Wikipedia talk:Press releases/May 2004

message: Maybe it's just me, but my head hurts when I to try to go from NPOV mode to shameless self promotion, PR mode.  Fuzheado 00:29, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shameless self promotion 

message: * "You can edit this page"
* "Neutral point of view works"
* "One big cyber ant colony"
* "Harnessing the power of perverts" (er, inside joke re: Bomis and Wikipedia)
* "Edit this page right now"
* "The best encyclopedia bar none"
* "Half million pages and counting"
* "Donate; We need more servers"
* "An encyclopedia in fifty languages"
* "Wikipedia kicks Britannica's scrawny ass"
* "sp fmt rm tyop lk"
* "Open source is the way"
* "Open source encyclopedia; editors everywhere"
* "Wikipedia - everything you ever needia"
* "Wikipedia - nothing rhymes with it"
* "We don't do short entries"
* "You, too, can help write"
* "Information wants to be Free!"
* "A great encyclopedia and community"
* "Freedom of Information Art Squared" Neutrality 02:08, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Acceptance speech suggestions 

message: :"...competing against sites such as Friendster and Livejournal.com..."
This use of the "such as", introducing samples of a class, relates Friendster and Livejournal as examples of "sites", so putting Dictionary.com in here would be as valid as including the other actually nominated community sites, whereas "like" relates Friendster and Livejournal as one of some "sites" that are similar to Wikipedia. In other words, here are the full meanings of the two cases, as they would stand. The first is "...competing against sites such as Friendster and Livejournal.com...", the last is ""...competing against sites like Friendster and Livejournal.com...":
: Wikipedia announced today that it had won a Webby Award for Best Community. It competed against websites, examples of which are Dictionary.com and Yahoo!.
: Wikipedia announced today that it had won a Webby Award for Best Community. It competed against other community-oriented sites like Friendster and Livejournal.
A way to use "such as" so that the meaning is correctly that of the latter example would be as follows:
: Wikipedia announced today that it had won a Webby Award for Best Community, competing against other community-oriented sites, such as Friendster and Livejournal.
However, this is redundant because, if Wikipedia is competing in the Best Community category then the other sites are of course community-oriented, so using "such as" would not be appropriate. As for like, the range of similitude includes sameness proper. It does not so strictly mean that, because Wikipedia competed against sites "like" Friendster and Livejournal, it could not have competed against those very sites. Using "like" in this way may not be the best construction, but it is better than using "such as" in this way. So, if there's a better construction, go for it.
As for comprising, in this sense it means more "include", "comprehend", or "contain", which are all faces of the same coin. The key is, though, that it overwhelmingly means the action of containing, rather than the fact of there being containment. So, "...a diverse organization comprising nearly five hundred leading experts..." would be one which is currently embracing or containing within it five hundred experts. A discourse comprises some subject of study; walls comprise parts of a fort; a Wikipedian comprises facts in an article. But, in the sense "to be composed of" or "to consist of", the passive sense is proper. For instance, here are two examples from the OED: "Many of these words are comprised of monemes.", "The voluntary boards of management, comprised..of very zealous and able laymen." Upon further consideration, however, I think that it would be better to remove the comprising entirely, and replace it with, simply: "...a diverse organization of nearly five hundred leading experts...".
: - Centrx 23:06, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyedits