Anyonecanedit.org

I was talking with a friend in my logic class, and he was asking me how long I had been programming. I told him, and went on to mention some of the things I’ve done. I talked a bit about MediaWiki and the volunteer development work I did there. He asked me why I enjoyed developing for free. To me, it’s all about doing your part. I just happen to do my part by developing software rather than writing articles or taking pictures. I’ve got extremely liberal ideas about content and its accessibility. To me: quality information (be it text, images, video, music) should be as readily available as possible to everyone.

I take special note of the word quality. To me, when trying to balance quality over quantity, I tend to give heavier weight to quality. 2,000,000 articles is useless when it’s unorganized, unverified and poorly written. It’s be as useful as putting the world’s literary collections into a giant pile, after ripping all of the pages out and shuffling them around. The same goes for images. Poorly organized, licensed and documented, this too turns into a degenerate mess.

A second ideal that I’ve gained respect for is cultural significance. We need to be generating content that is both of high quality (as possible) and high cultural use. So when we take up the subject of sexually explicit photographs, I see a quick distinction. Unlike older photos and paintings that cannot be obtained now (we can only take pictures of the Mona Lisa, we can’t make a brand new one), pictures of things in our everyday lives, be it houses, cars, or people (clothed or nude) can be taken any day of the week. I think I put it best earlier, when I said on Foundation-l that “Commons \ is meant to be a collection of freely-licensed media, not a dumping \ ground for all media that happens to be free.”

At some point, a line has to be drawn. We are not a hosting service, we are a collection of free content. A free image does not necessarily make a good image. When asked about what the difference was between being a collection and dumping ground, I followed with:

Emphasis on usefulness. We’re about providing free content, and I would hope being culturally significant would still be a priority. I always considered that a major point in inclusionism/deletionism debates. Are we remaining culturally relevant? Talking about pop culture as well as historical events, places, customs, etc. Providing information about naked people, their habits, customs, fetishes even: I consider this culturally relevant. Hosting a picture looking up a girl’s skirt is hardly culture, and is borderline voyeurism.

If we’re a dumping ground, of course none of this matters at all.

Have priorities changed over the years? Is this in fact the direction our community wants to go in?

Not tech related at all, just felt like writing this one up. Found out a few hours ago (via VCU e-mail) that our police chief has been arrested in Chesterfield County on charges of soliciting underage sex. The Washington Post has already reported on the story, as have several local publications. Of course, VCU has already done the expected: placing him on administrative leave and issued a statement saying that Chesterfield’s finest have VCU’s full cooperation.

For what it’s worth: the Chesterfield police have been (and this is no secret) using Craigslist and other such services to handle sting operations in recent months. Trying to catch pedophiles and such. Wouldn’t the police chief of VCU know better? *sigh* And to think this week was going to end without some mess in Richmond about something remarkably stupid.

[Just to clarify the situation: Chesterfield is a county about 20 minutes south of the city of Richmond. Virginia is fun in that we have incorporated cities, they don't exist within counties like pretty much everywhere else. Richmond has its own police. VCU has its own fully-certified and trained police force, separate from the city's.]

Quite possibly one of the coolest hooks to exist in MediaWiki. I’ve been playing with this for the past few days, and it really is indeed a powerful hook. Occurring very near the beginning of a MediaWiki execution, it allows some high-level access to early objects, before MediaWiki has begun its output.

• $output – The global OutputPage object allowing you to control all aspects of page output prior to execution–and if you’re halting execution, you can provide your own output.
• $article – The Article object, which could be Article, ImagePage, or CategoryPage (potentially a SpecialPage or child?)
• $title – Your Title object. Very easy to allow for Title swapping at a very high-pre-output level.
• $user – The current User object
• $request – Just the WebRequest so you don’t have to call the global yourself.
• $wiki – The MediaWiki object. Not a huge amount of use that I’ve seen yet, but it is helpful to have on hand

I’m really starting to see what all this baby can do