User:Arch dude

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HI!

I am a 58-year-old American (WASP, male.). I have been a systems architect in the field of data communications software since 1970. I am interested in computers, Open Source, Linux, science, science fiction, the singularity, nanotechnology, history, and just about everything, in approximately that order.

I am a radical Singularitarian. "Radical" means that I think the singularity is inevitable and that it will occur "soon." I feel that human civilization is building a technological infrastructure that makes it increasingly easy to create a superintelligence, either explicitly or by accident. Wikipedia is possibly an important part of the infrastructure.

I have linked about 500 Project Gutenberg Authors: (Wikipedia:Project Gutenberg author list.)

I am also a disambiguator:

I have disambiguated the following: hawthorn, chirality, resistance, rugby, violet, battery,Maya, sedge, analog

[edit] Itanium

I rewrote the Itanium article and brought it to GA status, pretty much by myself. I nominated it for FA status: we'll see what happens. I started this effort because the existing set of articles were very weak and had a large pro-Itanium bias, and I had a very negative attitude toward the effect of the Itanium saga on the computer industry. As part of writing an NPOV article, I found that Itanium has some really worthwhile features to somewhat counterbalance the "political" problems. I also recruited a member of the Gelato team to write the Gelato Federation article. This has been a fun experience.

My RFA failed. Based on this experience, I concluded that the RFA system is fundamentally flawed, and I am no longer willing to invest any time in this system. I will spend my time trying to improve articles.

[edit] Firefox add-on for worldcat links

I decided that Worldcat Links are extremely valuable, so I created some templates and spent some time implementing a Firefox add-in. See User:Arch_dude/worldcat. I asked around in several Wikipedia forums and received not negative feedback, so I have been gradually adding worldcat links. Nobody has yet objected. Together with one other user, I've several hundred links. My goal is to add a link to every Wikipedia article that is about an author or subject with a Worldcat ID: that would be a substantial percentage of our articles.