User:Improv
Mary had a twisted goat Its fleece as black as night And everyone that Mary met It ate them out of spite
Wikipedia Links and Friends
Pages I started:
- Free-Net
- Duquesne University (but I forgot to log in. Oops)
- Point Park University
- Law & Order: Trial by Jury (again, forgot to log in. Argh)
- Second International (politics)
- Education City, Qatar
- Bath, Ohio
- GSR
Friends
Other stuff
- Japanese Orthodox Church was translated badly into English, so I fixed it.
- Nikolai of Japan was also translated badly into English, so I fixed it.
- Brecksville, Ohio was rather dull, so I made it somewhat less dull.
- I've corrected little spelling/grammar things all over Wikipedia
- Blood boosting had copywritten content, so I rewrote it.
I use the Special:Randompage link to find badly-written articles, typos, and the like, and fix them.
Contact Info
On AIM, I'm dachte000 On ICQ, 97563550 On YIM, pgunn01 My email address is [email protected] My webpage is http://www.dachte.org
Things I find interesting
- Carvaka
- Jewish Autonomous Oblast
- Trotskyism
- Alexander Kerensky
- Earth First
- Haiku
- Saint-Pierre and Miquelon
- Zzyzx Road
I've also taken a few pictures for wikipedia articles.
Activities
I manage/run/install MediaWiki software (the software that implements WikiPedia) to make communication go more easily in my current workplace (Neuropsych Researcher/Unix Sysadmin in academia). I occasionally put in some effort to port from MySQL to Postgres, but spend more time on my own open source projects. I am always introducing new people to Wikipedia.. I'm also starting to monitor Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion
Thoughts on Wikipedia policy
I strongly oppose the existance of List of articles, and, barring exceptional circumstances, will vote for their deletion when they make it onto the Votes for deletion page. I am presently unsure if listing every single town in the world is a good idea for Wikipedia (as people have been importing survey/census data).
History
In case you're wondering if I'm that Pat Gunn, I was born in Dallas, Texas, and lived there and in Connecticut until I was age 6, at which point my family moved to Brecksville, Ohio. I went to Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and worked about a year and a half there after graduation, at which point I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I now work at Carnegie Mellon University. Not that there are that many Pat Gunns on the internet -- I'm first by a wide margin on Google, last I checked.
Misc
On VeryVerily's Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies page, I am:
- a moderate immediatist - except I like to clean things up myself, so I will either clean or revert these things.
- unclassifiable with regards to statusquoism. If I see bad writing, I will fix it. I don't automatically respect the status quo, nor do I automatically respect random edits. Whichever is closer to the right thing is the better.
- think the community/encyclopedism distinction is stupid. The primary goal is to make an encyclopedia, but any action, be it deleting a bad newbie contribution or conversation, can be done politely, and getting personal rarely helps in making a good encyclopedia. There are kooks out there, but they're rare.
- Very anti-authorist. The article is the primary good, not our egos.