"But on Wikipedia, being right means you can be outvoted by the ignorant or the narcissistic."
Happens outside Wikipedia as well; those that have the best story win. That's just demagogy democracy.
Just as we predicted only yesterday, Wikipedia has proclaimed a famous “victory” over something that was never going to happen. The site launched a high-profile campaign to “Save the Freedom of Panorama”, after an amendment was tacked onto a European Parliament report produced by the Parliament’s only Pirate MEP. The amendment …
I had to look up what Freedom of panorama actually meant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama
The freedom of taking "photographs and video footage and creating other images (such as paintings), of buildings and sometimes sculptures and other art works which are permanently located in a public place, without infringing on any copyright that may otherwise subsist in such works, and to publishing such images"
Glad you did - my first thought was "I didn't think the Beeb was THAT influential - and why Panorama…? Why not 'Freedom of Newsnight' or 'Freedom of Question Time'…? Why's 'Panorama' so special…?"
And, no, this isn't even one of my shit jokes this time - I HONESTLY thought that - for a couple of seconds, before I clocked it was an EU thing. Okay, you can all laugh at me now. See…? I've failed myself, so YOU don't have to.
same here. I kept reading the article way past its lameness point just to be able to understand what the *issue* was.
BTW, among the nonsense of those rules is that in places [where? citation needed] works that are copyright-free because of old age can be photographed and freely published if they are flat: paintings, photographs, maps..., but not if they are three-dimensional: sculptures, carvings, models...
All in all, I do applaud at least going through the motion of disagreeing with even *more* nonsense, and glad about your a.k.a. Teenage MP. The EU legislative system is a silly thing to us in the former Colonies, but then y'all laugh at our counties where you cannot buy beer on Sunday, but buying a gun is OK...
BTW, I did get in HR trouble at work here (to the point of being called in to meet a boss behind closed doors), after I addressed this co-worker as "young man", so, beware of age-based dissing...
Not agreeing with Wikipedia's actions, however I guess there is a case for kicking up a stink about something even at the 'never going to happen' stage, just so that it doesn't escape those that would have some dodgy legislation pass that the population do not in fact want it. If you don't cause some noise it might make them think we are quite happy about it and they begin to get more serious ideas.
On the subject of Wikipedia, I say bring back the Encarta brand fully online with ads and have contributors wiki style but who are paid and held accountable for what they put in to it.
Not senior in as in authority, just senior as in a dev who has been hanging around for a long time. I was speaking for myself at the time and I am speaking for myself now.
It's my job to keep the site up, and I didn't think blackouts were consistent with that goal. Blackouts seem to directly conflict with our educational mission. I let the SOPA thing go without making much noise, but in July 2012 it was looking like we had set a precedent, and I was worried that blackouts would become a common event. That's why I spoke out at that time.
There's no evidence that anyone was lying, it's just that I (a developer, not a lawyer), had a different opinion to that of the WMF legal team.
I thought that was the whole point of Wikipedia's existence?
Now, I used to support the concept (perhaps I still do), but then I was hit by reality in the form of its current implementation.
Much as I dislike Orlowski's opinionated and seldom informative or interesting articles, describing contributors as "narcissistic" seems quite accurate, IMO. Take for example a random article about some random person, e.g., a politician or an actor, and see how often you find utterly irrelevant self-serving references. Case in point, and without having looked, but what's the bet there is a "Freedom of Panorama" article in Wankypedia with a full section on how Wankypedia single-handedly saved us all from some imminent legislative catastrophe.
With due respect to seemingly sensible people like Mr Tim Starling (who posted just above), I get the impression they're way outnumbered by freeloaders and plain losers like the French nobody whose name I don't even recall who came up with the idiotic Flickr-like image viewer.
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