05 December 2007

I don't get it... I usually get off things like that

No surprising admission here - I use Wikipedia. I use it, you use it, he/she/it uses it, we use it, they use it, they use it. In the nature of giving back to the community, I figured I'd do a little work for them, and along the way, maybe learn something new. Particularly, I wanted to have an excuse to learn/use Inkscape. (I gushed over GIMP, but it isn't a tool for vector graphics manipulation. Which I have occasion to do. And Inkscape is, like GIMP, pretty good at it. Again... full-featured, open source/free, multi-platform, etc.) To kill two birds with one stone, I'll learn a bit about Inkscape, do something with what I learned, then learn a little about Wikipedia contributions and then do something with what I learned.

Along the way creating/uploading derivative work I want to be sure I'm attributing properly and editing/linking cleanly in Wikipedia, and thus I find myself in a morass of legalese and wikitext/links that baffle my normally tenaciously inquisitive mind. (I mean, we're talking about a bloke (me) who willingly spent hours digging through web pages and on the phone to figure out exactly how to know whether you're standing on federally/publically-owned land, or if you're on Billy-Joe-Jim-Bob's little patch of privately-owned meth lab heaven.)

Most of the time my overanalysis nit-picking engine kicks in and I can't be disengaged without a pry bar. But the Wikicheese just is too much. I took the easy way out. Made a good faith effort, stuck the new image up, think I covered everything and I'm done. Usually figuring out the "right" way to do something, especially when firmly embedded in the morass of bureaucracy, is something I engage in and relish for relishing's sake. What happened to me?

Am I losing my overanalysis fetish? Hopefully it's just a temporary thing. What would my navel do without me to gaze at it?

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