User:Pinecar

I am extremely happy to have my picture on Mossbrae Falls displayed as selected picture on California Portal. I guess, this picture is selected, not for its technical merit - but for the unique natural wounder of this waterfall. This reassures me that we live in a wounder full place (called earth) - just waiting to dance for us - just we need to be prepared to get to it's theater with wide open mind and heart. Thank you again.

Contributions:
 * Waterfalls: Potem Falls, Mossbrae Falls, Basin Falls, Black Rock Falls, Granuja Falls, Triple Falls, Toketee Falls, Mill Creek Falls, Barr Creek Falls, Upper Falls, Salmon Creek Falls, Limekiln Falls
 * Technology: Static code analysis, Panmagic square
 * Arts: Bharatanatyam
 * Company / Product: Proximity marketing, Good Technology, MSN Hotmail
 * Politics: Execution of Saddam Hussein
 * Geography: Aragalur, Amaravathinagar, Attur, Thalaivasal, Vasishta Nadi & Kalrayan Hills
 * Misc: Lynbrook High School, Job Shadow & Magadai
 * Templates: Template:Salem District, Template:Dindigul District, Template:Thalaivasal Block, List of waterfalls in India, Template:Kaveri River, Template:Western Ghats & Template:Eastern Ghats
 * My Sandbox

My Wiki Talk(s)/Thoughts(?):
 * Wiki Template. My intentions of creating wiki templates are
 * Wiki editors can share ideas from other similar articles that fall in the common interest
 * Increase the possibility of getting more relevant topics added
 * We can avoid "see also" sections
 * image upload - copyright
 * I have uploaded a bunch of waterfall pictures I have taken on my camera. While uploading, I have tried to give as liberal a copyright notice as possible... I don't care who/how the picrutes are used (I don't own and don't want to own any of the waterfalls :-) ). Still folks keep bouncing my pictures - don't know how to move on.
 * I want these pictures be restored or I can load them again - but, can some one point me to an easy page that suggests best possible selections to make in image upload page - so that no one will ever delete it for copyright/ownership reasons. I don't even need credit for the pictures I have taken (I am not a professional photographer - let these pictures be in place until some professional puts up a better picture there).
 * On vandalism: Delete: Well, it looks like Medha Hari has manged to get one of the marketing managers - using WikiPedia, Hindu and many other opportunities to promote. I suspect, it is the marketing manager $$gaining$$ through the efforts of popularizing her. If the WikiPedia author(s) is really serious with out any bias to write about Bharatanatyam and Tamil culture, s/he can get older pictures of Bharatanatyam placed widely on wiki - instead of Medha Hari's all over. This is THE most controversial wikipedia entry I have come across so far. --Pinecar 01:49, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia Accessibility
Wikipedia Accessibility definitions, as I see, are approaching the opportunity from physical disability point of view. Can we expand the scope of Accessibility to include


 * 1) Read out aloud - think of AudioBooks accessible when visual accessibility is limited at specific planned/unplanned - time/place. This can help in distributing wikipedia articles to no internet/computer/power outlet scenarios as well.
 * 2) Like people make audio play lists and  publishing playlists, we can have some way of people sharing their wikipedia article collections. This has some over lap with Wikipedia books project.
 * 3) This can help with people using the articles for offline use as well as collections
 * 4) Help for low internet bandwidth users
 * 5) There are other projects addressing the Offline snapshot - can be brought under Accessibility umbrella
 * 6) Language support can be another opportunity in accessibility domain
 * 7) Limited screen view (Mobile Phones) is another

MediaWiki switch to git for Backend
October 1st, 2020

Currently MediaWiki > Wikipedia use RDBMS (MySQL/MariaDB). Would like to explore if using Virtual Filesystem for Git kind of technology. Benefits include VFSForGit still not available on platforms other than Windows. I am looking ahead, as that can be solved, if needed.
 * 1) Branching - if someone wants to edit multiple times and generate good quality article, before pushing upstream
 * 2) How about people wanting to make selected documents offline
 * 3) Airplane reading
 * 4) People in less fortunate geographical regions

For profit Knowledge extraction, from Wikipedia
November 6th, 2020

Wikipedia data is being used by for-profit entities around the world to extract/train relevant information. In many cases, the result of this extract/training is not being contributed back in the form of open source. This extracted information is used as the foundation in many products sold for profit. I presume, some of this extracted information might even get Patent Protection from various Sovereign nations.

While it might be legal and complying with the current wikipedia license usage, not sure if the licenses should be modified to encourage the contribution back to the community. At the minimum, have the entities acknowledge the use of Wikipedia and perhaps say in limited wordings on how wikipedia was used.

March 18th, 2021, potential solution through Wikimedia Enterprise

March 29th, 2023: With Generative AI, the copyright owners of images are up in arms now - for models being created using their images. Let us see how these are resolved through national and global changes to laws. Glad, tags like "do not train" are appearing in the ecosystem.

April 20th, 2023: Elon Musk complain about Microsoft - "They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1648784955655192577 Wikipedia data is base for all kinds of training for AI/ML, so ubiqutous....

Remove links to Paywall
There are many links from wikipedia going to sites/pages with paywall. It would be nice if we can scrub these sites. Replace them with non paywall sites. Potentially from the primary source (like government or supported through public money) or open source. I am not against paid content. All I am suggesting is, wikipedia need not be the way these paid sites get their traffic and the corresponding advertisement revenue along with potential subscription revenue.

Also, it would be nice to use the sources that do not change/restrict their content by geographical region.
 * Sounds like a WP:TALK discussion. One way around a paywall citation is to use for example (a) a clip from newspapers.com, which will allow users to see the citation without havingn to pay; (b) use familysearch.org's ability to see a citation without login, e.g. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KCBW-H29/sarah-dix-hamlin-1845-1923 Greg Henderson (talk)