User:Jdavidb/blog
This is my wiki blog. It's a bit like a blog in that it has dated entries and sporadic writing. You can also comment if you like. If you do so, please comment under the appropriate entry with appropriate indentation (use colon) and sign your post. I'll evolve procedures for this as I go.
DVD covers 15:05, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
Whose idea was it that all articles on movies or television shows should be illustrated with the most recent DVD cover image? This looks horrible in some cases: for example, the DVD cover for Charlotte's Web looks nothing like the characters in the movie. I've also seen better illustrations, such as original movie posters, removed in favor of these more recent and less accurate abominations. At the least we could use both in the cases where we have them. Really I think illustrating with the movie poster is a better idea. (Sometimes screenshots are a better idea.)
Given that so many of these DVD covers were made decades after the film in question, this is a bad case of Wikipedia:Recentism if you ask me.
Of course, most of the time none of these images (either the ones we're using or the ones I want) would really be available under GNU FDL. 15:05, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
Single login 18:48, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
One thing that stops me from contributing more on other Wikimedia projects is the fact that when I go to those sites I am only an anonymous user. I don't feel as much urge to contribute, and this has actually stopped me from making edits I might have made otherwise. There are some proposals for a single login system but it looks like the political hurdles (they call them technical hurdles there, but they are really political: the whole thing could be solved by making some very not nice decisions, but those decisions honestly are not nice and probably would not be supportable) are such that this will not be overcome any time in the near future. It's about like the fact that we have the GNU FDL instead of a Creative Commons license: we're pretty much stuck with it unless someone wants to start over.
Now, I personally have no desire to ever contribute to a foreign-language Wikipedia. That's not entirely true: I would love to do so if I could, but I will never be able to do so. But I do want to do stuff at Wikinews and Wiktionary and such.
Meanwhile, Wikicities has some sites that interest me. And they have a single login system.
So today I went out and made myself accounts on every Wikimedia project: Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, meta, Wikispecies (okay, honestly I may never contribute there), and commons. I also set up a Wikicities account.
Now I'm logged in at all those sites (or able to log in quickly) and won't feel discouraged from contributing the next time I think about it. I really just had to finally get down to business and do it.
Then I set up this blog so I could talk about it. Jdavidb (talk) 18:48, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
Start of blog 18:38, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
A couple of weeks ago I had the idea of keeping a "blog" here. The idea was that when I learn something new (say, how to properly format lists), I'd like to put it up and say, "Hey, I learned how to do this." Or when I have a thought, such as "here are the criteria I personally use to decide on something" or "here are my thoughts about how edit summaries should be used," I want a place to put it. I don't want to just throw such things on my user page, and I don't anticipate all of these being significant enough or large enough to create a separate subpage in my userspace for. So, here's my wiki blog. Jdavidb (talk) 18:38, 19 October 2005 (UTC)