Welcome to Wikipedia!

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Dear Chuckwolber: Welcome to Wikipedia, a free and open-content encyclopedia. I hope you enjoy contributing. To help get you settled in, I thought you might find the following pages useful:

Don't worry too much about being perfect. Very few of us are! Just in case you are not perfect, click here to see how you can avoid making common mistakes.

If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions.

Wikipedians try to follow a strict policy of never biting new users. If you are unsure of how to do something, you are welcome to ask a more experienced user such as an administrator. One last bit of advice: please sign any discussion comment with four tildes (~~~~). The software will automatically convert this into your signature which can be altered in the "Preferences" tab at the top of the screen. I hope I have not overwhelmed you with information. If you need any help just let me know. Once again welcome to Wikipedia, and don't forget to tell us about yourself and be BOLD!--St.daniel 01:55, 13 January 2007 (UTC)Reply

Speedy deletion of Brian Lane (developer)

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A tag has been placed on Brian Lane (developer), requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia per CSD a7.

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not meet basic Wikipedia criteria may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as an appropriate article, and if you can indicate why the subject of this article is appropriate, you may contest the tagging. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the article and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm its subject's notability under the guidelines.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag) and leave a note on the page's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. KrakatoaKatie 01:34, 16 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Speedy deletion of Jesse Keating

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A tag has been placed on Jesse Keating, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia per CSD a7.

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not meet basic Wikipedia criteria may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as an appropriate article, and if you can indicate why the subject of this article is appropriate, you may contest the tagging. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the article and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm its subject's notability under the guidelines.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag) and leave a note on the page's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. KrakatoaKatie 01:36, 16 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

WP:AUTO

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  You should wait for others to write an article about subjects in which you are personally involved. This applies to articles about you, your achievements, your band, your business, your publications, your website, your relatives, and any other possible conflict of interest.

Creating an article about yourself is strongly discouraged. If you create such an article, it might be listed on articles for deletion. Deletion is not certain, but many feel strongly that you should not start articles about yourself. This is because independent creation encourages independent validation of both significance and verifiability. All edits to articles must conform to Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, and Wikipedia:Verifiability.

If you are not "notable" under Wikipedia guidelines, creating an article about yourself may violate the policy that Wikipedia is not a personal webspace provider and would thus qualify for speedy deletion. If your achievements, etc., are verifiable and genuinely notable, and thus suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia, someone else will probably create an article about you sooner or later. (See Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles.) Thank you. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 18:54, 7 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

GNU is a tool, Linux is a platform

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While my personal opinion agrees with you (that Linux is the de facto name for the wide-spread platform) you should be aware that this is controversial. I don't oppose your edit, just your rationale.

Strictly speaking, Linux is only the kernel; Linux alone can not normally run applications.

To actually have a platform or operating system, you need more than just the kernel (which can be thought of almost as merely the device-driver framework). You also need the standard system libraries that all of your programs are dynamically linked against. You need the initialisation programs which load the kernel into memory in the first place, and those which initialise your hardware and mount your disks, and you need the dynamic linker, and of course you need a user interface (the shell) by which other programs can be retrieved. Moreover, you need a vast array of basic utilities for performing all the functions that you (and all of your programs) take for granted, such as copying and renaming files, or scheduling essential background tasks. Surely the word "platform" must encompass all of these things (and sometimes more, like the text editor and included games); it at least describes the total standard environment which is taken as a prerequisite for any individual piece of application software. For the average so-called "Linux" computer, almost all of this environment is supplied by the GNU project. Of course, they designed it to permit mixing and matching; for the average user it is arguably the GNU+Xwindows platform that is most relevant (and given that, I doubt users would be able to tell whether their kernel is Linux or Hurd or BSD..). On top of that, considering the common community which develops GNU and Linux, and the fact that the latter has adopted the GNU license, one could argue that Linux itself falls within GNU (broadly construed). It just so happens that common parlence is tending to do the reverse: broadly construing Linus credit for everything ever related to UNIX (much to the chagrin of the GNU project which appears to be the more legitimate author of the software project, movement and philosophy, and merely had the glory usurped in the crowning moment of their endeavour). Cesiumfrog (talk) 05:13, 27 June 2012 (UTC)Reply