User:Improv

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Mary had a twisted goat
Its fleece as black as night
And everyone that Mary met
It ate them out of spite


Contents

What I do

  • I am an administrator on Wikipedia. I handle CSD articles, delete and protect pages, deal with vandalism, and am active on discussions of policy.
  • I am an OTRS support volunteer. I clear spam out of the OTRS queues and answer questions, sometimes doing things on Wikipedia as appropriate.
  • I am active on the Meta Wikimedia project, where I maintain a summary service for the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list. Others help too, by translating into other languages.
  • I am an editor on Wikipedia. I do a lot of housekeeping and cleanup work, fixing POV issues, typos, rewording things to fix grammar, and occasionally providing substantive content.
  • I am an inactive Mediator, only taking cases by special request. My mediation style
  • I am a techie. I am working on a project to embed Wikipedia dumps onto portable media devices. If you're interested in this, and aim to focus strictly on notable (!= verifiable) topics (some other projects don't do this) drop me a note.

Wikipedia needs your help

We now have over a million articles, but many of them are of very poor quality. You can help. Please follow this link and read very carefully over the article you reach. Chances are there will be a problem with it, from typos/bad grammar to POV problems. Occasionally you might find an article that shouldn't even exist. Please help fix typos/bad grammar, and if you have time handle the bigger stuff. If you don't have time, at least mark it with {{cleanup}}. If you ever find yourself with extra time, do the opposite and help cleanup articles others have tagged.

One particular set of articles worth working on are those in the Category:Wikipedia_articles_incorporating_text_from_the_1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica. These articles all came from an old encyclopedia that was published before modern encyclopedic standards. Once it fell into Public Domain, someone imported the articles into Wikipedia. Generally the articles fall into the following categories, and you can help handle them:

  • Articles that should not exist on Wikipedia
  • Articles that need heavy copyediting, from wikifying to providing context
  • Articles that are no longer factually incorrect or never were, according to modern scholarship. These range from having references to "present day" from those times to more serious and tricky issues
  • Typos
  • Articles that need categories, possibly photos, and better integration into Wikipedia proper
  • Articles that have already been handled by someone and are fine

There are also plenty of Wikipedia:Notice_boards that are always looking for help on their topics. Whether you're a great scholar, competent in some fields, or have good grammar, Wikipedia can use you. There are a few other types of responsibilities that you may eventually take on that are best not to try to tackle right away - wait a few months or a year and at least some of these will become apparent to you, and if your interests and the project's interests coincide, they may happen.

Thoughts on Wikipedia policy/guidelines

  • I once considered myself a deletionist. I believe we should remove articles that are not encyclopedic. If the topic is not notable, no matter how well-written the article, it has no place on Wikipedia. However, my notion of what it means to be encyclopedic is broader than it once was, and I am also no longer particularly interested in being very involved in VfD.
  • See also /Deletion for more detail of my former position
  • I support efforts to limit or eliminate fair use images on EN-Wikipedia, because I don't feel they're entirely consistent with our goals on the project.

Policy Ideas and Essays

Timeline

Wikipedia Links and Friends

Useful links for me

Friends

Other Wikipedians I trust

There are some Wikipedians who I think have particularly good judgement and vision for our project, and whose judgement and arguments I give special weight to. I don't always agree with them, but I think they have shown themselves to be worth paying serious attention to (in a good way) in their stances.

Contact Info

On AIM, I'm dachte000
On ICQ, 97563550
On YIM, pgunn01
My email address is pgunn@dachte.org
My webpage is http://www.dachte.org
My BLOG is here

MediaWiki

I manage/run/install MediaWiki software (the software that implements WikiPedia) to make communication go more easily in my current workplace (Neuropsych Researcher/Unix Sysadmin in academia).

Things to contribute

I can read Cyrillic and Kana, speak German well enough to be understood, can do some Spanish, and can speak little bits of Russian and Japanese. I'm hoping to learn French to fluency within the next few years. I once tried to learn Hebrew. I have an interest in history, in particular socialist revolutions and socialist philosophers and have a broad interest in philosophy. I'm involved in the open-source movement (as a programmer and occasional volunteer for other tasks) in my spare time, and did my undergrad in computer science. I have a general interest in science, and try to keep up with a number of fields. I also have a digital camera, which with I've taken photos for Wikipedia.

In the interests of intellectual integrity, I will disclose my biases here so you can judge for yourself if I've failed to be fair somewhere.

I do a lot of nearly invisible work trying to get people to cooperate and understand each other, over IRC and email. Chances are fair that if there's a large enough dispute, I've talked to at least a few of the participants to try to get them to understand each other, be civil, and hopefully resolve the issues. Compromise isn't always the solution, but a willingness to budge/be convinced by good arguments is essential to be a good Wikicitizen.

Misc

Subpages

Permanent Temporary Scratchpad

Describe a Room Game is a surrealist game in which each participant sequentially adds to a description of a room until there is a sense that the description is "completed."

Do You Know Me?

In case you're wondering if I'm that Pat Gunn, I was born in Dallas, Texas, and lived there and in Connecticut until I was age 6, at which point my family moved to Brecksville, Ohio. I went to Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and worked about a year and a half there after graduation, at which point I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I now work at Carnegie Mellon University.


Things I find interesting

Pictures I've taken

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