NotInventedHere

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Edit history

Hello, you recently made an edit with the summary "Please read the page history before reverting changes, the edit summary is there for a purpose."

I can see now that you have removed these edits, but I'd just like to clarify that edit histories are not the place to cite your sources — citations should exist on the article, and the person wishing to introduce the information needs to take care of adding them.

I didn't, however, find any sources from your previous edit comments, and the explanation "8 GB volume limit: 4% space needed for in-memory RVM, RVM is recommended not to exceed 330MB" is original research at best — hence, inappropriate for Wikipedia. This is why I reverted your edit.

In any case, if you haven't already, you might want to have a peek at the attribution policy. -- intgr 08:43, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

"Removed links to project homepages"

Re this: yes, that was intentional. References are to be used to link to reliable independent sources which back up the presented statements - not to the subject's home page. Furthermore, the "a comparison can be found here" paragraph is an inappropriate self-reference and is presented as an instruction to the user, both of which are improper. This should be reverted. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 14:31, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

If you can come up with some better syntactical way of providing homepage links (without creating whole new articles for radeon and radeonhd, that is), please have a go. Same goes for the presentation of the comparison link. Just removing the driver homepage URLs doesn't help anyone really though, and moving the comparison ref to an unrelated paragraph doesn't help either. -- NotInventedHere (talk) 14:41, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

We shouldn't be referencing anything to a primary source which can be edited by anyone in the first place. We do not need links to project home pages at all unless they are the main focus of the article. I already made a change to the way the comparison page was listed, which you reverted. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 14:57, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

1) The radeon(hd) home page is hosted on a wiki, yes, as are hundreds of other project pages for open source projects. Anyone can edit these pages, yes. Any malicious edits there will get reverted immediately by project staff though. So your point is moot. Wikis are just normal primary documentation sources for many open source projects these days (know Trac?). 2) The comparison link made sense in this revision. You misplaced it in your revision - do you really think that any reader finds the comparison by following the (7) ref there (that's completely out of context)? Additionally, you made the comparison a ref instead of a direct link, but as you remarked, refs are "for citing reliable independent sources that back up the presented statements", but that ref doesn't back up any statements (in your version). -- NotInventedHere (talk) 15:32, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

The degree of quality control on the fd.o wiki is not guaranteed - certainly it can be argued that "malicious edits" will be quickly reverted, but this does not guarantee that data there is current and accurate and it certainly doesn't negate the possibility of people editing here and then changing the referenced text on the external wiki to match. It's still a primary source. As for the comparison text, it should be in a reference tag because WP:EL discourages the use of external links inline in the article body. I'll have a look into rewording the section, but that doesn't mean I'm satisfied that a section predominantly sourced to user-editable documentation on the subject's own site is reliably sourced. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:32, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

As for accuracy of fd.org, there is no 100% guarantee of anything in real life :-). Anyways, that page is maintained by the actual driver developers, and you won't find a more accurate or more up to date source. If you find a better way to link to the project pages, go ahead. Wikipedia:EL#Important_points_to_remember discourages inline external links normally, correct. The recommended way (external links section) clearly doesn't work with a multi-topic article though. I propose just to inline project page links ("The radeonhd driver..." or "The radeonhd driver (project page)...") and rewording the feature comparison sentence. But that's really just syntax in the end... -- NotInventedHere (talk) 23:15, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I certainly imagine that the fd.o wiki is better looked-after than most wikis, but the point is that in general we expect sources to be immutable. Still, I'll look into alternative layouts which may help to alleviate this problem. The article in question is and always has been a bit of a mess, and that's never really been adequately resolved, so hopefully we can resolve both of these in future. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 00:21, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

You can always link to some fixed page revision on fd.org but then someone else will come and complain because of outdated information ;) -- NotInventedHere (talk) 10:05, 13 February 2009 (UTC)