User:Dront



= About me = I am a young man (boy?) living in London, United Kingdom.



Things I enjoy include, but is not limited to the following.
 * Studying
 * Computer Science
 * Maths
 * Reading
 * Science
 * Philosophy
 * Fiction on rare occations
 * Contributing to Open source projects
 * Photography

In general, I find it hard to pin down my interests. Perhaps my edits will better reflect it than what I am able to put onto this page.

= About what I do here =

My goal is to make small improvements here and there, I also hope that contributing photos may make me a better photojournalist. I want to be corrected, although it may hurt to be wrong the gain will be that in the long run I grow somewhat wiser.

Arguments, we will have them
Some consider reaching an argument to be a failure, to say it mildly, I don't agree. Arguments are necessary and through them we may make progress. It is likely, if not obvious, that both you and me are wrong in regard of many things due to different observations, biases and differing backgrounds. The truth lies, between, somewhere else, or perhaps with one of us. The only way to approach the truth, or at least the best approximation of the truth, that we may or may not posses, is through arguments and reasoning. With this in mind, I am looking forward to learning my mistakes, just as I hope that you are looking forward to learning your own. Let's argue, in a civil maner.

There is no shame in being wrong, there is a great deal of shame however in not realizing that you are human and capable of working towards a better understanding by accepting that you make mistakes.

Licensing
All my work on Wikipedia, pictures and textual is dual-licensed. This is due to my objections towards restrictive licenses such as the GPL and consequently the GFDL. Thus all my contributions are available under a permissive license as well, see the bottom of this user-page for a copyright notice.

Reasons for using non-restrictive licenses
First of all, before the licensing war starts. Just as with many things in life, there is not one license to rule them all. I do artistic works by writing and taking photographs, I am also involved in software development and come in contact with licensing that way as well. This is what I have come to believe after a few years of exposure.

Non-openness
Sometimes it is good to have control. Even an open license can sometimes be wrong, taking a photograph of someone and publishing it is in fact an act that exposes that someone in many ways to abuse. As a photographer the responsibility falls upon you, especially if it is a public shot and not a model we are talking about. For these cases you might find it more correct to have a license saying, look, don't touch, don't copy and do ask if you want it really badly.

I find this approach natural since I care for those who are exposed through my works. There are of course borderline cases, but that has to be left for you as a photographer to decide.

Restrictiveness
For commercial purposes I find that the GPL and GFDL makes perfect sense. If you are planning on making money from your work and keeping the opposition out, this makes sense to me. I know that this is a provocative stance, but after a brief encounter with the Free Software Foundation I have come to the conclusion that a restrictive open license is more likely to gain only the group that share the ideals of the license, rather than humanity as a whole.

I find MySQL to be a good example, their business model made perfect sense in regard of the GPL. But did they really try to forward the common good? I doubt this. Do note that I put no shame in forwarding your own self-interest, it is nothing but natural. But if your own goal is to contribute to something grander I find that being restrictive is not the way to go.

This being said, and I will most likely only say it here, I disagree with the choice of restrictive licensing of knowledge generating projects such as Wikipedia.

Permissiveness
Instead, consider this, would it hurt you if a company considered your text or code good and chose to incorporate it into a brochure or proprietary software? Giving you due credit by accrediting you.

When it comes to software I feel that the words of a very wise OpenBSD developer, said back at the computer club I belong to when arguing once again over BSD-licensed code being "stolen" by proprietary software companies, springs to mind. This is the somewhat distorted memory I have of them.

"My goal is not to forward a political agenda. I see tons of bad implementations, conflicting standards and other evils out there. As an engineer I don't feel bad that they chose to throw away their own rubbish code and place one which hopefully is better in its place. Less security holes, better software and the world may actually become a better place. Instead of trying to jam my own morale and way of thinking down their throat."

It's about trust, trust that good will shall prevail. The one who knows best on when to give back and what to give back is actually the person that might copy your work. Have faith in that person to report errors and perhaps to contribute something in the future since you showed good will towards him or her.

Sure, they may make money out of your work, but is that really a bad thing in the end? Was that the reason why you felt that you wanted to contribute to the common good in the first case? By forcing them to contribute in one way and one way only, perhaps it is the case that they will not contribute at all?

Pages to edit

 * The article on Sven Nordqvist needs citing and could use some rework on the language
 * The Love-bite article is largely hear-say and could really use some well grounded claims and remedies
 * In general the pages on Mathematical Logic need some love, are you up for it?
 * Shoko Asahara, potential white-wash of the Dalai Lama?
 * User:Jia.ming has injected his own research papers into a ton of articles such as Fisher's exact test. I am not sure what this violates, but it feels plain wrong.

Pages to create

 * English Wikipedia lacks an article on Dan Larhammar, the Swedish Wikipedia has an article that could serve as a basis. Perhaps it would also be possible to ask Dan for a picture since there is none for the Swedish article.

Existing
The is a list of pictures that I would like to have a shot at making better. Reasons might be that I know that they don't cover the subject as a whole, that the subject is presented in a way that is distracting, etc. It's not intended as critique, it is more of a reminder for me that perhaps I may improve on things.


 * Tokyo:
 * Image:Tokyo University Akamon 2004-11-16.jpg
 * Image:The place of the University of Tokyo establishment.jpg
 * Image:Sanshiro Pond, Tokyo University.JPG
 * Image:医学部1号館Med.1st Bldg.jpg
 * Image:The Experimental Tank.jpg

Non-existing
This is going to be a list of articles that I would like to take a picture for. Most likely they will be in the vicinity of my current location.

Potential bot work

 * Change links to Linux refered to as "GNU/Linux" into "Linux"
 * Only links, otherwise we risk to hurt discussions about the naming, etc.
 * This might be a dangerous assumption, before letting it loose this should be seriously tested. Perhaps it even should be limited to a specific set of articles?
 * Would most likely not be appreciated by "some" people, but is the de-facto name used.
 * Should be limited to pages on software, it is particularly inconsistent on these descriptions. "Foo is a program for GNU/Linux", "Bar is a program for Linux" etc.
 * Check Influenced and Influences, do they go both ways
 * Are there cases when we don't want them to go both ways?
 * Generate Influenced and Influences graphs and histograms
 * Would be fun to see for a whole category
 * May need to limit to results that acknowledge a two way relationship
 * Turn external links into internal Foo into Foo
 * Keep in mind the potential renaming of the link

= Link collection =

On helping out on the Wiki

 * Image use policy
 * WikiProject Biography

= Identity =