User:Timwi

Name		Timwi
Birthday		21 Oct 1980
Wikipedian since		10 Jun 2003
Contributions (ca.)		20,500
Wikipediholic score		117
Administrator on		en Wikipedia en Wiktionary meta test
Other addictions		LiveJournal, IRC
Silly favourites		colour: blue number: 47 animal: Goldies proglang: Perl instrument: piano
Other interests		See interests list
Silly user picture		Silly user picture

General

Hi. I am Timwi. Find out more about me on this page.

POV: I don't tend to have political POVs. I am largely uninvolved with political matters; I don't vote, and I don't tend to think good or bad about any particular political party, politician, country, etc. This may or may not be the reason why I have never been involved in an edit war. (In all honesty, I have been involved in one, but it was a silly formatting issue, and as we say in German, einmal ist keinmal (once is never). The page in question was Forest (disambiguation).)

Copyright: Please consider all pictural contributions of mine as public domain, and all textual contributions as GFDL.

Interests: In real life, my main interests are computing, programming, music (piano and guitar) and languages. On Wikipedia, however, the spectrum of articles that I have ever edited is wide; this is largely due to the fact that most of my contributions are spelling corrections and minor things like that. The few major contributions of mine are listed in the following section.

Pages I've worked on

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):

• Stationary point (June 8, 2003) — Originally at Extremum, I wrote a little stub about this. I then made the newbie's no-no of copying & pasting the page to its new home instead of using the move function. By now, I have found a way of merging the histories.
• Vulcan (Star Trek) (June 14, 2003) — Rewrote this article.
• List of fictional birds (June 18, 2003) — Started this article from scratch.
• Example Scrabble tournament game (June 23, 2003) and Scrabble scoring examples (July 14, 2003) — These articles contained HTML tables to represent Scrabble board positions. Needless to say, they were huge. I wrote a Perl script that converted the HTML tables to a Delphi program which in turn generated images from it.
• Graham scan (December 8, 2003) — I wrote this article from scratch.
• 47 (number) (originally Forty-seven) (December 9, 2003) — I wrote this article from scratch, although it was based on 40 (number) (then Forty).
• List of Disney characters (December 11, 2003) — I spent a whole day researching what character was from what film and remade the entire page using a Perl script that you can find on the Talk page.
• List of computer-animated films (December 12, 2003) — Created this list from scratch.
• LiveJournal (December 13, 2003) — I spent a whole day creating the "timeline" section from scratch, rummaging through old entries in official LiveJournal communities to find links to add.
• S2 programming language (January 23/29, 2004) — I wrote this article from scratch.
• Wikipedia:Navigational templates (originally Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom elements) (February 28, 2004) — I created this when Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages (now Wikipedia:Template messages) was obviously getting too big and clunky.
• Scottish Qualifications Authority, Standard Grade, Higher Grade, Advanced Higher Grade (March 1, 2004) — It took me a pretty long time to notice these were missing and I had to start them...
• Time hierarchy theorem (March 3, 2004) — I contributed the proof for the deterministic time hierarchy theorem.
• Alley Cat, PC speaker (March 6, 2004) — Some old-time PC games nostalgy.
• List of grammatical cases (March 14, 2004) — Not really done by me (but rather by my friend N-true), but I fixed it up into Wikipedia format. And yes, he gave me permission to licence it as GFDL.
• List of sets of unrelated songs with identical titles (March 21, 2004) — Well, I only started this page with a few entries, but seeing as it has grown considerably since then, it seems that someone to start the page was badly needed...
• In the Hands of the Prophets (April 23, 2004) — An episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine which didn't have an article yet, and which I felt had such an obvious relation to a real-world controversy that it really should have an article. I originally thought the episode's title was "Blasphemy" because it is called "Blasphemie" in German.
• Zurab Tsereteli (June 12, 2004) — This is my first attempt at starting a whole new article about something that has no intersection with my knowledge or even interest.
• King of the Zoo (August 2, 2004) — My favourite GameBoy game, but no-one else's.
• Diploma in Computer Science (August 11, 2004) — One of the two courses I took at the University of Cambridge. (The other was the Mathematics Tripos.) I wrote this article from scratch.

Pictures I have uploaded

• Taken by myself:
  • Trinity College, Cambridge - Great Gate and Great Court (February 18, 2004)
  • Pembroke College, Cambridge (June 6, 2004)
  • Peterhouse College, Cambridge (June 6, 2004)
  • St. Catharine's College, Cambridge (June 6, 2004)
    • (Yes, I know I've spelt the name of the college wrong in the filename.)
    • (It was annoyingly hard to find a place to take a picture that wouldn't be entirely obstructed by the trees and cars.)
  • St. John's College, Cambridge (June 6, 2004)
• Taken by others:
  • Kings College, Cambridge and Chapel (May 28, 2004) (taken by Roman, a friend of mine)
  • Emmanuel College, Cambridge (June 6, 2004) (taken by Spottedowl)

Other stuff I've done

• On February 14, 2004 (or roundabout), I started the Navigational Elements Craze (using what was the MediaWiki namespace then and is the Template namespace now) 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 February 18, 2004, I have taken and uploaded two pictures for the Trinity College, Cambridge article.
• On March 15, 2004, I have 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. — Since then 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 are double-redirect fixes.
• On April 21/22, 2004, I added the German-language sound files to common phrases in different languages as well as German alphabet. I also pursuaded a Russian speaker to add the Russian recordings to the former.
• On June 3, 2004, I added a recording of the German numbers to numbers in various languages.

Modifications I've made to the software

I've also contributed by making modifications to MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia:

• On 11 July, 2003, I made a major modification to the way apostrophes are converted into bold and italics. Previously it was done using just two simple regular expressions. As a result, two pentuple-apostrophes (''''') in a line would cause invalid HTML to be generated (<strong><em>Text</strong></em>). I corrected this by replacing the regular expressions with a tail-recursive function (somewhat akin to a finite state machine). Later, the software was developped further and used a tokenizer, but this turned out to be inefficient, and so my function was reinstated.
• On 8 February, 2004, I made it so that self-links (links that point to the page they're on) are removed and the link text instead displayed in bold. The motivation were those navigational elements mentioned in the previous section, so they clearly show what page you're currently on. It seems that this feature was pretty well-received in the Wikipedia community.
• Typing three tildes inserts your username, four tildes inserts your username and the current time in UTC, and due to me since 21 March, 2004, five tildes insert just the current time. It seems, however, that not enough people need this feature for it to become known.
• On 6 August, 2004, I completely remade the apostrophe handling mentioned above. The problem was that in some languages (especially French), you often get things like l'''homme'', which you probably want to produce "l'homme" instead of interpreting the triple-apostrophe as "open bold". It is no longer a tail-recursive function, but simply a for loop.
• I have not updated this list recently. Since I finished my Diploma Dissertation, I had had time to fix many more bugs and create many more features. My most notable contribution that is currently in CVS (but not on the live site yet) is the Recent Changes Patrol, and I am currently working on a lex/yacc parser to replace the current PHP not-really-a-parser. I have also rewritten Special:Allpages at some point because its database queries were just too inefficient.

Miscellaneous

• I recruited from Trinity College, Cambridge: Caesium, Mywyb2 and Legorol
• I recruited from LiveJournal: Applejade, Beginning, Csogilvie, Dottey, Mendel, Nyxie, Rho, Rydel and Spottedowl
• I know from LiveJournal: Brian Kendig, Freso, Pne, and Ralesk
• I was recruited by Chuck SMITH.
• TheCustomOfLife used my User info box (the one in the top right corner). I'm honoured!