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Wikipedia History

Well, my first appearance on the wikipedia under my own account seems to be on 29 June of 2004. I'm present on freenode as keats. I use irssi and won't notice you talking to me unless you send me a private message, which will spawn a new window with a pink 9 indicating I've got a new message.

My first foray into technical writing was at the age of 17, when I wrote The Datura FAQ. I have since ceded all rights to it to Erowid, who at one time I was friends with (Earth, I miss you).

My contributions to the wikipedia have been mostly focused into three areas.

First, I have been cleaning up, adding content and images to, categorizing, etc, military technology articles. This isn't necessarily focused on weapons systems, but also on vehicles and other things of that nature. This is both difficult to do and easy to do. Difficult because sometimes the military doesn't like to share information about its toys. Easy because once you find the information you want, it's copyright-free, and you can simply copy-paste. Although usually they're such horrid writers, I wind up doing a read-and-rewrite-better sort of thing.

Second, I go through random pages looking for typographical issues, grammatical issues, categorizations, stubs which I can expand, and so on. This is work more wikipedians should be doing, there are a lot of typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, etc, out there. I'd even advocate a "no new articles day" just to see if we could get people to pretty up the 'pedia. This sometimes gets me into a hornets nest, which is my next and last general area.

Third, I may be what some wikipedians call a deletionist. I am generally in favor of a delete in VfD's. This is not to say that I feel that we should wantonly delete material from this fancy encyclopedia we have. It is simply that I feel that some material does not belong here. Specifically, things like "articles" about fictional characters in television shows. In general, if you wouldn't find it in Encyclopedia Britannica, or you would be embarassed to ask a librarian to find you information on it, I don't want it in the wikipedia. I don't feel this makes me a deletionist per se, I think it just makes me a hardass. And every FOSS project needs at least one hardass to make sure stuff gets done.

At one point I was involved in an effort (or perhaps I was that effort) to increase the scalability of the wikipedia, and its stability, after several outages. I am no longer a part of that effort. I want no part in the decision making process and will not offer advice. When there is an outage, I will simply go do something else. The reasons for this attitude are complex, sort of. Mostly, it boils down to a strong resistance to change in the core group of people currently supporting the wikipedia. If you'd like the history, you may see my original e-mail and follow the resultant thread.

I donate. You probably should too.

Adjectives and affiliations

• Auto Mechanic
• Connoisseur of fine food and drink
• Database Administrator
• Desperately seeking new and exciting music
• Gardener
• Libertarian
• NRA Member
• Netizen
• Owner of cats
• Perl Hacker
• Programmer
• Unix Administrator
• Voracious consumer of fiction

Favorite Wikipedia Nodes

I reserve the right to expand this to include other Wikimedia nodes as needed in the future.

Miscy

• Single Malt Scotch
• Talisker Single Malt
• Yottabyte
• Saimin
• Moorea
• Zombie cocktail
• Mamalahoe
• There is no cabal
• Berdache
• The Joshua Tree
• Everything, Everything
• Sic semper tyrannis
• Sturgeon's law

Plants

• Bodhi tree
• Brugmansia
• Habanero chile
• Joshua tree
• Rooibos

Planes

• B-1B bomber
• F-14 Tomcat
• AC-130 gunship
• RQ-4 Global Hawk

Weapons Systems

• AGM-84 Harpoon
• FGM-148 Javelin

Ships

• USS Bowfin (SS-287)
• USS Iowa (BB-61)
• USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76)
• USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)
• USS Virginia (SSN-774)
• USS Kamehameha (SSBN-642)
• Typhoon class submarine

The Big Stuff

• Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb
• Nuclear weapon design
• Tsar Bomba

Nodes I'm going to write one day

• Johnny McGovern (now needs expansion to include the broadway performances)
• Yunnan teas
• Filter (tea)
• Gong-fu tea preparation
• draining tray
• Robert Angell check it first
• CL-20 info
• SIGARMS Blaser R93 LSR2 Tactical info
• Type A Personality , Meyer Friedman , Ray Rosenman info
• Off-road -- I need to turn this into a real article.
  • Offroad racing -- expand, probably tie in to Rally Racing .
  • All-terrain vehicle -- also tie in
    • Kaena -- maybe make a category?
    • Rubicon Trail -- "
• Allen M. Sumner class destroyer -- there is so much opportunity for expansion here

Hawaii Stuff

• Kahana Valley State Park
• Pu'u o Mahuka Heiau State Monument

Military Hardware

• M260 7x launcher of 2.75" unguided missiles mounted on huey or cobra data and images
• AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile info and pic from the Raytheon page. Perhaps a raytheon armaments category would be useful.
• GAU-16 this is a crew served or aircraft mounted 50 cal machine gun info
• PGM-11 Redstone
• RT-20 Rifle info info info info (20mm)
• NTW-20 Rifle info info need more info (20mm)

The Broken Shit I'm going to fix

• Start adding more information on Single Malt Scotches, particularly Islays and Speysides.

• began taking notes at On Scotches
• started converting my not-very-formatted-notes into actual wikinized tables for transplant to the specific vendor (eg Bladnoch , Benromach , Aberlour, etc).

Star Trek-specific cruft

• Piss off some fanboys by adding a Template:Move-To-Memory-Alpha template to some minor star trek nodes.

• GhIlghameS -- barf
• Zefram Cochrane
• Curzon Dax
• Phoenix (Star Trek)
• Nebula class starship
• Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards
• Reman warbird Scimitar

I'm too sick to go on for now.

Look at nodes like Danube class starship and the gigantic template of crap that exist in this database that simply don't belong here. We are not the encyclopedia of arda, nor memory alpha, nor anything of the kind.

In fact, Memory Alpha is a mediawiki, not a WikiWiki as I had previously thought. It is also hosted on wikicities. So what is so hard about moving the Star Trek stuff over there? Why are so many people obssessed with having Zefram Cochrane in this encyclopedia? Furthermore, "specifications" are lifted from sources which we do not have rights to, and articles such as Reptilian ship are lifted from memory alpha, transplanted HERE. Why?

Generally speaking, encyclopedias are FACTUAL repositories of information. Contrary to what SimonP and others may believe ratio of fiction-article-creators to fact-article-creators, I think we can assume that the vast majority of users of the wikipedia prefer factual articles. The only way to fix the problem is to approach the authors individually and tell them what they are doing is wrong. The "move to memory alpha" template is a good start.

Quote from SimonP's usertalk page:

I understand what you were trying to do, but you should be aware there are many of Wikipedians, probably the majority of us, who see no difference between "articles on a fictional universe" and "good Wikipedia-worthy article." - User:SimonP 17:20, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)

Weapons systems needing images or updates

• SEAL_Recon_Rifle

Sub-Pages

• Scotch
• Notes for future pages
• Stuff I have completed and am proud of
• Images I've either taken myself or pilfered from the US Military and uploaded

Everybody ELSE Has a License Template...