User talk:IanOsgood

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Welcome!

Hello, IanOsgood, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Mak (talk) 02:32, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

1 Reusing Wikipedia material on Esolang
2 Esoteric programming languages
3 Edit summary
4 Redirect policy
5 Hey there
6 Rcw86.jpg
7 Monad (Symbol)

[edit] Reusing Wikipedia material on Esolang

Wikipedia has a short FAQ about reusing its material elsewhere: Wikipedia:Copyright_FAQ#Can_I_reuse_Wikipedia.27s_content_somewhere_else.3F, and a full policy: Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content. However, the point is that all submissions to Wikipedia (this talk page message, for example) are licenced under the GNU Free Documentation Licence by default, which is a copyleft licence (meaning approximately that all derivative works must be licensed under the same licence). Esolang uses a public domain licence; this means that any contributions to Esolang can be used by anyone for any purpose (including for a purpose disallowed by the GFDL, such as inclusion into closed-source software). As such, GFDL-licenced text is not allowed on Esolang.

If you wish to use Wikipedia content on Esolang, you must get permission to multi-licence the work into the public domain from each author of the article (which can be checked in the page history). If you use an old version of the article, you only need permission from authors who edited that version and prior versions (so if you make an article yourself and then someone tags it for AfD, you can copy the last version you made if you have permission from yourself (likely, but you must make such permission clear to Esolang, for instance on a talk page)). You can give permission for all your contributions at once by placing {{userpd}} on your userpage, but I suggest you read that template first as releasing contributions to the public domain can't be revoked. --ais523 09:30, 1 September 2006 (U T C)

Thanks for the clarification! The strategy I'm taking is to ask page originators to contribute original material to the Esolangs article. I'm concerned less with the article text than with the snippets of sample code. One question: if I determine that portions of these wikipedia articles come verbatim from some other copyrighted source, that it must be deleted from wikipedia or rewritten? --IanOsgood 14:07, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

If you discover that a Wikipedia article is a verbatim copy of an external source, check it for copyright notices; if there are no copyright notices, it must be removed. However, many esolang programmers are aware of copyright and will give some help in a copyright notice; on Wikipedia, public-domain text can be used without attribution, CC-by text can be used if attributed in the edit summary and edited at all (I think, but I'm not sure on this), and GFDL text can be used if you copy the edit history to the talk page. You have to be very careful about rewriting copyvio; it's best to remove it first and then rewrite it in your own words from memory, to make sure that there isn't any accidental copyright violation. If you could point me to an example, I'll be happy to check individual cases. --ais523 14:16, 1 September 2006 (U T C)

[edit] Esoteric programming languages

Hello! I see from the world's biggest AfD you're another kind soul who wants to work on merging all the Esoteric programming languages articles down into either their parent language, or the List of esoteric programming languages. I'm looking to start work on this, mainly with respect to redesigning the List of esoteric programming languages article. Currently it is a rather raw list, with little additional information about the entries. Ironically, the table in the aforementioned AfD is in a better state! So I'm proposing that the esolang list be reformated to be in a similar style to that table, detailing the language name, languages it's based on, link to websites, references, and other notes (eg, author). You game with this? I'd better get learning how to do tables in mediawiki! LinaMishima 17:59, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

I recommend linking out to the Esolangs wiki article for each language, and also note that new esolang articles should go there rather than on wikipedia. IMO, author, websites and refs can live on the Esolangs wiki. I'm not sure that leaves much of a table. (The Esolangs wiki has their own list.) --IanOsgood 18:07, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Following that line of reasoning, to be honest, there's no point in the list if it's only going to be links out to an external website. I see no compelling reason to require that an external website be visited for basic information on these languages (ie, enough for a brief overview of the concept, as a good stub requires), nor is it policy to require as such (especially since we cannot guarentee the contents of the website) Indeed, references have to be present within any such list, thanks to WP:VERIFY. Given that the esolang wiki seems to be fairly supported, however, it probably should be linked accross to and probably will have more information than we can provide. Authors themselves I would not personally include, except as additional notes for those with particularly notable authors. Most significant languages become a group development, anyhow. LinaMishima 21:52, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Edit summary

When editing an article on Wikipedia there is a small field labeled "Edit summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:

The text written here will appear on the Recent changes page, in the page revision history, on the diff page, and in the watchlists of users who are watching that article. See m:Help:Edit summary for full information on this feature.

Filling in the edit summary field greatly helps your fellow contributors in understanding what you changed, so please always fill in the edit summary field, especially for big edits or when you are making subtle but important changes, like changing dates or numbers. Thank you. BlueValour 02:42, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect policy

Noting Wikipedia's redirect policy for future reference. I will no longer:

try to delete misspelled redirects
replace redirects with links to the direct article

--IanOsgood 16:29, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hey there

Hi Ian, nice to see you on here. -- Earle Martin [^t/_c] 00:10, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi! It has been more civilized here than on C2 recently. (BTW, it was me who added the trivia to the Nutty Buddy page.) --IanOsgood 00:17, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rcw86.jpg

Hi, nice picture of RCW 86. But I think it might be even better to use the version without the zoomed-in part on the side, because the zoom just looks confusing when the picture gets shrunk to 250 pixels. (The version without the zoom is linked from this page: More Images of RCW 86.) -- 128.227.82.149 04:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)