User:Timwi

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Name		Timwi
Birthday		21 Oct 1980
Wikipedian since		8 Jun 2003
Contributions (article namespace)		29,000
Current occupation		Web developer at CSR plc
Silly favourites		colour: blue number: 47 animal: Goldies proglang: Perl instrument: piano
Silly user picture

This user doesn't use any userboxes (other than this one) to describe his skills, interests, hobbies and other attributes because he would have to stack millions of them in order to satisfy his irrational perfectionism and desire for completeness.

[edit] General

Hi. I am Timwi.

[edit] POV

I don't tend to edit articles in which political POVs are relevant, so my own political bias does not tend to influence my Wikipedia editing behaviour. Regardless, I am quite libertarian, and I think fulfilment of human rights, equality of freedom and elimination of poverty and war are the supreme most important issues of the present world. (I know I'll have forgotten one or two, but as usual you don't find out until you've pressed Save.)

I also tend to stay out of discussions relating to how Wikipedia should be run or how various issues should be dealt with, even though I have relatively strong views on this. I don't think I can change much, as there are too many dissidents. Too many people think that it's somehow dangerous for a not-so-active contributor to be admin, thereby allowing for adminship to be an authority hierarchy. Too many people think that it's somehow harmful to have information that is useful to few but more than zero people, giving rise to obvious gaps in the coverage. I'm helpless against those crowds.

[edit] Copyright

I used to have a paragraph here explaining why I don't think copyright is a good idea, but I kept getting messages from people trying to explain to me what I already know, so I've removed it.

All my contributions are public domain. (I realise that German law doesn't actually allow me to rescind my copyright, but if you can trust that I'm a reasonable and honest person, then you can trust I won't sue you.)

[edit] Interests

In real life, my main interests are computing, programming, music (piano and guitar), languages and linguistics. On Wikipedia, however, the spectrum of articles that I have ever edited is wide; this is largely due to the fact that I tend to read stuff I don't already know, so most of my contributions are spelling/grammar corrections in articles I read to educate myself. The few major contributions of mine are listed in the following section.

[edit] Pages I've worked on (a little)

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.
• 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 which character appeared in which film and remade the entire page using a Perl script. Like many useful contributions to Wikipedia, it was deleted (on May 26, 2007).
• 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 (game), 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.
• 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.
• Seamless branching (February 13, 2004) — Started this article from scratch. Although it was more than a stub, it was not very informative.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia (April 12, 2005) — I ripped this idea off the German Wikipedia.
• Vuk (film) (originally Vuk) (May 23, 2005) — Couldn't believe the best Hungarian animated film didn't have an article. So I made it.
• 2005 Sony CD copy protection scandal (November 16, 2005) — It seems that loads of Wikipedians have added this story to loads of articles, including Rootkit, Sony, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and Digital rights management. The article Extended Copy Protection is still pretty much a copy of it. I created a new article before realising that the story had been covered all over the place. I've then removed the redundancy and copied all relevant information into my article.
• Ember attack (March 20, 2006) — This term came up in a news report and I didn't know what it meant, so I tried to look it up. Wikipedia didn't have the answer, so I added it here for future people to find.
• Penelakut (January 4, 2007) — My parents were there.
• Kursdorf (July 7, 2007) — A town inside an airport!

[edit] Files I have uploaded

• Pictures 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. John's College, Cambridge (June 6, 2004)
  • Newnham College, Cambridge (1) (November 13, 2004)
  • Newnham College, Cambridge (2) (November 13, 2004)
  • Selwyn College, Cambridge (November 13, 2004)
  • Wolfson College, Cambridge (2) (November 13, 2004)
• Pictures taken by others:
  • King's College, Cambridge and Chapel (May 28, 2004) (taken by Romanski)
  • Emmanuel College, Cambridge (June 6, 2004) (taken by Spottedowl)
  • Faculty of Law, Cambridge (November 13, 2004) (taken by Gordon, another student)
  • Mathematical Bridge, Cambridge (November 13, 2004) (also taken by Gordon)
  • Wolfson College, Cambridge (1) (November 13, 2004) (also taken by Gordon)
• Sound files:
  • For WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia:
    • Milgram experiment (April 15, 2005)
    • Split infinitive (April 16, 2005)
    • Berliner (pastry) (April 18, 2005; not quite serious)
    • Peer review (April 19, 2005)
  • For German alphabet (April 22, 2004): German alphabet, German extra letters
  • For List of tongue-twisters (now on WikiQuote):
    • German (April 29, 2004): Brautkleid, Fichtendickicht, Fischers Fritz, Fliegen, Klapperschlangen, Pappplakate, Potsdamer Boxclub, Potsdamer Postkutscher, Whiskeymixer
    • Russian (by Romanski, May 10, 2004): Карл и Клара
  • For List of numbers in various languages (June 3, 2004): Numbers in German

[edit] Other stuff I've done

• On February 14, 2004, I started the Navigational Elements Craze (using what was the MediaWiki namespace then and is the Template namespace now) [1] 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 March 15, 2004, I 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. For some time thereafter, 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 were double-redirect fixes at the time.

[edit] Modifications I've made to the software

I've also contributed by making modifications to MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. Most of them are not worth mentioning as they are minor bugfixes and smallish features, but I guess I can mention that I have at some point re-written Special:Allpages for database efficiency. I have also written a Recent Changes Patrol feature, but it was rejected by the English Wikipedia community and is therefore only in use on some of the other language Wikipedias. I started work on a lex/yacc parser to replace the current PHP not-really-a-parser, but I eventually hit a hurdle and gave up.

[edit] Miscellaneous

• I recruited from Trinity College, Cambridge: Caesium, Mywyb2, Legorol, Romanski
• I recruited from LiveJournal: Applejade, Beginning, Csogilvie, Dottey, Kitambi, Mendel, Nyxie, Rho, Rydel, Spottedowl
• I recruited otherwise: Expent
• I know from LiveJournal: Brian Kendig, Freso, N-true, Pne, Ralesk
• I was recruited by: Chuck SMITH
• Other (non-Wikimedia) wikis I am (somewhat) involved with:
  • Orbiter Wiki — about the Orbiter space-flight simulator
  • UI Wiki — a wiki about user interface design