Talk:Professional amateurs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maybe someone could add a link or reference to journalistic blogging somewhere in here. After all, these amateur bloggers are now doing reporting of (arguably) equal quality to professional journalists.

Is it really correct to describe Linux as developed by Pro-Ams? Certainly, many of the people writing Linux kernel code are not being paid to write that code, but I'd venture a guess that at least the majority are paid to do the same activity (programming) professionally. Bryce 04:16, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Basketball players who are "pros" also play in the Olympics and are called "pro-amateurs". I dont think you have to be a non-professional, the idea being your doing it for some reason other than money. Stbalbach 15:59, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

"Open source software such as Linux was developed by Pro-Ams and has become the only realistic competition to Microsoft." -The Mac may not be a big competitor, but that doesn't make it an unrealistic competitor, does it?

[edit] Quotes

It is legal and ethically acceptable to excerpt from a book, up to about a full page of the original text (this is a single paragraph), so long as it is attributed as an excerpt. It does not violate copyright laws. It is also legal to paraphrase from the original work, so long as it is not a clear cut and paste of large sections of text, using key phrases is fine.

A copyright violation would be if entire paragraphs and sections of the original were cut and paste into Wikpedia with no attribution to the original author. Stbalbach 16:11, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Actually, there's no set standard for how much you can quote and still be covered by Fair Use. Furthermore, simply for practical and encyclopedic reasons, often you don't want to quote that much anyway.

And your last sentence implies that crediting an author automatically means there is no copyright infringement, which is not the case. Attributions to the author is a defense against plagiarism, not against copyright infringement. 04:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

In any case, paraphrasing so closely in the first paragraph of this article from the quote presented later on isn't very good style. This should be reworded, ideally based on an understanding drawn from multiple extant sources. Scott 10:11, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Importance

Is this really a concept that has any purchase outside of the one webpage about it? Also, the middle kind of reads like desperate propaganda for wikipedia: "Look! We're ProAms! This is legitimate!" Paultopia 16:24, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] plagiarized, lacking sources

The article is plagiarized almost verbatim from the one source that it quotes. Cleanup is required.

Aside from plaguirism, it is not an NPOV article, which makes sense since the source it was taken from is not NPOV. This article is trying to boost or push the idea of the 'professional amateur' as an important and good thing, which is inappropriate. I am considering just deleting large swaths of it? JonathanNil (talk) 02:23, 17 January 2008 (UTC)