User:Benbest

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Ben Best
This user is proud
to be a Wikipedian.
This user edits on Wikipedia under gender real name.
This user has been on Wikipedia for
3 years, 5 months and 4 days.
3,500+ This user has made over 3,500 contributions to Wikipedia articles.
1RR This user prefers discussing changes on the talkpage rather than engaging in an edit war.

36		 This user has set foot in 36 countries of the world.
This user is a bibliophile.
This user enjoys reading non-fiction.
This user enjoys writing.
This user does not smoke.
C2H5
OH-0		 This user is a non-drinker.
This user is drug-free.
raw This user is a raw foodist.
This user is a certified aircraft pilot.
APL This user likes APL.
Java This user can program in Java.
LV This user is a LabVIEW wireworker.
mysql This user writes programs that access MySQL.
php This user can program in PHP.
This user knows by heart the first 40 digits in the decimal representation of pi.
Image:Green Pi.PNG Pi ≈ 3.1415926535897 932384626433832 7950288419716939 93751058209749445 9230781640628620 8998628034825342 11706798214808 6513282306647 09384460955 0582231725359 408128481117 450284102701938 52110555964 46229489 5493038196 44288109 7566593344612847564 823378678316527120190 91456485669 234603 8610454 3266482133936072 602491412737245870066063155881748 8152092096282925409171536 436789259036001 13305305488204 6652138414 6951941511609
\sum This user is greater than the sum of his or her userboxes.
This user's entire personality can be summed up in a few userboxes.
who/what?? This user is unique just like everyone else.

Contents

[edit] About Me

My interests are biogerontology, cryonics, history, economics, and health (among many others). I am the President of the Cryonics Institute.

I use my real name Ben Best for User:Benbest. I have created User:Ben Best as a doppelganger account to prevent someone else from taking it. If I had known better I would have started with User:Ben Best from the beginning. These names are NOT being used for sockpuppetry or any other nefarious purpose. I have a biography at Ben Best, which due to my prominence in the cryonics community I feel I was justified in starting. I have not edited the Ben Best entry since June 2006, so as a result of many edits by others it is not in the form I would like it to be. I think there is value in my being able to provide information about myself that others do not have access to, but because other Wikipedians have strong feelings about Wikipedians editing biographies about themselves I have adopted a "hands off" policy toward the editing Ben Best entry myself.

[edit] Some of the articles I have started

[edit] Articles I rewrote almost from scratch

Of course no one has ownership of articles, and these kinds of articles in particular seem to be vulnerable to input from people whose enthusiasm exceeds their scientific knowledge. Therefore, the current incarnations of these articles are not what I have written, despite the fact that I laid the foundations.

[edit] Articles to which I have made very substantial contributions

[edit] Comment about my Wikipedia experience

I admit that when I first got involved in Wikipedia that there was much self-promotion associated with my contributions. This has diminished considerably -- or perhaps I have done as much self-promotion as I want to do -- and I am increasingly interested in building this wonderful on-line encyclopedia. I believe that Wikipedia will become the greatest encyclopedia ever created and will leave all others in the dust. It is a terrific resource and I love the way everyone can become involved, warts (vandals) and all. I still have selfish motives, but it is usually the selfish satisfaction I get from having done a good job and feeling that I have made a worthwhile contribution to Wikipedia. I get satisfaction from improvements large and small: major re-writes, reverting acts of vandalism and spelling corrections. I have learned to lengthen my fuse when changes are made which anger me, and I think I am becoming better at negotiating with goodwill and avoiding "revert wars". Nonetheless, I still have not figured-out how one becomes a Wikipedian involved in The Wikipedia Community [1].

I have a few contributions in Wiktionary, but I feel that this resource has a long way to go. I think it is harder for people to get motivated to create entries for Wiktionary, which is sad. But who has a special interest in words like "increase" and "embark"? I have created a number of new word entries in Wiktionary, but it is a massive undertaking to make that resource comparable to what we have with Wikipedia.

[edit] External links