User:Mxn

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Minh Nguyễn is a contributor to Wikipedia. You can view his userpage there.

Hi, I’m Minh Nguyễn (Minh Nguyen, for those not using a Unicode-capable browser) of Stanford, California, United States, North America, Earth, Solar System, Local Fluff, Local Bubble, Orion Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Milky Way Subgroup, Local Group, Canes Venatici cloud, Virgo Supercluster, Local Filament, Universe. You get the idea. I maintain a personal weblog. You can find out more about me at my blog.

I volunteer as a bureaucrat at the Vietnamese Wikipedia and Vietnamese Wiktionary, and as an administrator at the Vietnamese Wikibooks, Multilingual Wikisource, and Wikimedia Meta-Wiki.

Oh, and I'm not that Minh Nguyen. ;^)

[edit] Tasks

• Write up Girls' Town of America [3]
• Convert photo of Loveland flag to SVG.
• Refactor my Wiktionary and Wikibooks user pages.
• Reread each Vietnamese province article to check for mistakes in their infoboxes regarding the names of provincial leaders.
• Create a separate article for WPTO, so that WPTD doesn't turn into some kind of Siamese twin article...
• Write up Loveland, Ohio’s history [4]
• Mention Loveland's Valentine Lady remailing program [5][6]
• Take some photos to put in Loveland, Ohio.

[edit] About me

My parents immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, due to the Vietnam War.

I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana (near the Vietnamese-American community of Versailles). My family and I now live in Loveland, Ohio. I graduated from St. Xavier High School, which belongs to the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus, and I now attend Stanford University in California, where I'm majoring in computer science. [7]

[edit] Software

I browse and edit Wikipedia using Mozilla Firefox, and I invite you to do the same, since its simple tabbed browsing really makes it easy. To type out text in Vietnamese, I use a home-brewed text editor / IME that I created in XUL.

[edit] Language

I can speak English fluently, and I am learning Vietnamese from my parents, and from my participation at the Vietnamese Wikipedia. In addition, I completed four years of courses in Spanish, culminating in an AP test in May. I intend to continue studying Spanish in college.

Since the eighth grade, I’ve taken an interest in phonetics, particularly in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I use my proficient knowledge in that alphabet at Wiktionary.

[edit] Principles as a contributor

[edit] Inclusion

I certainly don't consider myself a deletionist; after all, I wrote a substantial portion of an article about my high school, St. Xavier High School, which isn't really notable outside of the Greater Cincinnati area. However, I do strongly feel any article here must either demonstrate its topic's notability or adhere to a somewhat high standard of writing and presentation. Otherwise, its contributors should (where possible) be invited to help raise it to a higher standard, and in the absence of such improvement, it should be deleted. We need to be moderately selective, so that the general public doesn't view us as an ordinary forum without the avatars.

My high school's article illustrates my point: at first it was very lackluster, and the few paragraphs it contained dealt mainly with sports – but surely there's something to say about its academics! I was on the verge of nominating it for deletion, but instead posted a call for action at my blog, which was read by many of my classmates at St. X. [8] The article was soon expanded on, and with the help of a fairly meaty infobox, it actually looks somewhat respectable.

[edit] Responsibility

That same article also illustrates the need for regular contributors to maintain the work that they've contributed. Often, a vandal (probably from St. X) will stop by and add tons of random people to the list of famous alumni. As a primary contributor to that article, I feel a responsibility to maintain a high standard for it.

Of course, few longtime contributors can keep track of all the articles they've helped out with – even with the help of a well-pruned watchlist – but I believe in picking the articles you've contributed to the most – the ones that you're most proud of, the ones that you'd link to from your userpage – and checking back on them regularly, tweaking them where necessary. It would be pointless to institute this practice as a rule or even a guideline; rather, it's a simple suggestion for those who care enough about Wikipedia to keep it going strong. It's a rather concrete application of the responsibility that comes with free speech, to stretch the description a bit.

[edit] Practicality

I've recently become quite annoyed by the intrusion of two fads at Wikipedia: infoboxes, and the userboxes that they inspired. Admittedly, I'm quick to add infoboxes to articles myself: there's one on this very page, with Babel userboxes to boot. But we need to draw a line between providing useful information at the appropriate times and providing information "just because we can". (Nevertheless, I do have a favorite userbox.)

{{Infobox Biography}} is a template that has been repeatedly nominated for deletion, and for good reason. Although the template's supporters will usually argue that it's not that intrusive and actually provides much-needed information, I would counter thusly:

Strong delete. A student, for instance, would not be inconvenienced by having to look at the first sentence to find out the person's dates of birth and death (the locations are optional anyways), and would certainly not be inconvenienced by having to look in the infobox's current location to see a photo or portrait of the person. On the other hand, having an infobox for a country is much more handy, because it would take much longer to find out the country's currency, for example, in the absence of an infobox – the reader would likely have to find the Economy section and look for some mention of the currency there. If the intention is to have an infobox for every article at Wikipedia, then may I suggest Wikidata? Before deleting this template, the information given for its parameters should be moved to a more appropriate place in each article. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:59, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Others have argued more eloquently to the same effect, but the point remains: practically speaking, it's unnecessary. I would have supported the template if it were invisible: it could be of much use to any software parsing articles for structured information. But this same information is already present in the article in locations that users have already become accustomed to – dead tree encyclopedias and other reference works will often start their biographical entries with the person's name, dates of birth and death, and notability. They'll also have a picture to the right. Why do we need a template to enforce a convention that an article would conform to after wikification anyways?

[edit] Contributions

My first contribution to Wikipedia was a minor, anonymous edit at United States presidential line of succession, which has since been invalidated.

Most of my contributions occur at the Vietnamese Wikipedia, where I’m an administrator and bureaucrat. Most of my contributions here come in the form of typo corrections and interwiki links between the English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. But I’ve also contributed some articles, too:

[edit] Articles

Here are some articles that I’ve had a major hand in writing:

Technology

Adobe Atmosphere – Microsoft Bookshelf N – ISO 15924 – Vietnamese Quoted-Readable N – VNI – Wiktionary

Education

Autonomous University of Nuevo León¹ – Sentence diagram³ – St. Xavier High School – St. Xavier High School, Louisville, Kentucky N

Cincinnati, Ohio

Big Pig Gig N – Cincinnati Public Schools, Hamilton County, Ohio – Cinergy – Jungle Jim's International Market N – Moeller High School – Little Miami River N – Loveland Bike Trail N – Loveland High School – Loveland, Ohio – Ohio² – Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County N – The Spanish Journal N – St. Xavier High School (Hamilton County, Ohio)⁴ – Symmes Township, Hamilton County, Ohio – Woodward High School (Cincinnati, Ohio) – ZoomTown N

Television

Cincinnati: WCPO-TV 9, WBQC-CA 38 N, WCET-TV 48, WSTR-TV 64; Dayton: WPTD-TV 16

Ohio: Ohio News Network

Vietnam and Vietnamese culture

Côn Đảo – La Vang – Marian Days N – PMU 18 scandal N¹ – Vietnamese language⁵

Miscellaneous

Ayacucho – Caernarvon (disambiguation) N – Knockemstiff, Ohio – Windpipe (disambiguation) N

[edit] Images

And here are some images that I have uploaded here or at Wikimedia Commons:

Adobe Atmosphere

Packaging – Wireframe house in Builder – Rendered house in Player – Portal in Player

Cincinnati, Ohio

Aerial photograph of St. Xavier High School – Cinergy logo – Historic Downtown Loveland – Loveland Bike Trail – PLCH logo – St. Xavier High School logo, circa 2004

Television

Cincinnati: WBQC-LP logo, circa 2001, WCET-TV logo, WCPO-TV logo, WSTR-TV logo, WXIX-TV logo; Dayton: WPTD-TV logo

Miscellaneous

Closing Mass of the 28^th Marian Days celebration – Logo of The Stanford Daily – Vietnamese-American businesses, Little Saigon, Orange County (photo by Nguyễn Hữu Dụng; transferred from vi:)

I've uploaded a few other images to the Commons, but they aren't used here.

[edit] Templates

• {{Click}} – inspired by my adaption of the Dutch Wikipedia's Sjabloon:Klik; see Tiêu bản:Hình tượng at the Vietnamese Wikipedia

[edit] Licensing

After much thought and consideration on the topic – about three seconds' worth – I've decided to be generous with my pittance of contributions here, especially to free the Rambot articles:

	Multi-licensed with any Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license draft version 1.0 and version 2.0 and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.

With respect to the permission granted below, I specifically add Anthony DiPierro in addition to the Wikimedia Foundation for any contributions automatically generated and added by the rambot from the public domain census bureau statistics. The above exclusions still apply.

Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation I grant non-exclusive permission for the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to relicense my text contributions under any copyleft license that it chooses, provided it maintains the free and open spirit of the GFDL. This permission acknowledges that future licensing needs of the Wikimedia projects may need adapting in unforeseen fashions to facilitate other uses, formats, and locations. It is given for as long as this banner remains.

I license much of my original work under the Attribution ShareAlike license anyhow.

[edit] Quotes

• Welcome to the Hotel Wikipedia...
• “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Benjamin Franklin
• “C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do succeed, you will blow away your whole leg.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
• My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
  To children ardent for some desperate glory,
  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
  Pro patria mori. – Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
• “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” – Noam Chomsky
• “And does it so much better than that upstart called Britannica...” – “The Web Encyclopedia Song”
• “You should be the change that you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
• “Đời cha ăn mặn, đời con khát nước.” – Vietnamese proverb
  • When the father's generation eats salt, the child's generation thirsts.
• “Ở đây mọi người đều như nhau, quản lí chỉ mỗi nhiệm vụ xoá các bài không phù hợp. Chất lượng Wikipedia phụ thuộc cộng đồng, mà cộng đồng Wikipedia tiếng Việt = bạn + tôi + những người khác. Thay vì than thở hay phê phán nó thì hãy làm nó hoàn thiện lên. Bạn có biết là lúc đầu Wikipedia ‘tệ’ đến thế nào không? Nếu bạn vào lúc đó chắc bỏ chạy không thèm quay đầu lại.” – Nguyễn Thanh Quang, responding to S.P
  • [At Wikipedia] everyone is equal; administrators only get abilities like deleting unsuitable articles. The quality of Wikipedia is in the community, and the Vietnamese Wikipedia community = you + me + everyone else. Instead of complaining or criticizing, help to improve things. Do you know how “pitiful” Wikipedia was in the beginning? If you came here back then you would've run the other way and never looked back.
• “I've fallen and I can't get up!”

[edit] Subpages

[edit] External links

• Minh’s Notes RSS
• Apuntes de Minh RSS
• Planet Xavier – an aggregator of over 200 weblogs by St. Xavier students and teachers