Forum:Stuff from the Planet Half-Life wiki, written by me
This is your evil twin, former staff writer for Planet Half-Life. (I say former - I never technically quit, I just haven't written anything in ages!)
I was the guy that set up the Planet Half-Life wiki and wrote some of its first entries - stuff on Dark Energy, Xen Crystals, the tau cannon, gluon gun, displacer, the Black Mesa Incident, and a bunch of other things. The Planet Half-Life wiki has been pretty dead for a while, so I was surprised and delighted to discover this Combine Overwiki which appears to be exactly what I was intending ot create when I came up with the Planet Half-Life wiki.
Out of curiosity I tried searching for a few things I had written entries on, to see what Combine Overwiki had to say about them. I was astonished to find that a number of articles have had their text and images simply copy-pasted from the Planet Half-Life wiki! Take a look at the Dark Energy entry , or the Displacer entry, they are the same as what I wrote on the Planet Half-Life wiki. http://phlad.planethalflife.gamespy.com/wiki/index.php/Dark_energy http://phlad.planethalflife.gamespy.com/wiki/index.php/Displacer
I don't actually mind - to be honest, I find it flattering. It's not like the Planet Half-Life wiki articles had "written by your evil twin" in big letters on it, it isn't a question of wanting author recognition. And since the PHL Wiki was also contributed to by the public, not just PHL Staff, I doubt stuff on the PHL wiki can be copyrighted. But I think perhaps there should be something indicating that some articles here came from the Planet Half-Life wiki. The front page mentions that some stuff comes wikipedia, but no mention is made of the PHL wiki.
Your evil twin 16:33, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
- Damn, you're spot on about Dark energy and Displacer Cannon, they're just blatant copy and paste articles... *sigh* Sorry about that. If you give me a list of articles that are copy/paste duplications, I'll tag them with a special "hey, the original author here was a lazy ass who swiped it from the Planet Half-Life wiki" template (though I might rephrase it just a bit). EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:49, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
- An alternative could be if the name of the "lazy ass author" was replaced with my name. Then the tag could instead say "This article first appeared on PHLWiki and has been reproduced by the original author." Although I said earlier that I wasn't seeking author recognition, it occurs to me that having newly discovered Combine Overwiki I am probably going to be quite active here, and it would be good if all the articles I had written were actually attributed to my username, rather than half to myself and half to the user "Davereject". I now see that he has gone and copied pretty much EVERY article I wrote on PHLWiki except for my Black Mesa Incident page, since someone here beat him to it and wrote a brand new one.
- If it isn't possible to actually change the name of an author of a page, I guess I could simply delete the pages and re-post them again myself! Since they are just copy pastings of my original text.
- List of articles that I wrote and that Davereject has copy pasted:
- Dark energy
- Displacer Cannon
- Energy Ball
- Xen crystal
- Exotic matter
- Gluon gun
- Tau Cannon - though this one has been edited quite a bit by other users, so it isn't as obvious.
- List of articles that I wrote and that Davereject has copy pasted:
- Funnily enough the Exotic matter article has been suggested for deletion on its talk page. The reason I created a brief exotic matter entry was that my articles on dark energy, energy balls and xen crystals all mentioned the concept of exotic matter, and I didn't want to have to bother with a scientific explanation of the concept of exotic matter with negative mass in every article. I got quite irritated by people confusing the concept of "anti-mass" with antimatter... if the test sample in Half-Life 1 contained antimatter then the disaster would have blown up the entire planet!
- Incidentally, I'm also the guy that originally created the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit page on Wikipedia, and changed the old Half-Life page's references to US Marines to the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit. The article here on Combine Overwiki bears little resemblance to that wikipedia article though, just a few small phrases.
- I was the one that originally popularized the HECU term. On a couple of Half-Life forums there were arguments about whether the human grunts were US Marines or Army. Opfor's bootcamp is in a marine base and one of the random solider phrases is "Let's go marines!", but the Apache helicopters say ARMY on them and the trucks and Ospreys have the Army star on them. Also in real life the US Marines Corps do not have medics and they don't wear berets, those are purely Army. Some people also objected to the idea of US Army soldiers or US Marines being willing to kill unarmed civillians, and preferred the idea of them being a nameless "government death squad". I pointed out that the text at the start of the game says that Shephard's training was "United States Marine Corps, Special Forces", but his current assignment is listed as "Hazardous Environment Combat Unit", and I suggested that this HECU was probably a totally new military force set up to deal with strange threats such as aliens, which got its soldiers and equipment from a variety of existing military forces. And ever since then, people have been using the acronym HECU, rather than calling them "the grunts" or "marines". I'm rather proud of that fact. :) Your evil twin 20:09, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
