User talk:BCube

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I'm taking a short wikibreak due to school and will be back on Wikipedia sometime down the road. Most likely, however, I won't be able to keep away from Wikipedia for that long, and I'll probably be back a lot earlier while making some small edits every so often. Messages left for me may not be replied to for a while.

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[edit] working on "Conflict of Interest" guidelines

Dear WLD, Doc0tis, hAl, Gazpacho and BCube --

I've been following (and partially contributing) to the discussion of the whole "Microsoft edits" issue on Talk:OpenDocument. My own experience with editors who have "conflicts of interest" (on very different topics: FIRE and John Templeton Foundation) is that while such folks can be tedious at times and definitely need to be "educated" on things like WP:NPOV and WP:CITE, that they are capable of valid, good faith edits and that it would be a net detriment to wikipedia if such editors were banned from editing and forced to simply post suggestions on a talk page.

(In the case of Microsoft vs. Open Source pages I think the problem is particularly acute because by definition "one side" of the story is unpaid and thus does not fall under the COI guidelines -- if we were to ban employees, say, from editing pages, we would end up with a net POV slanted towards open source.)

I went to the WP:COI page (a guideline I'd never noticed before in years of editing) and tried to make some edits to make this clear. These were quickly reverted, but there is now at least a discussion of sorts on the talk page. The basic problem is that the editors on that page believe pretty much that such editors should be banned, should be forced to seek permission from other editors, or something of the sort.

My sense from your contributions to the Open Documents discussion is that you have similar feelings to mine. I think it would be a good idea for you to contribute your views at the WP:COI page if you have the time. I don't usually like to "recruit" people, but the essential problem is that the editors currently feel that "consensus" is on their side.

Yours, Sdedeo (tips) 00:16, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A question about cURL

We've been having a bit of a problem running a Perl script that uses cURL to keep the Good Article main page updated, (and hopefully out of the hands of people just randomly posting subjects they like onto the page) and I noticed your name on the cURL talk page and that you know several programming languages, and I was hoping you might be able to help us. The Perl components of the script work fine, it just seems to be how it implements cURL that's not working, the user who used to run it left Wikipedia suddenly after some big ruckus over Fair Use concerning promotional pictures or something without telling anyone how to run the script, and the problem is, even though the cURL package appears to show up now in my Perl library, (I'm using Windows, so I used some pms thing or whatever it is to bind libcurl to Perl) Perl still won't register the cURL commands :/. The script is at User:Cedars/gaauto.pl, and it seems to stop at "} system "cp stamp.time stamp.bac";" and the curl keyword shortly below it, if you can help us at all, i'd be much obliged. Homestarmy 00:41, 4 February 2007 (UTC)