User talk:TomFrayne

I'm a bit worried about all the work you're sinking into the Hierarchal TOC. Not that I can do much to stop you. But experience seems to show that hierarchialism in a wiki is a Bad Thing. The main reason is that it's too hard to maintain. The main page isn't so much a TOC as a good jumping off point to the more popular pages, which have links into the depths of the wiki. To put it another way, the natural topology of a wiki is a mesh, not a star.

I did something similar when I first joined this wiki with the HCL. I now regard the HCL as my worst mistake here, and I'm about this close to asking the sysops to remove the whole HCL.

If you think I'm wrong, continue by all means, but I think you'll have more fun and produce more if you get back to editing and adding to articles rather than futsing around with dreary organizational details. Even if you don't think you know much about linux, you do know something about some piece of it, and there is always cosmetic editing to do. Crazyeddie 18:52, Jul 1, 2004 (EDT)


 * I'll consider your remarks, but I think I'll continue working on the TOC for a while longer. I have already run into some problems updating it, so I see what you mean. TomFrayne 19:35, Jul 2, 2004 (EDT)

If this wiki gets MediaWiki 1.3, you can do what you're doing with categories. I don't know if there's a plan to move to 1.3, but you might want to hold out until we get categories here. Dysprosia 01:31, Jul 2, 2004 (EDT)


 * To add to that, I mentioned MediaWiki 1.3. and Categories to Jeremy a while back and we should be moving toward this in the near future -- Skyline 14:12, Jul 2, 2004 (EDT)
 * The categories part seems to be working out well so far, so I think I'll continue to do it manually rather than waiting for the MediaWiki update.

More bad news - I was looking over your contrib list, and noticed a "moved from Grokdoc". Last I checked, Grokdoc uses the non-commercial variant of Creative Commons, which isn't compatible with the share-alike variant that we use here. Unless you have permission from the actual copyright holder (whoever originally contributed it to Grokdoc), we're in copyright violation. The incompatibility works the other way too - LQwiki material can't be rereleased under noncommercial CC by anybody besides the orginal copyright holder. I feel your pain - I stumbled over the fact that Wikipedia's GFDL isn't compatible. Fortunately, it was caught before I put the material in an actual article. :-( Crazyeddie 05:28, Jul 2, 2004 (EDT)
 * I should have noticed that, but didn't. If I can't get permission today, I'll remove it.   TomFrayne 19:35, Jul 2, 2004 (EDT)


 * Please note that PJ has given permission to put any material from GrokDoc into the LQWiki. Jeremy 10:23, Jul 3, 2004 (EDT)


 * I stand corrected. I've checked the "edit article" page, and it has a clause about "freely donating" the contribution to Groklaw, which could mean that Groklaw (ie, PJ) holds copyright, not the orginal contributor. Which in turn means that PJ can unilaterally give us permission. Of course, PJ probably knows more about that then me, being a paralegal and all. :-) Perhaps we need a page with a list of what webpages we can and cannot reuse here? Crazyeddie 14:46, Jul 5, 2004 (EDT)


 * It's not exactly naked-eye obvious. After I got stung in the Wikipedia thing, I got interested in copyleft incompatibilities. In the programming world, the GPL is standard, but in other media, there are a lot of different copylefts, which aren't compatible. Even ones that have almost exactly the same wording, like the by-sa CC and the Free Art. I've actually read the lawyer-readable version of the by-sa CC varient, and noticed a thing on CC's website about their reasoning for not allowing noncom to be rereleased under the sa varient. When I saw Grokdoc mentioned in the mailing list, the first thing I checked out was their copyleft policy. I, of course, told the mailing list about it, but I guess I'll make a note to the mailing list about maybe making a notice on the edit article pages. Linux Documentation Project and most man pages are under GFDL, so they're off-limits too. In fact, about the only thing that we can reuse is the Jargon File, which I'm currently working on integrating. Feel free to join in if you like, I'm taking the weekend off. Crazyeddie 03:34, Jul 3, 2004 (EDT)