User:Dwheeler
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My name is David A. Wheeler, and I specialize in computer security and developing large software systems. I've also written a number of articles on open source software / free software (OSS/FS). My personal website is at http://www.dwheeler.com.
If you want to chat with me, please email me, dwheeler-NOSPAM at dwheeler.com (eliminate the "-NOSPAM"). I do not accept SPAM. You're welcome to add to my talk page instead, but I don't scan it that often.
I have many other interests besides the Wikipedia. My main interest in the Wikipedia is trying to contribute ideas to help the Wikipedia project overall, rather than contributing specific articles. Simply put, I want the Wikipedia project to succeed, and since I don't have time to contribute lots of articles, I'm trying to contribute as I can. I've contributed a general html2wikipedia tool, and posted several ideas to the Wikipedia-l list that I hope are useful. I've also modified various "policy" documents and Wikipedia user documents, in the hope that by doing so I'll influence many articles (not just ones I've written).
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html2wikipedia
Among other things, I've developed a tool that translates HTML files into Wikipedia's Wiki format. You can get the tool at http://www.dwheeler.com/html2wikipedia (GPL license).
Wikipedia Article Contributions
Most of my article contributions to the Wikipedia are small incremental improvements. However, I have contributed several articles whole cloth or as a major rewrite:
Computing: Scale-free network, Unix philosophy, Worse is better, Software patent, Law of Demeter, Source lines of code
History: George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights
Chess: Fischer Random Chess (aka Fischerandom, Fischerandom chess, or Chess 960), Chess opening, Descriptive chess notation, Portable Game Notation, Forsyth-Edwards Notation, the annotations for The Game of The Century (chess), Evergreen game (chess), Immortal game (chess), Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1, Bitboard, Chess as mental training. I also seriously rewrote portions of Computer chess, though I wasn't logged in at the time and didn't get much credit.
Cards: Playing card, Ninety-nine, Most wanted Iraqi playing cards
Miscellaneous: John 3 16, Pictures at an Exhibition, Four fours, Mesklin, Sebastian Shaw (supervillain), Maximize Affirmed Majorities
Citing Sources
I especially want to encourage contributors to cite sources. I'm not perfect at it myself... I know I'm not... but I do try!! People are more likely to take Wikipedia seriously when they can easily check the citations.. but that requires the citations to start with. Most other problems can be fixed later on by later editors, but it's often very hard to re-find information; so if everyone works to cite their sources, it'd be better for all.
I proposed that the bottom "edit" info specifically suggest citing sources. I intentionally made it short, so it wouldn't create more load on a user. After posting notices on MediaWiki_talk:Copyrightwarning and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) pages, I gave it a whirl. After many days, I found that more people like it than don't like it.
Locations of Interest
Here are locations of interest in or about Wikipedia:
- Downloading Wikipedia (http://download.wikimedia.org/)
- Wikitech-l Archives (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/)
- Wikipedia:Category
- Wikipedia:Utilities
- Wikipedia:Village pump