User talk:Ojw: Difference between revisions

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes (~~~~) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! -- Graham ☺ | Talk 22:50, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

re Christmas

your ( i think it was yours) suggestions were probably O.K., but you had to see where the article came from to get to "Feature" status. Large sections, including much ethnocentric and very detailed stuff, were repackaged and sent off to new sections (try Christmas in the media, for one), and lots of new material was worked in, in a reasonably equitable process. Good spirit shown by all on this holiday.Sfahey 23:02, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

templates

Can you tell me more about "listdev" template (I am new to en:Wiki) thanks Gérard 09:44, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It's just a "this list is incomplete" template, might be more useful for a list page than "stub", although it's all a matter of style. "listdev" = please add more items to the list, while "stub" = please write more text about this article. Ojw 13:27, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Circuit diagram example ( + Seychelles map)

Thanks! It's now in use. Great work. – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 13:41, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

And the Seychelles image looks great. I was going to finish this, but I got distracted, reading about how Seychelles fared in the Tsunami. Anyway, thanks! – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 20:58, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

Hi Ojw, I left a question for you (just curiousity) at Wikipedia:Image recreation requests#Completed requests. dbenbenn | talk 22:52, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Don't know whether I'm supposed to reply on my talkpage or yours. The earth image is pretty common - I got mine from here or here, and xplanet has loads more where that came from.

As to copyright, I haven't found anyone attempting to stop them being used as public-domain images, although they're occasionally found credited to JPL/CalTech. Images are distributed with xplanet for example, which is GPL, and many of those popular websites are displaying them without copyright notices (and have been for decades).

One page says that another page says that Living Earth claimed copyright of a similar image, but I can't find anything to substantiate that. Anyone wanting to dig through and come up with an answer I'd be interested to know, but I'd treat the images as public domain. Ojw 23:29, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

re electronic signature problems

I've left a long reply to your comment at its talk. We might consider confining a meta discussion to one of our talk pages rather than on elec sig's as a serious discussion will very likely encompass more. Are you interested, modulu time available? ww 19:03, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Baseball diagrams

Archived to User:Ojw/Baseball

Rules of the road map

Hello Ojw. I would do this myself, but I don't seem to have the facility to do so. It's about the map that you've posted at Rules of the road. I've noticed a couple of minor errors or omissions in it, namely:

• Brunei is shown as driving right (it drives left); - Done
• Mauritius is shown as driving right (it drives left); - Done
• The Bahamas are shown as driving right (they drive left); - Done
• Certain countries are completely missing:
  • the Solomon Islands;
  • Vanuatu;
  • the Maldives;
  • the Seychelles;
  • the Comoros;
  • Singapore.

There may be other oversights that I haven't noticed.

Sorry, I don't mean to be a nitpicker, but I like to see accurate maps. I'm sure you do, too. So if you get a moment, could you change the map? Thanks. Kelisi 03:55, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The countries which are missing completely, there's a good chance that they'll be missing from every wikipedia world map, because we all derive maps from the ones on Wikipedia:Blank_maps

Perhaps you could raise it either on the map page, or on one of the wikipedia helpdesks, because if there's a problem with missing countries it will affect a lot more than just this image (and it can only really be solved by someone capable of regenerating the maps from raw data, not those of us colouring them in). Ojw 17:22, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Image Tagging

I notice that you've done a lot of work creating images for Wikipedia. Unfortunately, from what I could tell, none of them have tags in accordance with Wikipedia:Image_copyright_tags. That means others can't be certain of their copyright statuses. To remedy this, can you go through and tag them. It would be simplest just to make them public domain or GFDL. If you need help, post a message on my talk page. For now, as I see your images, I'll have to mark them {{unverified}}. Thanks for your cooperation. Superm401 20:19, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

OK, show me images that are untagged? Everything in User:Ojw/Gallery is marked - screenshot for screenshots, cc-by for photos, and FDL for diagrams, maps and modfified images. Most of those images received a tag at the moment they were uploaded.

I can see about 86 correctly-tagged images on my contributions page, and I can't see any non-tagged images, which makes the phrase "none of them have tags" seem rather confusing. Ojw 20:54, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

free software = freeware!

Why did you change it? Kmg90 00:08, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

We have two pages: Free Software refers to Free Software (freedom to use, modify, and redistribute the software), while Freeware refers to software which is available at zero-cost.

The first paragraph of the article already mentions that, and provides a disambiguation link to freeware. So regardless of anything else, putting another link would be redundant.

Secondly, whoever changed the article wrote it as "Free Software (Freeware)", implying that the two were equivalent, which they're not. Free software isn't always available at zero cost, and freeware doesn't always allow you to modify and redistribute it.

OK, the concepts of freeware and Free Software sound similar when you first hear them, but they are distinct terms, and that's reflected in us having two pages for them.

Does that sound reasonable, or are there still unanswered questions? Ojw 00:33, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Image deletion

Greetings, ojw. Over at the Commons, some images I've uploaded are being considered for deletion. I'd be interested in hearing your honest opinion on the matter there. Thanks! – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 13:07, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)

Maritime flags

I happened to notice you wanted maritime signal flags. Not being an expert on these, but luck happening as it does, I happened to visit this page earlier in the day, which may have what you want. Burgundavia 03:54, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. They're now at International_maritime_signal_flags. Ojw 20:02, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

India.png didn't upload, so I'll put it up in a minute. kwami 09:18, 2005 Jun 4 (UTC)

Image:Evolution_encryption.png

You might want to fuzzy-out the key ID in Image:Evolution_encryption.png too if you want to protect your privacy, as public key servers allow for searching keys by key ID, which reveals your full name and email address info (ask an admin to delete the old revision after you've uploaded a new one to prevent people from looking at old revisions). If you're just trying prevent people from casually using your email address feel free to ignore me, ofcourse. --Weyes 18:20, 2005 Mar 30 (UTC)

OK let's just ignore it for now and hope it goes away (the email address is published on a website anyway, as is the PGP key). Removed all links to it, so it'll be orphaned eventually. Ojw 16:48, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"please place pictures better"

Since my screen resolution can't go above 1024x768, I can't seem to be able to resize the page in question to rearrange the images. Does your browser display my reorganization worse than the original? If so, maybe we can come up with a compromise. The problem I had with the old layout is that all them images piled up on the right side, while the text took up about half the height. —Sean κ. + 23:31, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

For Security Reasons

"previous content was unverifiable" - OK, fair enough.

But we're left with "for security reasons" which means nothing at all. A 'weasel phrase'. In real life, you never do something 'for security reasons'.

e.g. when you go on holiday you don't tell your kids to "turn the TV off for security reasons" you say 'turn it off lest it catch fire.' You don't lock your door for security reasons, you lock it to stop burglars getting in. And you don't pixelate a photo for security reasons, you do it to stop somebody deriving information that you're worried about them knowing. Everything has a reason.

So either we have a reason for the pixelated photos or we don't. "Security" isn't a reason. Maybe "..has been pixelated for fear of people seeing it" or nothing at all would be better. Ojw 6 July 2005 20:06 (UTC)

• I do see your point, and I would agree with you that 'sniper locations' may in fact be a reason they pixellated the photo. However, I am sure that if you asked the satellite imaging company why they pixellated the photo they would tell you that it was done for "Security Reasons". I agree that it is a cop out answer, but I feel it is the correct answer. I do think that the pixellation requires some explanation as it is clearly seen on the photo. That's why I changed the caption.... Gblaz July 6, 2005 20:33 (UTC)

Rail services VfD

Hi there. I've added Waterloo via Weybridge railway service to the existing VfD for the sake of consistency and expediency. If you feel they should be separate please do feel free to split them up. -Splash 02:04, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

WikiProject Reenactment

Hello, I noticed your reenactment related contributions and wanted to ask you, whether you would be interested in joining the related WikiProject.

As you probably know there's a definite lack of reenactment-related content on Wikipedia and if you have any idea what could be added to the ToDo list or would like to write some articles (or stubs) on missing topics, that'd help a lot.

Cheers. Ashmodai 08:31, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Your comments on Talk:BitTorrent

I agree with your comments on the inclusion of the legality of BitTorrent. I made similar arguments several months ago, but they were reverted some time after I removed the 'legal issues' section. Multiple members of the community reverted them, but none made any response to my arguments. My attempts at compromise were also ignored :-( I honestly don't know what to do, just letting you know that I've tried to remove those sections myself, and the experience has soured me on editing Wikipedia as a whole. :-(