User talk:DesmondW

Hello! Camera-wiki.org is a wiki about cameras, photography, and their history. If you're interested in contributing to it, that's great — welcome!

The next thing to do might be to read some of the Help pages, to get an idea of how to edit pages. Or, if you already know how, just jump in and edit the wiki page that prompted you to register. Maybe you'd like to write something about yourself and your cameras on your User page. Generally, text in the wiki should be in English (though you may find the odd word or phrase of other languages in some articles, where it's relevant).

We have had a problem recently with accounts being created by spammers, to put advertising into the wiki. To combat this, new accounts are blocked if they aren't used fairly soon (within a day or two after being created); and of course an account is blocked immediately if it becomes clear it was created for spamming or vandalism. So please at least write a short reply here to reassure the admins that you're not one of the spammers; otherwise, your account may be blocked.

Cheers! -- Hoarier 07:22, 5 January 2012 (PST)

Thank you for your welcome message. My knowledge is primarily Leica R cameras and, to a lesser extent, Olympus M having owned and worked with each over many years.DesmondW 08:22, 5 January 2012 (PST)

Then you are most welcome here. You're free either to tinker with existing material or to add more.

As you've probably noticed, an awful lot of stuff here is not from direct observation or any cited reliable source, but instead from an uncited reliable source, bulletin-board chitchat, vague memories of something read somewhere, etc. Let's do better than this -- please cite your sources wherever appropriate. If you don't understand how to do this, then just try your best and somebody else (perhaps me) will come to your aid. -- Hoarier 16:23, 5 January 2012 (PST)

Thank you for your message. I see that the Leicaflex article is quite comprehensive (mostly similar to the main Wiki page) but the R3, R4-R7, R8-R9, are hardly mentioned. I have just written the main Wiki R4-R7 article, merged & edited the R8-R9 article, and added to the R3 article. How can I help here?DesmondW 01:27, 6 January 2012 (PST)

Hi Desmond. First, thanks for offering your knowledge to camera-wiki.org (which has no relation to Wikipedia, aside from being based on the same software platform). Considering the historical importance of Leica as a brand, our wiki has rather uneven Leica coverage, and I welcome any additions you might offer. In this wiki, sometimes related cameras are all described in a single article. But, if there is sufficient reason to break them out into individual pages (e.g. a significant change in design or features), then creating and linking to a new page is perfectly valid. Our Flickr pool may already provide good illustrations—or, if you have your own, we'd be grateful if you would add them there. --Vox 18:06, 6 January 2012 (PST)

I'd like to elaborate on this. Camera-Wiki.org (CW) does indeed share the software ("Wikimedia" "MediaWiki") that underlies Wikipedia (WP). But the resemblances don't end there. There are several, and one is particularly important: In either, when you contribute text, you both (i) release it according to a copyleft license and (ii) declare that either (a) it really is yours to release in this way or (b) it is not yours but is licensed properly for such a re-release. The "(b)" part of (ii) is a bit complicated, but it's only very rarely applicable here in CW (and unusual in WP too), so we can skip it and say much more simply "You are declaring that you wrote the material yourself".

Again, your additions of your own material -- either from cited sources or (a big difference from WP) from direct observation -- would be welcome here at CW. Hoarier 21:05, 6 January 2012 (PST) ... amended 22:43, 7 January 2012 (PST)

Ah -- I look more closely and see that in WP you (legitimately) copied material from a separate WP article that had itself been (illegitimately) copied to some spammer's blog, and that Coren's bot drew the wrong inferences. False alarm. Whew, that's a relief. Happy editing! -- Hoarier 21:24, 6 January 2012 (PST)

Thank you for all your comments, as you know I am an absolute beginner here and no expert on Wikipedia. I am still not clear: do you accept copies of Wikipedia articles or must they be original? I enjoy writing for one site but not keen about re-writing for another.DesmondW 06:12, 7 January 2012 (PST)

Unfortunately no, one can't copy WP material and paste it here. Or vice versa. (This was possible in the past, given certain conditions that I won't go into now, and this is the reason why you'll sometimes see signs that it has happened; but it is possible no longer.) Text at WP is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; by contrast, text here is released under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3. The two licenses are different. ¶ Now, if you contributed a paragraph or three to WP, then you are the copyright holder. You posted it to WP thereby releasing it via CC; you as copyright holder are also free to post it to CW thereby releasing it by GFDL. (And of course the reverse is possible: if you post something here, you can post something it there.) NB the two encyclopedias also have other, copyright-irrelevant differences, notably that although you can write something here that derives from your own careful observation you cannot do so at WP. -- Hoarier 08:25, 7 January 2012 (PST) .... amended 16:49, 7 January 2012 (PST)

Understood. The Leica R4-R7 article on WP is all my own work and I suggest that it be used here to replace the several bitty articles, but including the excellent photograph in the R4 article. Redirects for R4, R4s, R5, RE, R6, R7, will then be needed. Would you please do this, my experience is limited? I will then gladly add other observations from my own experience as an R4 owner DesmondW 08:41, 7 January 2012 (PST)

I'm sorry if I seem to be introducing additional complexity (or just wasting your time), but I'd much rather not do the first (easy!) part of that. Please introduce the material here yourself, no matter how messily. (This way, anyone who checks the page histories will be able to see that you did it.) Once you've done that, I'll happily work on clearing up the resulting problems. -- Hoarier 16:49, 7 January 2012 (PST)

Fair enough, I can understand why. I will start a Leica R4-R7 article and add some starter material.DesmondW 02:46, 8 January 2012 (PST)

I have also started the Leica R8-R9 article - DesmondW 04:32, 8 January 2012 (PST)

Yes, I see. Good. Look, I'm sorry if I seem to blow hot and cold, but what I meant by direct, personal observation isn't what you've taken it to mean. As an example, I bought my R8 second hand in 2005 and have loved using it. Who is this "I"? Well, it's you, and this can be found in the article history -- but what if somebody comes along later who, without wanting to offend you, possessed an R8, didn't like it, and was happy to sell it and get something else? We can't really have competing "I"s writing these articles. What I had in mind was the kind of thing you see in the article on the (very rare) Super Flex Baby: the editor Rebollo_fr managed to find and buy one of these (it's so obscure that most dealers don't know what it is, so if you do find one it can be cheap), and then he examined it very carefully indeed. Now, it's possible that he got something wrong, and of course many people find ridiculous the idea of paying so much attention to some old camera, but if we put aside these two possibilities we see when we look at the article that very little is a matter of opinion. This is the kind of direct observation that CW welcomes. As for matters such as weight, instead of saying that a camera isn't too heavy, better to say that (imaginary example) despite complaints of weight, at XYZ grams it's actually 30 grams less than the Nikotronic XG 3000 (about which nobody complains). ¶ There's also the matter of all that you write that clearly isn't from personal observation; I do hope that you are going to "source" this (to say which factual claim comes from where). ¶ I am sorry if I have wasted your time, and hope that you can CW can work together happily and productively. -- Hoarier 05:23, 8 January 2012 (PST)

Please don't be concerned, I am happy to learn and adapt as necessary. I completely understand that you don't want reviews, but simple facts either from attributable resources or personal knowledge. I shall remove the "Personal Experience" sections and add references to the books & manuals that I own. We shall progress and I greatly appreciate your guidance - DesmondW 06:06, 8 January 2012 (PST)

If I can throw in one comment here; even though camera or lens reviews aren't appropriate here, most people who look up equipment here would like to read them, so many editors add links at the bottom of the page to offsite reviews or reports of personal experiences or photos taken with the equipment. If you post your reviews to a blog or photography forum, I'd encourage you to add a link to them on the appropriate pages here. Most pages have a "Links" section at the bottom for that purpose. -- Steevithak 08:26, 8 January 2012 (PST)

Thank you! Excellent advice - DesmondW 08:56, 8 January 2012 (PST)

Merging or splitting?

Good morning! (my time)

Above, you write: The Leica R4-R7 article on WP is all my own work and I suggest that it be used here to replace the several bitty articles, but including the excellent photograph in the R4 article. Redirects for R4, R4s, R5, RE, R6, R7, will then be needed. Would you please do this, my experience is limited?

I lazily agreed. I mean, I agreed without thinking it through. However, now that I do start to think about it....

When I look at your new, long, article in the making, I read such things as: R6 / R6.2 A very different camera, [...]. If an article is long and is about subjects that are both (a) straightforwardly distinguishable (and "R5" versus "R6 / R6.2" is very simple) and (b) quite different (and you're saying that the R6.x is "very different" from its predecessor), then separation seems far better than merging. Am I missing something?

(Over at WP, merging might well be more palatable than splitting. But that's their problem, not ours.)

We now have articles that overlap (as you had warned). We have to go one way or the other, and whichever it is, I (and Ross?) will help with this. I'm not trying to wheedle out of doing work on this; I just want to ensure that we're going in the right direction, because what I don't want to do is to put effort into one direction and then to reverse course. -- Hoarier 16:11, 8 January 2012 (PST)

Me, above: (a) straightforwardly distinguishable (and "R5" versus "R6 / R6.2" is very simple) and (b) quite different. By (a), I meant having names that are straightforwardly distinguishable. By contrast, consider the article Canon F-1, about two very different cameras that, bizarrely, share the same name. As for (b), consider Canon II/III/IV, an article about a bunch of cameras (much more than three), among which every variation is very similar to at least one other variation. (Incidentally, the article Canon L-3 shouldn't really exist: the L-3 is just one among another such cluster of closely related cameras.) -- Hoarier 23:01, 8 January 2012 (PST)

Good to have discussion. R4 & R5 were very similar, almost identical. The R6 was indeed quite different but still shared the chassis, metering, viewfinder, flash control, & body shape and much of the general description still applies. The R7 differed again but all the series used Minolta developed electronics with the same camera base. If it were split, e.g. R4-R5, R6, R7, then there will be a lot of duplication and / or cross references. Incidentally, the only extant seperate article with any text is the existing R4, for R5 & R6 there are only stubs and nothing for the R7. I think that there is more in common than different (the also Minolta based R3 has nothing in common) but if the decision is to split then I suggest R4-R5, R6, R7 - DesmondW 01:18, 9 January 2012 (PST)

P.S. Another reason in favour of splitting is the timeline - the R6 was sold alongside the R5 and the R6.2 continued alongside the R7 and even the R8 for a short time - DesmondW 01:24, 9 January 2012 (PST)

Rolleiflexibility

later models that provided interchange of the entire front plate with both lenses

Which Rolleiflex models would that have been? -- Hoarier 07:47, 15 January 2012 (PST)

Well spotted! Of course it was Mamiya (?) who had TLR cameras with interchangeable lenses. I have corrected the article - DesmondW 08:26, 15 January 2012 (PST)

meters

thank you for working on some exposure meter pages. I be lazy to finish ones I already started. Hope you fine some the stubs and additions with cross name model list easier to start new articles.--Tkmedia 15:34, 14 March 2012 (PDT)

My pleasure! --DesmondW 15:35, 14 March 2012 (PDT)