User talk:Robert Merkel/archive 2
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Sydney Nolan should be Sidney Nolan. We have lots of work to do on Art of Australia! Adam 17:14, 14 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Hi Robert, please can you remember to update Wikipedia:Protected page when you protect or unprotect a page. Thanks. Angela 16:06, 15 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- Why is this still needed now that we have a protection log? The only thing missing from that log is a way to indicate why something was protected. --mav 22:33, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Robert - do you have the access needed to get rid of the "support" message at the top of every page? There was a general consensus to remove this message when we are not having an official fundraising drive (such as now). I also thought it would be neat to have "A Wikimedia project" below the logo on every Wikimedia project. What do you think? --mav 22:33, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- I'm an administrator, so I've only got the same access that you have. If you can't change it, neither can I. --Robert Merkel
- Sorry, I thought you were a developer who had developer access. --mav
I wasn't expecting everyone else to clean it up - I was in the process of doing it myself when you moved it. However I understand and accept your point. Secretlondon 13:43, Nov 23, 2003 (UTC)
"McAuley and Stewart, it turned out, had invented Ern and Ethel Malley out of thin air." I don't know what could be clearer than that. Adam 05:49, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- It's clear enough, but you have to read the whole article to find out. That's why I prefer to put the really, really key information in the first paragraph, in the manner of a news report. Chalk it up to my scientific training, where the point of good writing is to make the key points screamingly obvious, and making writing entertaining is a very low priority.
- By the way, I loved the Ern Malley piece. --Robert Merkel 11:21, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Hi, I saw your edit to open source. As the one who put that content there - Solaris to my best knowledge is under a "shared source" license, and the current version of PGP is also open sourced to allow community inspection - though I don't think it allows distribution of modified versions. As for Pine, I vaguely remember that it was open sourced to help in porting, but wouldn't swear by it. -- Pakaran 02:42, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- Pakaran, as much of the article already discusses the confusion between free software and Open Source (in the opensource.org sense), which are different philosophical viewpoints promoting essentially the same software licenses, which allow the free distribution of modified versions of the software. Your edit used the term "completely open source" to describe software which, although the source code is publically available for review, is as you've pointed out not available for free modification, and confused terminology further when it's already confusing enough.
- If you want to discuss the use of the term "open source" in the context of software like Solaris, you have to make clear that this is a different use of the term to that originally used by Perens et al.
- If you can make your terminology clear and make the article more informative by doing so I'm happy for such an addition to go in.
- By the way, next time probably discuss article-specific issues on the article talk page. --Robert Merkel 02:55, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- That's fine. Probably an article on shared source, as the term is used by Sun (most notably) is needed. I also believe Linus (who is generally faily moderate about these things) has criticized Sun for their philosophy. So maybe it's best to keep this stuff out of open source and move it to shared source or something. -- Pakaran 03:00, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Robert, read my major update to the article on Kitsch. Some of my writing is a bit strained, so maybe, if possible you can loosen the grammar. Brianshapiro Dec 3, 2003