User:Shanes
- This Userpage is about Shanes, the wikipedian. For reading and writing messages to him, see his talk page
Shanes (born 1968) is a male Norwegian wikipedian living in Oslo.
Short Bio
He grew up in Northern Norway but after a 1 year military service in the Norwegian army, he went to Trondheim and studied Theoretical Physics. He finished his Master's degree in 1993, writing his main thesis in Germany on some quantum mechanical effects in solid-state physics. Later, he spent time learning computer related stuff and working for various Internet companies. Shanes has an Erdös number of 4.
Wikipedia activities
Shanes discovered Wikipedia in 2002 but was for a long time just a casual reader, sometimes doing small edits. It all changed in November 2004 when he signed up an account and started doing more frequent contributions. He is writing and doing fixes on every thinkable subject. And besides that and writing about himself in third person on his userpage, Shanes also spends much time watching the Recent changes page, reverting the many new users test edits, deleting spam, and fighting vandalism. He is one of the many wikipedia administrators, which means he can more easily screw up things, but also that he is more than happy to help new users with any problems or questions.
Likes and Dislikes
Likes
Shanes likes most things. Some of them are (in random order)
Dislikes
Shanes dislikes a few things. Some of them are
- Pompous Fools
- Rudeness
- Having to wake up early
- Fundamentalism of every kind
About wikipedia
Things I believe most Wikipedians could be better at:
Always use the Edit summary field
The edit summary field is everybody's friend. Use it. Always. It makes it so much easier to browse page histories when summaries are written to each edit. Please.
Be nicer to newcomers
I wish everyone could be as nice as they can, and try being even nicer. There is never a reason to be rude. Even to vandals and pompous fools. It's called not sinking to their level and I strongly believe that even the worst vandal can be turned into a good wikipedian if we go forth as good examples and don't resolve to name-calling and hate. On my RC-patrolling I see (by far) mostly nice treatment of newcomers, but there are exceptions. It's sad to see some talk-messages left to newcomers who (most likely) accidentally blanked a page or just tested a "Hello mom" edit. They are probably already quite confused over the whole wiki-concept and how this edit-stuff works. And when they then get a flame-message, I can't imagine that they think of wikipedia as a nice place to be. Assume good faith!
Be more aware of Copyright infringements
As wikipedia grows to one of Internet's top sites in use and fame it also turns into a very valuable website in terms of money. And where there is value, there is incentive for someone to try and grab some of it. And one way of grabbing it is by throwing lawyers at us and claim that wikipedia is stealing their work and by that enriching us on their behalf. It is not that far fetched that wikipedia one day will receive a cease and desist letter from someone claiming that we are publishing their work and that even if we delete it we aren't able to stop it from recurring since everyone can edit. But I am (thank God) not a lawyer, so I might worry for no reason. But I believe we need to be careful, and I personally think that the fine wikipedians doing copyvio-hunting are doing one of the most important tasks on the whole wikipedia. I hope, one day, I'll do my share at that, too. If only it wasn't so damed boring...
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -- Bertrand Russell |