User talk:Lee Daniel Crocker

Is your jpg really smaller than my png? Ericd

Not by much, surprizingly, but enough that old modem users would still prefer it. It's almost always the case, though, that PNG is not efficient for photographic images--and wasn't intended to be. I'm the person who invented the adaptive-prefiltering compression technique that PNG uses, and it was optimized for iconic drawings (altough we tried to make sure it wasn't too bad for photos either). JPEG is almost always the best format for photographs.

My picture was 64 gray levels to optimize size I believed ther will be no reel difference.

That's why the saving wasn't as dramatic, then. But it still went from over 40k down to 16k, and that's not insignificant.

It works great -- right after you placed a comment in my talk an * appeared by the neat little talk link by my handle. --mav

This one too, thanks.

Lee, what happened to your old talk?

Now, on to the more important question: could you take a look at talk:The Beatles (album) when you get a chance? I'm not sure what the original author intended, and I think you might know (the last question there). Thanks, --KQ

I deleted the old talk; it's still in history, and I saw little need to keep it around and make it hard add more talk. It was getting pretty long. I'll take a look at the white album talk.

Lee - what do we do when people are obviously ignoring our image use policy and not responding to requests for copyright information? --mav

I haven't seen any major problems yet, but if you can't figure out any way to reach someone, deleting an image or two usually gets their attention. BTW, it's quite likely that unknown uploaders are Polish/German/French wikipedians (I found Aioneko at fr, for example) so that might be another place to look. Who are you worried about? -- Lee

user:Dwhitney just uploaded an image of a engine block with no copyright info that looks like it is a scan from a cars manual. user:Isis is uploading many images -- none of which seem to have copyright info (including videotape covers). I'm also wary about the overuse of fair use -- our previous image use policy was to only accept public domain images and those covered by an acceptable open content license. This allowed somebody to copy the text and the article by using similar licenses. Now we have sound clips. If anything we need to have a very clear statement that the text of Wikipedia is covered by the GNU FDL but any images or other files may be owned by others who have not placed their work under an open content license. We are probably OK because we are using this stuff for educational purposes -- but others copying our material and trying to abide by our license may want to sell this stuff. --mav

Dwhitney was only a few ours ago. I just contacted him (he has a valid e=mail address), so give him some time to respond. Isis is a special case. She has a valid e-mail address as well, and has been very cooperative when contacted (Jimbo and I have been talking to her about helping form the non-profit). She is also a lawyer with IP experience, so she knows what she's talking about. I agree that we would certainly prefer images in the PD or licensed under appropriate terms rather than ones used under "fair use"--as you say, it means that people copying Wikipedia articles won't necessarily be able to copy the images that accompany them unless they too follow fair use guidelines, whereas our text has no such restrictions. Most of Kay's stuff is old enough to have fallen out of copyright, but obviously the videotape covers and such haven't.

I think the "fair use" material is so valuable to some of the articles, though, that it would be a shame to get rid of it, so I think you're right that a stronger statement should be made on the copyright pages that only our text is covered by the GFDL, and images might have different terms. I just can't imagine any reasonable coverage of the white album, for example, without letting readers hear the amazing diversity of arrangements and subjects for themselves.

In a way, including such material actually helps our cause a bit: for example, we would like for other non-profit educational sites to use our material. They would have an equal fair use claim to us, so they could take our material in toto. But a for-profit site that we might not want to use our material might not qualify for the same fair use exception, and so could only use our text.

In any case, I think you're right that a more detailed statement is needed, probably both on wikipedia:copyrights and wikipedia:image use policy.

Maybe I'm just thick-headed, but how, legally, are images different from ASCII-encoded text as far as our license goes? --Brion 17:29 Aug 31, 2002 (PDT)

Lee, there is something over at Wikipedia talk:Statistics that needs to be seen by a developer. It's about article counts. --mav

Lee, could you take a look at http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Nat%25FCrliche_Zahlen&redirect=no and comment about why the interwiki link for the Slovene article is bumped down into the text? A bug or something I've done wrong in some way? Thanks, --KQ 13:50 Aug 30, 2002 (PDT)

A bug. The names of the languages that appear in the "Other languages:" section are translated to local names; when Magnus translated the table into German, he apparently mistyped the corresponding code "sl" as "si". It's fixed.

At one point the slovene wiki was at si.wikipedia.com, probably due to a mistype. That got into various lists of links, and apparently didn't get purged from everything when the Slovenes relocated to the correct server. (Additionally, the list of language names for interlang links on the German wiki is incomplete; it covers most if not all of the currently used ones, but may need to be added to if some of the others become active.) --Brion

Is it fixed, though? NS 6.x and IE 5.x for winME think it's not. --KQ 17:56 Aug 31, 2002 (PDT)

It was fixed, then unfixed, and now fixed again. This time I think Brion, Magnus, and I have our source control ironed out and aren't stepping on each other anymore.

ok, then.

Hello: in searching Google to see if it has yet reindexed the site (yes), I noticed that quite a few of wikipedia's articles are on the first page of Google's search results (mav's got a lot of them). Anyway, here are the ones you've listed on your user page which are in the top 10 results searching for title only:

(I tell you this b/c the canna lily I wrote was in the top 10, & I was suddenly alarmed at how short it was and added another 2 paragraphs to it). Anyway, I just thought you'd be interested to know. Cheers, --KQ 23:30 Sep 1, 2002 (PDT)

Hi, Some concerns on photo copyrights. Though the website from which I just uploaded the photos does not own the copyright. It just gave me a bunch of organizations without saying which photos were drwan from which source:

United States Army
United States Marine Corp
United States Navy
United States Air Force
Publishers Depot
Art Today
LBJ Library
JFK Library
Nixon Library
Eisenhower Library
National Archives
Norton Air Force Base Archives
Vietnam News Agency
Albin-Guillot-Viollet
Pierremon

My best bet would be just citing year (1997) of the copyright of the website. Even doing so, I can't tell if the copyright has expired or not. Guess you would provide me some help here. user:Ktsquare

You still don't say which website you got them from; if that's all you know, that's what should go into the description. Most of the sources you list above offer public domain images, so there's probably no copyright problem, but we should at least mention where the images came from.

Mentioning the website will not help clarifying the copyright issue as it doesn't own the photo copyrights. Anyway I'll cited the site on pages of the images. Thanx.

Thanks; I noticed the pbs.org on the first one. It may not settle the issue of copyright, but at least it's a place to start looking if the issue comes up later. Any information at all is better than none.

direct link here

Lee, in regards to the dispute between GrahamN and myself (RK) how can you say that you don't know who the bigger offender is? Just read the Talk section! GrahamN came here in an anti-Semitic fury, slandering the majority of Jews as "racist" and "evil" (his words). I strenuously objected to this hatespeech, and stated that Wikipedia is not an appropriate forum for this. How can you write that his anti-Semitic rants are no worse than being against such hatespeech? I ask you to imagine how you would feel if he picked out your people, and publicly slandered the vast majority of them as "evil", "racist" and spent day after day, attacking them and you. Why is such behaviour allowed on Wikipedia? This is vandalism and harassment. RK

GrahamN has been very consistent and very clear that he opposes Zionism and Zionists. You can interpret his statements as anti-semitic if you like--they may well be, and he may well be. It's even fair for you to say "I think your statements evince anti-semitism". But to actually say that he called Jews evil and racist is a lie, and dishonest arguments will get you no points with me. It is not rational argument, it is a childish dictionary game you play to call him anti-Semitic by merely noting the fact that most Zionists are, in fact, Jews. I expect better from both of you. And even if he is a rabid anti-semite, my personal moral values judge dishonesty to be a greater sin than racism.

Oh my Goodness. GrahamN spends all of his time filling Wikipedia with what you basically admit is anti-Semitic slander...but you find no problem with it, and then out of the blue you accuse me of being a liar, and then insult me as a sinner?! Are you out of your mind? What has gotten into you? Frankly, I have lost all respect for you. You have already made it clear that you will refuse to ban GrahamN, and will allow him to fill Wikipedia with his non-stop Anti-semitic rages every day. Perhaps you think that hatespeech against Jews, and the murder they face on a daily basis in the real world, is just "word games", but incitement to hate Jews is not a game. Shame on you. I can only conclude from your unprovoked slander about me, and your support of anti-Semitism, that you yourself must be more like GrahamN than I ever would have guessed. RK

And now you lie about me. I have never said anything remotely resembling the idea that I will not consider banning GrahamN; if you can point to a single statement I have made to suggest that, I challenge you to do so. I would ban him in a second if I thought he was persistently trying to get anti-semitic views into articles here and refusing to work with us--indeed, there's an ongoing discussion on the mailing list right now about banning H. Jonat for similar reasons--but from what I've seen he's mostly just ranting on talk pages, and that doesn't bother me as much. If you choose to call my support of free speech "support of anti-semitism", you are free to do that, because I take your freedom seriously too.

LDC - I really like your rewrite of the Social Darwinism article. It reads much better now, the flow of ideas is much more streamlined, and the differences with and confusion with sociobiology are well highlighted. Kudos! -- April

Hi Lee Daniel,

I haven't been able to logon to wikipedia for a few months as I forgot my password. Can you reset it or should I talk to someone else. Unfortunately, I do not have an email address associated with my account, so I can't get a new password emailed to me. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, sfmontyo.

Password for user "Sfmontyo" has been reset.

Thanks!user:sfmontyo

LDC -- There's a message for you on my talk page asking for help. isis 22:41 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC)

Replied to you question regarding Drexel Shaft. MB 19:09 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

HTML is ok in links; Unicode is not? Take a look at # Sebastião Salgado's link (formerly on List of famous photographers): Sebastião Salgado: it aborts the link, and later edits interpret the character rather than leaving it coded. --KQ

Seems a little strange, but yes; titles in the English wikipedia are formed from a subset of the ISO-8859-1 character repertoire, and may not include characters outside that set. Link titles parsed inside brackets will accept HTML named entity references to ISO-8859-1 characters, but not numeric ones. I wasn't ready to open that can of worms just yet.

It must be a can of worms, indeed; I already don't understand what you're talking about. :-) ... Ok, I'll use HTML named entries. --KQ

Odd question. Under the Berne Convention, anything is copyright once it's in a fixed medium. Under the DMCA, if you bypass encryption to access a copyrighted file, you break the law. I write you an email using GPG, you decrypt it, you violate the DMCA (the email is copyright me, unless I explicitly disclaim copyright--J.D. Salinger set a precedent on this one in re: personal letters he'd sent a friend, who gave them to an author who wanted to publish them in a book on Salinger). Therefore the DMCA explodes either itself or copyright--nothing copyright can be decrypted without violating the DMCA, or encryption itself is illegal (including for DVDs). I must be missing something. --KQ 03:37 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, the contents of mail is copyrighted by the sender, but the very act of mailing should be an obvious expression of intent that the recipient read it--that's the whole purpose. The DMCA only outlaws "bypassing access controls" for unintended accesses; it certainly doesn't apply to playing a legally-bought DVD on a legally-bought DVD player, or reading your own mail, both of which require decryption as the copyright holder intended. It would be illegal for me to read your mail, or even for me to sell a program that allowed some third party to read your mail.

Hm, I knew that seemed too easy. So if I understand it correctly, the DMCA just ... uh ... doesn't make much sense. You could be prosecuted for breaking rot13 on a message? --KQ

User:Renata seems to want some help with her images, especially the corn dolly one she just uploaded. Do you want to volunteer? I will if you don't, but I'd rather it be you. Or somebody else other than me. -- isis 20:13 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Sure, I'll trim them--I can do that quickly and easily (at least after I leave this office Windows thing and get home to my real computer :-)

Earlier today I got there, and there was no text yet, but now every time I try to follow a link to User:Renata (from 'recent changes' or otherwise) I get the error message:
Warning: Lost connection to MySQL server during query in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 17 Could not connect to DB on 127.0.0.1
Is this my problem or yours, please? --isis 21:46 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

The system seems to be up, and I can get there with no problem. Might just be an intermittent load problem. restart your browser and let me know if it persists.

I've been running a script to munge the old UseMod edit histories into shape, which may be contributing a little to the load. Should be through with that soon. --Brion 22:12 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

I restarted my browser (but not my computer) and logged into Wikipedia again, and I was still getting the error message. Then I went into Explorer and deleted all my internet temp files (except the cookies), and the problem is gone now. So it seems to have been at my end -- maybe that same proxy server problem that sometimes keeps me from getting updated images? -- isis 22:54 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Would you please take a look at Robert Graves to see if it's a copyright problem? I moved the text to the talk page, but if it's a violation, it's one there, too. -- isis 06:00 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)