User talk:Dustin McAmera

Please add new material at the top --Dustin McAmera 04:21, 30 March 2011 (PDT)

Makes perfect sense to me. --Vox 19:42, 30 March 2011 (PDT)

Image rights: a discussion in March 2011 about using images under Fair Use: Click to read it (don't expect me to read anything you add here)

Image rights Hi Dustin. Since you're interested (or interestable) in copyright stuff, take a quick look at this list. Many still assume that this website is "Camerapedia" -- ouch! Well, this is straightforward, and I'll fix it in the next couple of days. However, there's another problem (I think). It's exemplified in French document in public domain, after 1923, though it pops up all over the place. I quote: [These materials] are not in public domain in the United States [...]. Republication of advertising material published in France in that period probably falls under fair use for US legislation, and it is thus accepted in Camera-wiki. Click the link to "fair use". Do you see anything there that suggests that republication of this is likely to be thought "fair use"? I don't. Of course, common sense says that if either (a) it's mere advertising or (b) it's anyway in the PD in the nation of its origin -- let alone both (a) and (b) -- then only a loony would kick up a fuss about it. But this is a question of law, not of common sense. (You're not a lawyer? Neither am I. But I think that we're both qualified to read an article about "fair use" -- not that this article should be assumed to be authoritative, of course.) Zuleika 03:44, 24 March 2011 (PDT) Actually, I think it's ok Hmm. for what it's worth, I'm an out-of-work engineer. I'd be entirely happy to leave the whole field to someone else... As you suggest, common sense suggests that the original owner of the advert, be that an advertising company who owned it as artwork, or the camera company who used it to sell cameras, would have been happy to see it distributed as widely as possible. The present owners of copies of the advert might be unhappy to see it reproduced on the web because their copy is rendered less valuable as a collectable object; but I don't think those people have any share of copyright in the image. I had a look at the Wikipedia article, and convinced myself that there is a case that this is Fair Use. I've written a bit about that below. Now, there is an image_rights category called Fair Use. As I recall, it's discourgaed in the Help pages. I suppose categories like this 'French doc in PD after 1923' one (and its like) exist to embody the fact that someone has considered whether it's fair use or not, so that less intellectual/interested editors don't need to. I think it might be worth adding some words to the Help, encouraging people to consider whether their use of an advertising image is scholarly; our use of them is less defensible if they are just decorative. To consider each of the factors in the definition of Fair Use given: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; I think the use in the wiki is usually defensible as scholarly and non-commercial. The old advertising is (in the overwhelming majority of cases) being used because it provides a picture of a camera (or other product) or information about the specifications and price when the camera was new, or information as to what the makers claimed about the camera, or even simply the identity or address of the makers (I've seen this use of Japanese adverts in some of Rebollo_fr's articles on Japanese cameras). 2 the nature of the copyrighted work; The Wikipedia article suggests that in principle, the nature of the work doesn't limit the applicability of Fair Use, or make it open season on any category of work. However, I suspect it would be taken into account that the original purpose of the work was short-lived; to advertise the availability of a product. That purpose is over. It might be argued that the work has a new nature as a collectable document; but I don't think we threaten that anyway, because its nature as a collectable object comprises more than the reproducible image; it rests on its authenticity; age, condition, nature of the paper, etc. none of which we are using. 3 the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; I have a tiny doubt what 'the work' is in this case. I have seen old advertising on Flickr as individual adverts scanned from magazine pages, and also as whole pages of adverts. I've seen it as pages or part-pages of books too, elsewhere on the web (e.g. Google books and some US libraries' web sites, who have downloadable PDFs of whole photographic manuals from the early 20th century, including advertising). If 'the work' were the book or the magazine, it would be arguable that the proportion being reproduced is small. However, I think the division between editorial content and paid advertising is clear enough to dismiss that argument; usually we are reproducing a whole 'work'. However, I don't think it's a problem. I think the issue of amount used and that of the purpose of the use have to go hand in hand. The Wikipedia article says under 'Practical effect': The practical effect of this law and the court decisions following it is that it is usually possible to quote from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment upon it, teach students about it, and possibly for other uses. Certain well-established uses cause few problems. A teacher who prints a few copies of a poem to illustrate a technique will have no problem on all four of the above factors (except possibly on amount and substantiality), but some cases are not so clear. All the factors are considered and balanced in each case: a book reviewer who quotes a paragraph as an example of the author's style will probably fall under fair use even though he may sell his review commercially. But a non-profit educational website that reproduces whole articles from technical magazines will probably be found to infringe if the publisher can demonstrate that the website affects the market for the magazine, even though the website itself is non-commercial. Although we may be reproducing the whole work, we aren't threatening a market for it. We are that teacher with the poem. 4 the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. I think this one is clear. In any case where the advertising is old enough to be PD in France, the camera is no longer available as the new product advertised, so the value of the advertisement cannot be harmed. I doubt that its value as a collectable document is harmed by reproduction of a small image of it on the web. A third party could download the image, and try to make fakes for sale; but that would be their offence, and the same could happen to any image we use. --Dustin McAmera 09:53, 24 March 2011 (PDT) Not to butt in, but just as an example of "fair use" take a look at this scan, or this one which I used here. In the captions to those scans I laid out my own "fair use" reasoning. It may be helpful in considering what kinds of cases to take into account. --Vox 10:52, 24 March 2011 (PDT) Cheers Ross! I have yet to dip my toe into using anything but new photos of old cameras. --Dustin McAmera 15:01, 24 March 2011 (PDT) Dustin, I feel compelled to say that I'm sorry to hear that you're temporarily out of work ... but actually I envy you. However, I do hope that your income (if not your workload) recovers quickly and solidly. Meanwhile, you've had time to give this more thought than I either have done or will soon be able to. Now, I guess this doesn't much interest you (or 99% of sentient humans), but if you could somehow muster the time and energy I'd love to see a bit more work toward a draft of a "fair use" justification. If Vox and others could then look it over and check it, it could then eventually be shown to somebody or other's anonymous lawyer acquaintance, and thereafter turned into a new "'FU' justification" page to which mentions of "FU" could point. -- Zuleika 16:48, 24 March 2011 (PDT) I've looked at this a bit more, though perhaps not exhaustively. I'm now happy that whoever wrote those 'Japanese document in PD: 1927-28' categories (I'd bet money it was Rebollo_fr, because it applies mostly to his materials) spent an appropriate amount of time considering the justification of the PD claim where it is claimed, and the presumption of Fair Use where PD differs between the US and elsewhere. I'm also happier to have seen (somewhere) that advertising is generally taken to be anonymous, if published by a company and not signed by an individual. So I think we have more important work to do, (i) writing about cameras, (ii) hunting down photos that are in CW illegitimately (especially given the rumpus that CW members are making in the outside world about CP's use of photos). As I said before, it might help to add some words, perhaps in Adding Images, to encourage people to use images for 'scholarly' purposes rather than as artwork.--Dustin McAmera 05:48, 26 March 2011 (PDT)

XHTML: a discussion in March 2011 about Wikitext: Click to read it (don't expect me to read anything you add here)

XHTML A tiny point within this edit: You "corrected" "<br/>" to "<br>". However, Mediawiki uses XHTML rather than HTML, so "<br/>" is right and "<br>" is wrong. (Not that either of us should lose any sleep over this. And maybe your finger just slipped or similar.) That aside, I'm impressed by your continuing work. I got stuck revising "TLR" because I could/can three-quarters-remember all kinds of stuff but just didn't have raw material on me in authoritative, quotable form. Zuleika 08:53, 30 March 2011 (PDT) Thanks for your kind words. But <br> seems to give me a new line, which is what I wanted it to do. Is there some unwanted consequence I don't know about? Otherwise, why does it matter? I still don't like 'TLR' much; some of the discussion is really about WLFs. I have edited 'Viewfinder' recently, and am adding a bit to it now. Please add any more new messages on this page at the top, where they get seen without scrolling. Thanks--Dustin McAmera 09:23, 30 March 2011 (PDT) Deep breath. . . . Here is the page as edited by you. Let's feed it to W3C's validator. Here's the result, which isn't pretty. It's clear that the page purports to be XHTML 1.0 Strict, but (through no fault of yours) dismally fails to meet this lofty aspiration. ("Strict" markup is cleaner and less forgiving than "Transitional" markup.) The failures don't include any instances of "<br>", because the Mediawiki software has obligingly converted HTML "ground glass<br>screen" to XHTML "ground glass<br />screen". Or anyway this version of the Mediawiki software has done so. Who knows about the next version? Perhaps it won't do so. And perhaps there are circumstances in which even the current version won't do so. Let's imagine that for one reason or another the Mediawiki software fails to convert "<br>" to "<br />". Browsers are told that the page is XHTML 1.0 Strict but (as far as XHTML is concerned) a tag that is opened and therefore must be closed is not also closed. (In XHTML, I believe that "<br>" isn't necessarily wrong, as long as it's promptly followed by "</br>". But the latter is very likely to confuse real-world browsers.) Since present-day web browsers are designed to do their best with "tag soup" (i.e. the equivalent in web markup of diarrhea), and since this is a pretty straightforward error, all is likely to be well. However: (i) the average level of competence web pages is (at last!) rising (thanks to the gradual disappearance of truly bad "web authoring tools", and also the near-disappearance of totally incompetent "hand coding", as blog software makes it all so much easier); and (ii) browsing by hand-held devices is rising, and they don't have the puff to run vast browsers such as Firefox and their leaner browsers may skimp on some of the modules required to guess what to do with mistakes. So all in all it's better to do XHTML by the book, with "self-closing" tags where appropriate. You ask for new comments to be placed at the top of your page. It's your talk page, so I'm happy (well, fairly happy) to do that, of course; but it flies in the face of what virtually everybody else does in wiki talk pages (prescribed/described here). I don't think you're going to be able to change the general trend; and as long as you don't, I fear that having two patterns (new stuff at the foot of some talk pages, at the head of others) is going to cause confusion and irritation. How about asking people to leave a note at the top of your page that they've left a note somewhere below? (Though since you should be automatically notified by the website that you have a new message, I don't really see how even this would be helpful. Still, it's your talk page.) Zuleika 17:08, 30 March 2011 (PDT) If there's a comprehensive tutorial somewhere within this wiki describing how markup syntax is supposed to work, I would very much like to read it, because I desperately need that knowledge myself. Otherwise, a newcomer who arrives (with all the best intentions of being helpful) is naturally forced to use trial and error. I'm sure if you examine my own contribs you'd find any number of head-slappers in my misuse of the syntax. The solution to this problem is to expand our help pages—explaining the information that every user is "supposed" to know. We must always keep in mind that wiki markup (and indeed the "culture" of how various wikis have done things in the past) is not an end in itself. It is simply a tool, and frankly, a horrifically dated and unfriendly one. We are stuck with it for the moment, because so much content has already been built with it. But the goal is to share knowledge. Many who have vital knowledge of camera history or technology have no interest in the nuts and bolts of our publishing platform. In just our first two months, I can give the name of someone who would have been a hugely valuable contributor: He created a login, tried to add a photo, failed—and decided the whole business was too tedious to pursue. Frankly, he was quite justified. --Vox 20:02, 30 March 2011 (PDT) I can agree with much of that, but not all. The markup system at Wikia is friendlier for newbies than is the one here. I like it less. This is not because I like to prove how manly I am by using a system that others find difficult, but because (in my opinion) although it's easier to learn it's harder to use. Now, part of the Mediawiki syntax is indeed pretty horrendous. An example is tables. How so? Well, Mediawiki works as a preprocessor for XHTML, and XHTML markup for tables is itself pretty horrendous. I'm no Mediawiki expert but I'd guess that if the table markup were much simpler then the conversion process would be more iffy, and there'd be a higher risk of serious rendering errors. If you want a comprehensive tutorial here describing how markup works, then you want something very much like this at Wikipedia. Indeed, it would differ from that only in not suggesting the use of templates that (as yet) don't exist here. But even if we had that, it wouldn't be the kind of thing I'd recommend to a newbie. What I'd suggest instead is a brief guide to markup, one that made no claim to comprehensiveness. No such page is linked from Help:Contents -- in which [ahem!] most of the links need updating -- and such a page would be useful. Time permitting, I'll work on it. Zuleika 00:17, 31 March 2011 (PDT) Can I appeal, for my part, that you (or indeed anyone) don't start writing such a guide? This place is getting a sight too didactic for my taste as it is. In the little bits I've written, I tried to aim at a very low level of interest in code, because our typical user is interested above all in cameras. You can explain everything a new user needs as simply as 'Copy this bit, and fill in this here, and that there, and it will work'; the users don't even need to know what language they are using, as I didn't and still don't, really. Maybe put up the link to that WP page, and maybe this one in an appropriate place, and people who care enough will find them and get into learning the clever stuff. Exhortations to make sure your code is absolutely orthodox, however, will stop people from even starting (even more surely than standing on a box in the town square lamenting the awful quality of our writing). So to return to my point, no more style guides or house rules please; the site got here without them, and is actually damn good. Stop trying to manage, and start writing about cameras. Any reply to the rant component of the above can be put here with my blessing; anything more about use of markup ought to be in a more public page.--Dustin McAmera 11:42, 31 March 2011 (PDT) I agree that scaring off potential contributors is the worst possible outcome of all—far worse than generating a bit of malformed page code which might choke some (hypothetical) future browser. My contribution to our help pages is the FAQ which is quite deliberately constructed to hide complications from the newcomer, until they care to learn about them. (I did just add a link to the Wikipedia markup guide for the brave few who are curious.) --Vox 13:48, 31 March 2011 (PDT) On TLRs: Yes, you've certainly improved it. Perhaps the article didn't know what it wanted to be -- it was (and is) marked as a glossary item, but in places it was very unlike my idea of a glossary item. Anyway, it seems silly to me to have detailed articles on this or that specific (and often obscure) TLR but no article on TLRs in general. (NB I don't want to knock the former. They're fine.) Then again, I don't mind much if material is missing from this website; but I do think that it, like any other website, has a responsibility to try to make sure that what it does say isn't wrong. That article had some statements that were truthy but mistaken, and it was by no means an unusually poor article by the standards of the site. There's a systemic error, and I suppose the only way to fix it is to attract a larger number of people who know (or are willing to find out) what they're writing about and who then write it up carefully. Zuleika 18:39, 30 March 2011 (PDT)