one of "them". It's hard to see what could offset that. I would rather look into grants - projects (small-scale compared to us) get millions of euros in EU grants with no strings attached. For the longer term, I think we should be thinking about outsourcing apache farms to universities and keeping only the database server farm, which could reduce and stabilize our bandwidth and hardware expenses. Zocky | picture popups 07:09, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

comment left on Roomba userpage

==RanmaVolume1.jpg==
"Hello. I unfortunately do not appreciate the fact that you failed to tell me that my image was going up for deletion for being orphaned. If you had told me about this, I would have corrected the problem and there would have been no deletion. Now that it has been deleted, I have to re-upload it. WhisperToMe 01:28, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

(Copied it here where it would be seen — Apr. 24, '06 <freakofnurxture|talk>)

Why?

Why? Don't you understand? How can you do something like that? I like to think of myself as mature for my age, but maybe I lack the desensitazation of adulthood, because it hurt to find my userpage messed up. There are so many nicer and more civil ways in which you could have gotten the same result, but without fucking up my idealistic view of Misplaced Pages. TheJabberwʘck 03:14, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

That's OK. In terms of rants: I see where you are coming from, and I respect your personal view that rants are bad for the encyclopedia. But I don't think it's right to force others to conform to that belief unless it is completely necessary. It's kind of like the compelling interest doctrine of law, which prohibits the government from denying individual rights unless it is absolutely imperative. I can see that you don't think Wikipedians have rights. I disagree. Let us take the position held by John Locke and Henry David Thoreau, among others, that laws are a voluntary contract entered into by the individual and the state. Then the policies of Misplaced Pages can be regarded as laws. The owners and administrators of Misplaced Pages have entered into an implicit contract (non-legally binding, but again, so what?) with themselves and with the other editors, and have promised such things as freedom from racial discrimination. Yes, Jimmy Wales could ban all Jews from Misplaced Pages, but that would be a breaking of the contract. So when you say "We can exclude anyone we want at any time for any cause," that is only valid under United States law, not under "Misplaced Pages law."
But suppose that you reject this argument and deny the validity of this contract. Then you are correct that you can do whatever you want to my userpage. I would appeal to you to not do so - in fact, to not modify it at all - on both utilitarian and moral grounds. The moral argument has to do with freedom of speech and expression. I don't know what political viewpoint you espouse, but I hope you will agree that there is great value in individualism. No government could have done what Misplaced Pages has done, at such a low cost. We are individuals united, as you say, "working on a common goal." To me, a userpage is the locus of identity as an individual and as a Wikipedian - as one of the many people working on this amazing project. When I come here, my userpage is the facade I present to everyone else. I am proud of it, and I regard it as a thing of beauty. That is why I place so much value on my userpage, and why it hurt to see it changed against my wishes.
I may be mistaken as to how much individuality Misplaced Pages permits. Jimbo may have sacrificed some moral integrity (I think he holds some libertarian values based on ) to further the (possibly) greater cause of " free access to the sum of all human knowledge" to everyone. But even if this decision has been made already, I would like to know why. The only reason I can think of for permitting admins to edit user pages is if the page harms somebody else. And that is where the utilitarian argument comes in.
First, "somebody else" made the choice to look at the page, and if they don't like it they can stop. Kind of like porn or nazi sites. Do I like looking at the userpage of a fan of Osama bin Laden (no, I won't tell you who it is; I'm sure you can find out if you really want to)? No, of course not; that disgusts me. So I don't look at it.
Second, why is it bad that this person feels offended by my views? If they're stupid views, the person should be glad to know I'm an idiot (instead of having to find out late); if they're hateful views, they'll know I'm hate-filled, and they'll be able to watch me to make sure I don't spread my hatred. No matter what the case, it seems to me that knowledge is a good thing. The only exception is if the page itself is spreading hatred. That's where compelling interest is relevant. If you, as a Misplaced Pages editor, feel that this spreading of hate is a major harm to the community, then go ahead and remove the inflammatory parts. But if you look at what you removed, I can't see anything hateful except for the "Fuck the Chinese Government" box. Amnesty International is a human rights organization, and a two-state solution is working towards peace. The administator section was not hateful at all, and I carefully wrote it to reflect the fact that it is my opinion only. And as for the Chinese governement box, the only people I can see being offended by that are smooth-talking diplomats and supporters of the repressive regime, which has little regard for human rights. That's not a personal attack, by the way; if a good guy who happens to approve of torturing Falun Gong dissenters steps up, I'll be happy to change my opinion.
And finally, editing others' userpages has its own costs, which I think far outweigh the costs of any editors who are blushing at my "Fuck the Chinese government" userbox. Didn't the Userbox Wars and the related controversy lead to the resignation of many valuable editors? Look at User talk:Radiant!, and at what is happening right now with User:Karmafist. I hope you can see that these are people whose future contributions are/would have been much more valuable than any discomfort caused to some by a userpage. I hope Karmafist doesn't leave, but I can see why he would now.
I'm getting tired, so I'm gonna turn in. My writing is usually slightly fragmented; hope it's not too hard to follow. Writing this has been therapeutic for me, and I look forward to your response. Goodnight, TheJabberwʘck 05:06, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Re: Image:NASCAR_generic_car_2005.png

Hi, I was under the impression that morgue file files were copyrighted free use images. If this is not/no longer the case, please let me know, and I will cease uploading from said source. Thank you, -slowpokeiv 13:47, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Ah. I copied the license from the page onto the image page. The site permits free 'use' but not free redistribution. Thus it might as well be under the microsoft EULA for our purposes. :( --Gmaxwell 14:15, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Your threats

If you are a copyright Nazi - as is pretty evident from this edit - you may end by being permabanned from editing Misplaced Pages. Please keep away from my talk page. My policy is not to feed trolls. --Ghirla 15:18, 25 April 2006 (UTC)