User:Kierano

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Info This user comes from South Africa. Wikipedia:Babel en-5 This user is able to contribute with a professional level of English. af-2 Hierdie gebruiker het 'n gemiddelde begrip van Afrikaans. Search user languages This user is male. This user lives in Cape Town. UK This user uses British English. This user contributes using Mozilla Firefox. This user contributes using Linux. This user studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. gk This user is a geek. This user opposes all forms of racism and admires Nelson Mandela.

[edit] Update

I am currently a little snowed under with thesis work, so may be slow in replying to messages on my talk page (and am currently keeping my contributions down). I will definitely get back to you if you leave a message, though.

[edit] Introduction

I am a Computer Science Masters student, but am interested in a wide range of topics including history, computer games, politics, geography, zoology, and quite a few others. I began work on the Wikipedia on the page for Pietermaritzburg, my home town. Since then, I have contributed to a wide variety of topics, many of them dealing with South Africa. I have done some categorisation work on South Africa, and on Body piercing.

Most recently, my emphasis has been on articles pertaining to South African history, geography, and culture. One of my goals in doing this is to provide a source of factual and non-discriminatory information to users of Wikipedia, especially school kids in South Africa, who have been economically disadvantaged by Apartheid, and to whom Wikipedia will, hopefully, soon be distributed free of charge.

[edit] Projects

[edit] Ethnic Groups in South Africa

South Africa, probably more so than most other countries, is quite aware of its own ethnic and cultural diversity, and strong efforts are made to preserve people's cultural heritage. I have been working on bringing together the pages describing the ethnic groups in South Africa, with categories, navboxes, and infoboxes. I've also done a lot of the work on the Zulu page, especially the history section. (I got an award for this.) I guess this page is one of my long-term pet projects. The Zulu page is one of 2011 articles to be included in the 2006 Wikipedia cd, which makes me very proud and happy.

This work forms part of the Ethnic groups wikiproject.

For all your work in articles pertaining to South Africa and Zulu culture, I award you The Barnstar of National Merit. Wizzy…☎ 14:11, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

The current situation:

[edit] Municipalities of South Africa

I have signed up with the South African municipalities wikiproject, an effort to create articles on all the municipalities in South Africa. When I get around to it, I'll be writing some Python scripts to help with this.