After finishing my Master's Thesis (http://www.wv.inf.tu-dresden.de/Publications/Diploma/diplom_kroetzsch.pdf) in Dresden, I am at the intitute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe; see my brief homepage (http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/Personen/viewPerson?id_db=2107). My main subjects of interest generally are found in the vicinity of mathematics and computer science. My motivation for contribution relates monotonically to my current spare time, and I may take a Wikibreak if its value drops below some threshold.

E-Patents

Depending on the actual realization, legalizing software patents may provide useful protection for innovative and new techniques that include (but should not be limited to) software algorithms. However, todays software patents tend expose a degree of generality that does not protect a single concrete idea, but a general purpose. Instead of patenting an "evacuated glass bulb containing a wire filament, that is heated to white-hot by electrical resistance in order to generate light", one would rather patent a "technical device for generating light for use in indoor and outdoor environments". This abstraction from any actual invention seems to be possible in the world of software development and is in fact practiced quite a lot.

Ignoring the concrete implementation and protecting general ideas instead extends far beyond pure software development. The "invention" of sending a product bought in an online shop to a different address than the bill ("gift service") is an example of the kinds of trivial patents that already emerged. Further existing patents cover progress bars and tabbed dialogs in software appplications, mail filters, or the use of a "shopping cart" in online shopping. Legalizing patents means: a) customers pay for all these great "inventions" b) start-up companies are sued by patent holders for every line of software they write, including their websites c) publishing (free) software you wrote yourself or even creating a homepage can be illegal - consult a patent lawyer for some security...

These things are currently discussed in the European Union and you can speak out against unrestricted patentability of software. Find out more about software patents at the homepage of the FFII. If you are a European citizen, consider signing the online petition at eurolinux (http://petition.eurolinux.org/index.html) and the call for action (http://swpat.ffii.org/papiere/europarl0309/appell/index.en.html) of the FFII.

Meanwhile, the EU council of ministers has decided to legalize software patents in the European Union. The current proposal restricts patentability to those innovations that have some technical content, but it is not clear what the term "technical" means in this context. Some current interpretations assume that this relates to controlling some technical device in whatever may be considered as an innovative way. Read more about the latest descision in the statement of the FFII (http://kwiki.ffii.org/?Cons040518En). Obviously, supporting the FFII is still crucial since the present directive does not involve a judicial meaningful restriction of patentability.

The site www.nosoftwarepatents.com contains many reasonable arguments against software patents, though I do not like the good-vs.-evil style of this page (people who have ever talked to any political or religious extremist may share my allergy to extensive uses of the term "truth"; yet the people and its voted representatives seem to respond well to such methods). Have a look and judge yourself.

More POV

More interesting political non-NPOV that is worth further consideration can usually be found on the homepage of John Baez.

Editing

Currently, I am most concerned with mathematical topics (very specific, isn't it? ;-). The whole subset of articles in this area evolves very well, but there are still huge amounts of knowledge to be added. The problem is, of course, that one needs to address different levels of background knowledge. So in an ideal world, every math article should have a readable intro (with some intuition) and an easy to find section "Formal defnition", followed by interesting stuff of increasing difficulty. The WikiProject Mathematics compiles some good proposals on how to approximate this goal. Many articles will be happy about any extension, but bigger ones are sometimes rather lacking readability and an easy to follow structure. I also constantly complain about the absence of literature references in articles that state nontrivial results without a proof.

My current TODO (if any) is order theory, which really has increased quite a bit. Domain theory will be extended as soon as the important basic notions of order theory are available.

The following list may be of interest when you are looking for someone to complain about the contents of a particular article -- if its name appears on the list I will be happy to find your comments on my talk page. Some of my more relevant contributions include (in no particular order):

The number of * indicates the amount of contribution found in each article (usually this means that I completely (re-)wrote the article and that it is not a stub now...). The main purpose of this is to motivate me for extending articles further even when they are already listed ;-)

Other non-mathematical articles I edited are:

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