You’re hereby invited to /c/vegan, as you appear to be a Northern Hemisphere vegan.

The short answer is that I really, really suggest you try other things before trying to create your first article. This isn’t just me; every experienced editor will tell you that creating a new article is one of the hardest things any editor can do, let alone a newer one. It’s why the task center lists it as being appropriate for “advanced editors”. Finding an existing article which interests you and then polishing and expanding it is almost always more rewarding, more useful, easier, and less stressful than creating an article from scratch. And if creating articles sounds appealing, expanding existing stub articles is great experience for that.

The long answer is “you can”, but it’s really hard:

• New editors are subject to Articles for Creation, or AfC, when creating an article. The article sits in a draft state until the editor flags it for review. The backlog is very long, and while reviewers can go in any order they want, they usually prioritize the oldest articles out of fairness and because most AfC submissions are about equal in urgency and time consumption. “Months” is the expected waiting time.
• If you’re not using the English Wikipedia, you can try translating over a well-established article from English. There’s no rule that says sources have to be in the language of the Wikipedia they’re on, although it’s still considered a big plus if sources are in the same language. You’d have to keep in mind that the target language may have standards not followed on the English Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia’s notability guidelines are predicated on you understanding other policies and guidelines like “reliable sources” and “independent sources”. They’re also intentionally fuzzy so people don’t play lawyer and follow the exact letter without considering the spirit of the guideline.
• The English Wikipedia currently has over 7 million articles. There are still a lot of missing articles (mostly in taxonomy, where notability is almost guaranteed), but you really need to know where to look.
• When choosing an article subject, it’s extremely important to avoid COI.
• Assuming you have a subject you think meets criteria, now you have to go out and find reliable, independent sources with substantial coverage of the subject to confirm your hypothesis.
• Now you need to start the article, and you need to do this in a manner which:
  • Is verifiable (all claims are cited)
  • Is not original research (i.e. nothing you say can be based on “because I know it”)
  • Is reliable (all citations are to reliable sources)
  • Is neutral (you’ve minimized bias as much as you can, let the sources speak for themselves, and made sure your source selection isn’t biased)
  • Is stylistically correct (there’s a manual of style, but just use your best judgment, and small mistakes can be copy-edited out by people familiar with style guidelines)
• If the article is nominated for deletion, you have to keep your cool and argue based solely on guidelines (not on perceived importance of the subject) that the article should be kept.
• New articles are almost always given more scrutiny than articles which have been around; this isn’t a cultural problem as much as it is a heuristic one.
• An article deleted feels much more personal than edits reverted (despite the fact that subject notability is 100% out of your control).

Some of these apply to normal editing too, but working within an article others have worked on and might be willing to help with is vastly easier than building one from scratch. If you want specific help in picking out, say, an article to try editing and are on the English Wikipedia, I have no problem acting like bowling bumpers if you’re afraid your edits won’t meet standards.

I really wanted to give Lemmy a try, but I think I’ll be returning to the whiteboard in my office for organic, sophisticated discussion.

Ratchet: “I’ll just call you… ***** for short.”

I’m going to write this from the perspective of the English Wikipedia, but most specifics should have some analog in other Wikipedias. By “contribute to new articles”, do you mean create new articles, contribute to articles which are new that you come across, or contribute to articles which you haven’t before (thus “new to you”)? Asking because the first one has a very different – much more complicated – answer from the other two.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c31hk/unidan_gets_mad_about_crows_and_jackdaws_in_an/

Is it possible that this is an effort to steal work from Wikipedia editors to get you to train their AI models?

I can’t definitively say “no”, but I’ve seen no evidence of this at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan

So Wikipedia has three methods for deleting an article:

• Proposed deletion (PROD): An editor tags an article explaining why they think it should be uncontroversially deleted. After seven days, an administrator will take a look and decide if they agree. Proposed deletion of an article can only be done once, even this can be removed by anyone passing by who disagrees with it, and an article deleted via PROD can be recreated at any time.
• Articles for deletion (AfD): A discussion is held to delete an article. Pretty much always, this is about the subject’s notability. After the discussion (a week by default), a closer (almost always an administrator, especially for contentious discussions) will evaluate the merits of the arguments made and see if a consensus has been reached to e.g. delete, keep, redirect, or merge. Articles deleted via discussion cannot be recreated until they’ve satisfied the concerns of said discussion, else they can be summarily re-deleted.
• Speedy deletion: An article is so fundamentally flawed that it should be summarily deleted at best or needs to be deleted as soon as possible at worst. The nominating editor will choose one or more of the criteria for speedy deletion (CSD), and an administrator will delete the article if they agree. Like a PROD, articles deleted this way can be recreated at any time.

This new criterion has nothing to do with preempting the kind of trust building you described. The editor who made it will not be treated any differently than without this criterion. It’s there so editors don’t have to deal with the bullshit asymmetry principle and comb through everything to make sure it’s verifiable. Sometimes editors will make these LLM-generated articles because they think they’re helping but don’t know how to do it themselves, sometimes it’s for some bizarre agenda (e.g. there’s a sockpuppet editor who’s been occasionally popping up trying to push articles generated by an LLM about the Afghan–Mughal Wars), but whatever the reason, it just does nothing but waste other editors’ time and can be effectively considered unverified. All this criterion does is expedite the process of purging their bullshit.

I’d argue meticulously building trust to push an agenda isn’t a prevalent problem on Wikipedia, but that’s a very different discussion.

So far, I haven’t seen all that many, and the ones that are are very obvious like a very glossy crab at the beach wearing a Santa Claus hat. I definitely have yet to see one that’s undisclosed, let alone actively disguising itself. I also have yet to see someone try using an AI-generated image on Wikipedia. The process of disclaiming generative AI usage is trivialized in the upload process with an obvious checkbox, so the only incentive not to is straight-up lying.

I can’t say how much this will be an issue in the future or what good steps are to finding and eliminating it should it become one.

If anyone has specific questions about this, let me know, and I can probably answer them. Hopefully I can be to Lemmy and Wikimedia what Unidan was to Reddit and ecology before he crashed out over jackdaws and got exposed for vote fraud.

OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second.

• There’s zero consistent theme.
• The images are generated.
• They’re all “BY JOHN” (no pfp, no last name, no bio, let alone no indication why they’re qualified to write about this cornucopia of shit).
• It only ever hyperlinks to itself – i.e. the sources may as well be “I made it the fuck up”.
• The way the articles are structured are LLM slop to a tee – randomly bolding words, meandering prose, overuse of bullet points, jarring logical flow, etc.
• At least five articles per day from the same “person” despite extensive length, perfect grammar, and alleged research being done.

Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?

it shouldn't be that hard?

OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.

Outdated on Windows? Because on Linux, the LibreOffice UI is great, imo.

Lee-bruh is definitely the way to go since it fluidly connects to the first syllable of “office”. If you do “lib-ray” or “lee-bray”, you’re forcing a ton of unnecessary annunciation on yourself.

Why pay for anything ever if it’s going to potentially get taken away?

Because it’s called “lifetime”? As in the entire point of the product is that it will not ever be taken away with the exception that you close your account? “Why pay for anything if there’s nothing enforcing the core premise of the product?” The gardener advertised a “whole-yard mow” for $100, but I’ve already gotten the area around the driveway, and honestly would it really be that bad if they just stopped right now?

You can talk about odds all you want (although I think around $100 million in VC funding puts those odds squarely in favor of “lifetime” users getting the floor sawed out from under them Looney Tunes-style), but the fact it’s even possible is what’s deeply disturbing, because it’s deliberate. Lifetime’s meaning should be unambiguously stipulated in a contract, not inferred. Know why? Because companies out there advertising “lifetime” subscriptions right now have little disclaimers like “approximately five years or so but honestly we don’t really know or care lol this license disappears whenever we want it to”).

People are assuming it’s for the lifetime of your Plex account, but my response is: based on fucking what? Plex on their website doesn’t seem to specify this anywhere, even in their terms of service. People asking on their official forums receive responses saying things like “probably for the lifetime of your Plex account” with no sources to anything. I’m not trying to sealion here; I literally can’t find a single instance of Plex stating officially in writing or verbally what “lifetime” actually means to the end user. If Plex isn’t going to rugpull, why can’t they add a couple sentences to their TOS saying something like: “The purchase of a lifetime pass grants the user a non-transferable license for [blah blah] starting from the date of purchase. This license will not be revoked unless 1) the associated account is terminated by the account holder or 2) the aasociated account is terminated by Plex for one or more of the reasons outlined in section [blah]”?

They could, they should, they don’t, and you have no good explanation, otherwise you would’ve offered one by now. They have enough money to afford a legal team that wouldn’t overlook that. The answer is that they want to reserve the right to destroy the “lifetime” pass whenever they want. If you can find official documentation from Plex Inc. saying that if I buy a lifetime pass today for $250, the license will only end with the termination of the account, then I’ll have no idea why they make this too hard to find, but I’ll take back everything else I said in this comment and stop using “lifetime” in scare quotes. I genuinely want to know if they say anything about this anywhere.

Another reason donating to FOSS is better than paying for proprietary software. Proprietary software devs get to run around stealing whatever code they like from the open-source community and never suffer any consequence because they don’t make their source available. I can think of a select few proprietary projects that have the balls to be source-available.

If you want to intentionally create a system that lets you evade accountability for stealing code, “fine”, but I have zero respect for you or your product, and I’m certainly not paying you a dime. I’ll put my money toward the developers who work to better the world instead of the rat fucks who steal from them to make money and pollute the software ecosystem with proprietary trash.

You literally said you have Plex pass in the other comment, why are you playing dumb?

They care about the people who don’t have a “lifetime” pass? Having empathy for others who don’t have what you have, caring about the ethics of a company whose products you use and pay for, and taking a stance that software should be as free and open as possible aren’t “playing dumb”. If anything, as someone who isn’t just using Plex for free, they’ve earned more of a right to complain, because they’ve shown they’re willing to pay for quality services but think this one is exploitative.

Maybe even disregarding empathy, they’re worried that existing features will become locked behind a tier that the “lifetime” pass doesn’t apply to? Maybe they’re worried that their “lifetime” pass won’t be so “lifetime” if “lifetime” wasn’t explicitly defined to mean lifetime at the time of purchase? Anything bad that can happen will happen with VC-fueled enshittification.

I also want to emphasize that relicensing from the GPLv2 to something proprietary is damn-near impossible for a project this large with a team who are so ideologically motivated to make FOSS. If I today submit a PR to the Jellyfin codebase, they can’t legally relicense to a proprietary license without 1) getting my consent to give them ownership of my work (I’m not likely to be paid off or convinced it’s a good thing that work I submitted for free is being enshittified), or 2) removing my work from the project if they can’t get in touch with me or if I say no. To emphasize: this consent is affirmative.

Thus, the process is to survey who’s contributed to the project, reach out to anyone whose work is still in the project (preferably in writing in a permanent, court-admissable format like email), ask them to transfer ownership of their copyright to you, keep track of who’s said no, said yes, or not answered, fulfill conditions for anyone who wants something in return, and meticulously rip out all of the code from people who say “no” or don’t answer. One of the project’s major contributors died 10 years ago? Legally, too fucking bad: they didn’t relinquish shit to you. Rip out that legacy code and start over.

Just like for instance if you want to take a Wikipedia article and own it for yourself, you can’t just go ask the Wikimedia Foundation nicely. You have to contact every single contributor whose work is extant in that article, and rip out work that isn’t explicitly given to you by its owner.

Some points as someone who does not use Tailscale:

• Tailscale the software is under a BSD license. Plex is proprietary.
• The discussion in this thread about Jellyfin is less corporate versus non-corporate (where in the context of proprietary software this would be payware versus freeware) and more FOSS versus proprietary software.
• To be clear, Tailscale is proudly doing the same Series C venture capital bullshit as Plex. They’re seemingly just as corporate as Plex, but at minimum, the software as it exists right now isn’t tied down to Tailscale.
• Additionally, this isn’t Tailscale versus Plex; it’s Jellyfin + Tailscale versus Plex.
• Jellyfin + Tailscale means that you’re using Jellyfin, which is FOSS. Using FOSS doesn’t just benefit you but also everyone else using it because it benefits greatly from the network effect. Any money that goes to Jellyfin that would’ve otherwise gone to Plex is given back to the community and hard-working developers rather than lining some soulless venture capitalist’s pocket.
• With Jellyfin + Tailscale, everything you’re using locally is FOSS. With Plex, none of it is. And even taking corporate into account, with Jellyfin + Tailscale, most of what you’re using locally is non-corporate. With Plex, all of it is corporate.
• Tailscale is giving you a real service through use of their VPN. Because Plex is run on the end user’s infrastructure and barely touches Plex’s server for remote streaming, they’re basically just making you pay them a “fuck you, that’s why” subscription fee.

TL;DR: This isn’t a binary “corporate versus non-corporate”.