User:DHowell

Hi, I'm Dan, and I've been using Wikipedia resource for years. I'm currently an occasional contributor to WikiProject Radio Stations and WikiProject Television Stations.

I am also fascinated by logos and am bugged by the fact that logo images are being deleted from Wikipedia every day because someone forgot to include the logo template or some vandal removed an image reference from the article and it became orphaned.

Copyright paranoia and fair use
I believe copyright paranoia is running rampant on Wikipeida. Contrary to what a very vocal and influential minority of Wikipedians believe, fair use does not violate the GFDL. Jimmy Wales said "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." But when copyright laws are continually being extended, in both duration and scope, to the point where an ever-increasing portion of human knowledge is becoming increasingly protected by copyright, it is impossible to be the sum of all human knowledge without fair use.

Articles for deletion
Lately I have been spending my much of my Wikipedia time in Articles for deletion (doing AfD patrol), because I continually see so much good-faith work needlessly being thrown away. Here is a prime example of everything that is wrong with AfD—while reason ultimately prevailed in that case, Lobojo is absolutely correct that if he had come into the discussion any later the article might well have been deleted under the snowball clause. Deletion review would have been likely unsuccessful in such a case, as seemingly unanimous deletes are rarely if ever overturned.

A thought about our future legacy
While we endlessly debate whether certain articles should exist or not, it is interesting to note that while articles get deleted, the deletion discussions never do. So I wonder if there will come a time where the volume of content in Articles for deletion and all its subpages will exceed the volume of (non-deleted) content in the mainspace encyclopedia itself? At which point we will have not only created the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia, but the world's most extensive archive of debates about what topics don't belong in an encyclopedia. I wonder which legacy will be more valuable to historians in the future...

Additionally, all edits which would qualify as minor edits, e.g. spelling or grammar corrections, formatting or layout changes, correction of obvious facts, etc., but not so marked may be treated as if they were marked as minor.