User:Mjb

Mike J. Brown (mjb), an autodidact and Web technology consultant, has been contributing to Wikipedia since August of 2002. Since 1992 he has also been co-administrator of Hyperreal, a home for informational and community resources related to electronic music, rave culture, and altered states of consciousness, and until 2000, he was co-administrator of apache.org.

Some of Mike's music reviews appeared in URB Magazine in 1997. His profile of the musical group The Art of Noise was published in the first edition of Musichound R&B (1998; ISBN 1-57859-026-4) and the second edition of Musichound Rock (1999; ISBN 1-57859-061-2), both of which are encyclopedic album guides. He served as technical editor for the Addison-Wesley book XQuery: The XML Query Language by Michael Brundage (2004; ISBN 0-321-16581-0), and contributed to the second edition of the O'Reilly Python Cookbook (2005; ISBN 0-596-00797-3).

Since 2001, Mike has been one of the core developers of 4Suite, a toolkit for XML and RDF processing in the Python programming language. He also self-publishes articles and resources related to XML, XSLT, URIs, and character encoding on his own web site. In 2005, he was inducted into The XML Guild, an association of some of the best independent XML consultants in the world.

On Discogs, Mike was (until such roles were eliminated in early 2008) an editor and a moderator of Electronic submissions. On DMOZ, he was (briefly) an editor in the Roller Derby category.

[edit] Contributions

On Wikipedia, Mike created or completely rewrote these articles:

• Uniform Resource Identifier, system identifier and percent-encoding;
• HyTime, numeric character reference and character entity reference;
• Category:Character encoding, Universal Character Set, UCS-4, UTF-16, Byte Order Mark and Adobe Glyph List;
• shell (computer science);
• Afro/Cosmic music, acid house, intelligent dance music, Balearic Beat, The Art of Noise, Sun Electric, Ingrid Chavez, Digipak, and Detroit Electronic Music Festival;
• Spy (television);
• Cassano's Pizza King;
• Ann Calvello, William Hurwitz, and John Bedini.

Mike made significant edits and contributions to these articles:

• Semantic Web, Resource Description Framework, Document Type Definition and fragment identifier;
• Category:Character sets, character encoding, Unicode, ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859, ASCII, code page, ruby character and Arial Unicode MS;
• operating system advocacy;
• Fahrenheit and U.S. customary units;
• modular arithmetic, division (mathematics), and remainder;
• record label, rave party, techno music, and deep house;
• LSD and drug abuse;
• Sibel Edmonds, Roller derby, Bi-curious, AMBER Alert, and Hispanic.

A complete list of Mike's contributions is available here. He also has a presence on Wikisource.

Mike has some advice for Wikipedians.

Mike lives in the beautiful state of Colorado, USA.

Many non-BLP articles, after enjoying a long run of relative stability, have recently fallen victim to the relatively new fad where rulebook-throwing, Jimmy Wales-quoting editors are engaging in unilateral, aggressive removal of uncited material that's not even controversial. These editors just delete and delete volumes of material, claiming "uncited" or "no original research" in their edit summaries, rather than expressing doubt about specific points made in the article and using the discussion page to call upon past curators to deal with attribution issues—many of which can be dealt with through more careful phrasing, if not explicit citations.

Although they mean well, editors like this ignore the great deal of work and reasoning that went into building up the content that was there and why certain topics were being addressed, and they then fail to accept responsibility for the aftermath: vandals and frequent, poorly written attempts to expand the article to address the topics or points of view that are no longer represented.

Massive pruning of an article without discussion and without acknowledging its history and the concerns of past editors is irresponsible and (often) destructive. If you are going to insist that people play by the rules, fulfill your obligation as well, and use the Talk page to raise concerns and see that they're dealt with in a manner more productive than instant deletion of large portions of content. Similarly, express a basis for your skepticism; don't enforce a rule just because you're able to quote it. —mjb 18:27, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

See also: this comic strip