User:David Gerard

Wikipedia and Wikimedia UK press enquiries: Email me directly (wp@davidgerard.co.uk, which is a forwarder to dgerard@gmail.com). My phone (press enquiries only please!) is +44 (0) 7733 223 584, though it usually goes to message and reception is awful weekday daytime. I really will notice email quicker. You may care to ask the Foundation office as well (+1-415-839-6885), in case I'm not available and someone else on their list is. See also the Foundation press room. Read the Press Kit.

Contacting me otherwise: Put it on the article talk page in the first instance, my talk page in the second. If you email me stuff that would normally go on a talk page, I'll likely ignore it. (I've also erroneously deleted such mail as spam before.) I'm DavidGerard on irc.freenode.net, online occasionally; I'm usually AFK but I do check my messages. You probably shouldn't phone with stuff that can be emailed — if it's phone-call urgent but requires a computer to act upon, email is the way.

If you're inadvertently affected by a block I've made, do of course email. (Direct address: wp@davidgerard.co.uk.) Collateral damage is bad.

In Soviet Vikipedia, job finds YOU! These are as well as writing and editing articles. If you are accused of being in the Cabal, count how many Wikipedia jobs you have. If it's ten or more, you are.

• Administrator (mostly vandal and troll fighting; see WP:ANI)
• Ex-arbitrator (retired, thank goodness; still on list to advise)
• arbcom-l list admin (almost no work)
• oversight-l list admin (almost no work)
• wikien-l list admin (this is actually work)
• checkuser-l list admin (almost no work)
• #wikipedia channel op (fun fun fun)
• #wikimedia-au channel op (pretty quiet as yet)
• #wikipedia-en-admins level 40 op (be polite! be professional! behave!)
• CheckUser on en:
• Oversight deletion (requests only to oversight-l, and only serious cases of privacy violation please)
• Communications committee (Press)
• UK-based press contact for the Wikimedia Foundation (Danny: "You're on Irish radio in 40 minutes"; Sandra: "You're on NPR in 40 minutes")
• Director for Wikimedia UK (spork!!)
• Media officer for Wikimedia UK
• Press contact for Wikimedia UK
• An OTRS login, just landed on me by Mindspillage. Uh?
• WikiProject Scientology participant (wrote lots of the project page. And no, I'm not a Scientologist or ex-Scientologist)
• Calming ruffled feathers as needed
• Exacerbating ruffled feathers as needed
• At least three five Wikipedia cabals, probably more if I thought about it

"On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs" — me. When a new task comes up, people look for someone they already already know is competent and clueful. Whine about something long enough and you'll probably get the precise job you didn't want fixing it. This is probably a feature, not a bug. I think. "It may not be what your job or wife need, but you should have thought of that before you demonstrated sanity" — Snowspinner

Practical process on Wikipedia: WP:PRO. Comments, opinions, additions and rewrites most welcomed.

Sockpuppetry and CheckUser: I have the 'l33t power of CheckUser, a sysadmin-level facility to match IPs to usernames on the English Wikipedia, so that the Arbitration Committee doesn't have to bug the devs. Ask on WP:RFCU.

I can only check en:. For a full list of checkers, see m:Stewards. If your Wikipedia has a problem, you need to find someone who knows lots about interpreting IPs and net abuse who your wiki trusts to check this stuff out, then ask the stewards to give you permission on this page. If you have Checkuser, you should join the mailing list. I'm very happy to help make sense of IP evidence if you can't work out what's up with something or whether an excuse seems plausible.

I also have a sock puppet of my very own: User:Querulous, my favourite example user.

Text recovery: Uncontroversial deleted text is available for the asking. See Wikipedia:Deletion review/Content review.

Expertise and deletion: If you can verify for me that you are a subject expert in a subject considered notable enough to include on Wikipedia, I will, on your say-so, close any deletion debate as "keep" within your field of expertise, and will undelete any articles within your field that you say are notable. I'll even help copyedit them to make it clearer why they should stay.

Oversight deletion: The power to delete article revisions so toxic that not even admins should be able to see them (sensitive personal information, gross libel, etc). See Wikipedia:Oversight.

A note on deletions: Almost all of what appears on AFD does in fact deserve as quick, painful and messy a death as can be achieved. If you think you're an inclusionist, do Special:Newpages patrol some time. Oh My Goodness. Also, if I'm on IRC these days, it's probably for a reason other than Deletion 101 discussions. Talk page, please. I also recommend WP:PROD, one of the best ideas I've seen for a Wikipedia deletion mechanism and now up and running very nicely.

Send us your photos.

The more free content, the better for everyone.

I am the first Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search hit on my own name, recently outranking the Dutch painter. I work as a sysadmin, mostly Solaris and Linux. I'm from Australia and live in Walthamstow, London with my wife and girlfriend and daughter and cat. My wife foolishly directed me here and I became an instant addict. Like Barney Gumble having that first beer.

My life has been spent filling my head with unbelievable quantities of trivia and rubbish. Here's a chance to get some of it out. As a recovering editor, I can't see a grammatical or spelling error without my red-pencil hand twitching. Wikipedia provides tremendous opportunity in this field.

I must write more articles: And not hang around project pages so much. And so must you. Ideas from SuggestBot (requests). My scratchpad (for the terminally bored or work-avoidant). The Problem With Music.

Wikipedia 1.0: I can't tell you how envious I am of de:. Go to WP:1.0 and also join WP:100K.

WikiProject Scientology: started by me, Xenu help me. (I'm apparently what passes for an expert.) NPOV is pretty much a new approach to Web-based writing about Scientology.

The "Fix Crappy Prose" Challenge: I'd like everyone reading this who thinks they're a pretty good writer to middle-click "Random article" twenty times and rewrite any crappy prose without sacrificing facts. Do this at least once a week. Detail and accuracy beat eloquence when the choice arises, but that does not justify crappy prose.

If you're feeling particularly strong and have a fresh pack of Gudangs and a bottle of whisky to hand, there's a Metric Shitload of stuff on Category:Articles that need to be wikified that can only be fixed by hard editorial slog.

My personal style guide: We're writing articles for someone who knows nothing about a topic but needs to get up to speed really quickly. You have ten seconds.

• Who, what, where, when, why?
• Summary Lead section, then inverted pyramid.
• Omit needless words.
• The Economist Style Guide: clarity with precision. ("I love The Economist. It's like a really rational guy on crack." — Erithromycin)
• HOWTO: write bad documentation that looks good. "Why" is almost more important than "what."
• Brevity. "It's about viral payload density." — John Hawkes-Reed

I sometimes picture my reader as a very bright ten- to twelve-year-old. Someone with a good reading age, but who knows nothing yet. Did you used to devour encyclopaedias as a kid?

Feature brag: I've scored in two FA classifications (Computing and Religion and belief) ... I need one more. Though WP:100K is more likely to be my focus.

• GNU/Linux naming controversy — featured July 1, 2004 — front page July 2, 2004
• Xenu — featured December 21, 2004 — front page February 19, 2005
• X Window System — featured February 4, 2005 — front page September 3, 2005
• Space opera in Scientology doctrine — featured July 16, 2005 — front page September 10, 2005

Hey kid, your first puff of Wikicrack's free:

• Arkady Rose
• Brother William
• Malkin
• Persephone Hazard
• Rgclegg
• WikiRaven

Wikipedia meetups: It's amazing what a difference it makes to your view of Wikipedia to meet your fellow editors and have a drink with them. I attend the London ones where possible.

Reuse my stuff: All my article text is multilicensed under any cc-by-sa license. This only applies to my work in the main article space, not talk pages, Wikipedia: space pages or whatever. It does apply to images created by me and uploaded by me to Wikimedia.