User:Timwi

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Name   Timwi
Birthday   21 Oct 1980
Wikipedian since 8 Jun 2003
Contributions
(article namespace)		 29,000
Current occupation Web developer
at CSR plc
Silly favourites
Silly user picture Silly user picture

Contents
This user doesn't use any userboxes (other than this one) to describe his skills, interests, hobbies and other attributes because he would have to stack millions of them in order to satisfy his irrational perfectionism and desire for completeness.

[edit] General

Hi. I am Timwi.

[edit] POV

I don't tend to edit articles in which political POVs are relevant, so my own political bias does not tend to influence my Wikipedia editing behaviour. Regardless, I am quite libertarian, and I think fulfilment of human rights, equality of freedom and elimination of poverty and war are the supreme most important issues of the present world. (I know I'll have forgotten one or two, but as usual you don't find out until you've pressed Save.)

I also tend to stay out of discussions relating to how Wikipedia should be run or how various issues should be dealt with, even though I have relatively strong views on this. I don't think I can change much, as there are too many dissidents. Too many people think that it's somehow dangerous for a not-so-active contributor to be admin, thereby allowing for adminship to be an authority hierarchy. Too many people think that it's somehow harmful to have information that is useful to few but more than zero people, giving rise to obvious gaps in the coverage. I'm helpless against those crowds.

[edit] Copyright

I used to have a paragraph here explaining why I don't think copyright is a good idea, but I kept getting messages from people trying to explain to me what I already know, so I've removed it.

All my contributions are public domain. (I realise that German law doesn't actually allow me to rescind my copyright, but if you can trust that I'm a reasonable and honest person, then you can trust I won't sue you.)

[edit] Interests

In real life, my main interests are computing, programming, music (piano and guitar), languages and linguistics. On Wikipedia, however, the spectrum of articles that I have ever edited is wide; this is largely due to the fact that I tend to read stuff I don't already know, so most of my contributions are spelling/grammar corrections in articles I read to educate myself. The few major contributions of mine are listed in the following section.

[edit] Pages I've worked on (a little)

Mostly, I make only slight corrections (spelling, grammar) and insert a few extra points of information here and there, or engage in purely organisational or maintenance tasks. The only pages to which I have majorly contributed so far are (in chronological order of my contribution):

[edit] Files I have uploaded

[edit] Other stuff I've done

  • On February 14, 2004, I started the Navigational Elements Craze (using what was the MediaWiki namespace then and is the Template namespace now) [1] before the Categories system came into being. Now I'm advocating the idea of replacing the navigational elements with categories, but apparently some people want to keep my original idea...
  • On March 15, 2004, I fixed about three to four thousand double-redirects. I wish people were more conscious of the fact that moving a page creates double-redirects that they should go and fix. Even better yet, the software should do it automatically, but with the current database schema, this is infeasible. For some time thereafter, I've been downloading the database dump almost every week and fixed all double-redirects I found in it. I think about half of my contributions were double-redirect fixes at the time.

[edit] Modifications I've made to the software

I've also contributed by making modifications to MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. Most of them are not worth mentioning as they are minor bugfixes and smallish features, but I guess I can mention that I have at some point re-written Special:Allpages for database efficiency. I have also written a Recent Changes Patrol feature, but it was rejected by the English Wikipedia community and is therefore only in use on some of the other language Wikipedias. I started work on a lex/yacc parser to replace the current PHP not-really-a-parser, but I eventually hit a hurdle and gave up.

[edit] Miscellaneous