User:Improv
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Mary had a twisted goat Its fleece as black as night And everyone that Mary met It ate them out of spite
Improv_face.jpg
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Running for Office
I am not presently running for office on Wikipedia.
Arbitration Committee Dec2004
I ran for a seat on the Arbitration Committee in December 2004. It is their job to resolve the most difficult conflicts on Wikipedia. I didn't do too well. Oh well, so it goes.
Mediation Committee
In January 2005, I was elected to the Mediation committee. Mediation is a somewhat similar activity to arbitration, facilitating communication between people in difficult situations. See also my mediation style
Administrator on EN
I am, as of 19 February 2005, an administrator on EN
Other Office
I am not presently running for any other office.
Wikipedia Links and Friends
Useful links for me
- Pages Needing Attention
- Cleanup
- VfD
- VfU
- TfD
- RfD
- Requests for Adminship
- Admin howto
- Admin Reading List
- Comment -> Mediation -> Arbitration
- Vandalism in Progress
- Translation project
- Changing Username
- My CSS
- Attribution Changes
- My homepage on test. Test (http://test.wikipedia.org) is useful to play around.
- Meta Wikitravel Wikisource Commons German French Arabic Hebrew Japanese Russian
- I am on the Indian Wikipedians notice board because I like editing articles relating to India.
- I also am a volunteer translator for translating articles from the German and Spanish Wikipediae to the English one. I was thinking about volunteering to translate articles from the Simple encyclopedia too :)
de:User:Improv fr:User:Improv ar:User:Improv he:User:Improv ja:User:Improv ru:User:Improv
Users to keep an eye on
(edit this section) (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Improv/watched_users&action=edit)
Why?
- Bad Spelling or Grammar - I'll often go around after these users and clean up after them. A lot of good contributors may not be spelling champs.
- Suspicious pattern of edits - Some users show a worrying fixation in what they're focusing on, e.g. a focus on Nazi-related topics.
- Vandalism or edit-wars - Some users have been known to do vandalism or instigate/participate in edit wars
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
- Angolan War of Independence, although in all fairness, I did use the existing article on History of Angola to get me started
- Plaid Tongued Devils
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.
If you read any of the IRC logs I post here, please also see How to read my IRC logs in order to more easily figure out who is talking.
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 pgunn@dachte.org My webpage is http://www.dachte.org My BLOG is here (http://blog.dachte.org)
Things I find interesting
- Carvaka
- Jewish Autonomous Oblast
- Trotskyism
- Alexander Kerensky
- Earth First
- Haiku
- Saint-Pierre and Miquelon
- Zzyzx Road
- Grammatical mood
- Virgin Lands Campaign
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..
Special things to contribute
I can read Cyrillic and Kana, am not too far from fluent in German, can do some Spanish, and can speak little bits of Russian and Japanese. I'm hoping to learn French to fluency within the next few years. I once tried to learn Hebrew. I have an interest in history, in particular socialist revolutions and socialist philosophers and have a broad interest in philosophy. I'm an open-source programmer in my spare time, and did my undergrad in computer science. I am now refocusing on Cognitive neuropsychology. I have a general interest in science, and try to keep up with a number of fields. I also have a digital camera.
I do my best to be fair in life and on Wikipedia. I try to apply standards of intellectual integrity and similar without regard to social interactions or other values. I believe and hope this makes me helpful in conflicts, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where it seems that most people have difficulty accepting that others who are not "on their side" have an understandable point of view. Note that this doesn't mean that I lack an opinion on that, or other issues, but that I try to keep my interest and my standards of integrity separate in how I act. I am disappointed to see that we have some administrators on Wikipedia who are very partisian on one side or another, and who cannot set that aside.
In the interests of intellectual integrity, I will disclose my biases here so you can judge for yourself if I've failed to be fair somewhere.
I do a lot of nearly invisible work trying to get people to cooperate and understand each other, over IRC and email. Chances are fair that if there's a large enough dispute, I've talked to at least a few of the participants to try to get them to understand each other, be civil, and hopefully resolve the issues. Compromise isn't always the solution, but a willingness to budge/be convinced is essential to be a good Wikicitizen.
Thoughts on Wikipedia policy
- I am a deletionist. I believe we should remove articles that are not encyclopedic. If the topic is not notable, no matter how well-written the article, it has no place on Wikipedia.
- See also /Deletion for more detail
- I would like to become a developer, because I know SQL, have worked with the mediawiki software, and could do a lot of helpful work that currently isn't done very quickly due to lack of manpower. I could also write tools to make that work easier to do.
Policies I might propose someday
I occasionally have ideas about how policy should be. Here's what I've been thinking about..
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. Oh, I've been on Wikipedia since late 2002 (original username Pgunn, original userid 5522).
Misc
Philosophies
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.
Political viewpoints quiz
On User:Blankfaze/Political viewpoints, you can see how I compare here
Draft of RfC on Libertarian-related articles
See here.
Vandalism
This page was vandalized by members of a small group of trolls when I proposed the page on their group for deletion for insignificance and non-encyclopedic content. Please see this IRC chat where I was threatened for proposing VfD, and also note the vandalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:Pgunn&action=history) by JesuitX (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=67.101.86.102), who co-founded the group (http://www.gnaa.us/pr.phtml?troll=gnaa-gnfos-dr)]. They have also defaced my BLOG (http://blog.dachte.org), and as noted in the chat, promise to continue doing so (although I'm going to likely keep an eye on it and delete their additions). I went on IRC to talk to them and see if I could present my side. I am not pleased at them. Other people who I have disagreed with have sometimes attacked me personally, but generally kept things verbal and somewhat civil. These people have gone far beyond that.
My templates
I use these to help me in various places on Wikipedia. To learn how to make them, see Wikipedia:Template.
- { { User:Improv/testtemplate } } User:Improv/testtemplate User:Improv/testtemplate
Subpages
- User:Improv/Quotes - Amusing quotes and ideas I've seen on Wikipedia
- User:Improv/biases
- User:Improv/Deletion
Temporary Scratchpad
Describe a Room Game is a surrealist game in which each participant sequentially adds to a description of a room until there is a sense that the description is "completed."
TODO
- Amuse self by visiting List of places with fewer than ten people until I get tired of it.
- Do same with Unusual articles, and then try to arrange that to be moved into the meta namespace.
- Enjoy life, get outside some more, go sit in the park
- Finish with my account renaming -- move subpages and templates
- Mediate Israel-Palestine conflicts, because I am fair and have no strong attachment to either side
User:Improv/stuff to clean (Edit) User:Improv/stuff to vfd (Edit) User:Improv/stuff to ponder (Edit)