Welcome to my
user page. I haven't tried to make it fancy. While I have nothing against fancy user pages, I mostly use mine as a scratchpad and a list of links. If you're looking for examples of leading-edge user page design, see:
WP:EIW#UserPage. I know
a little more about Wikipedia than I did when I wrote some of what is here now, so I am gradually updating the old stuff to reflect my newer understanding.
I spend a big chunk of my Wikipedia time answering questions on the
Help desk, trying to help other people with their problems. As of 04:06, 15 June 2008 (UTC), I seem to have had the
most edits on the Help desk with: 3006.
These are my
user subpages. They are in various stages of "completion" at a given time. Pages that will eventually end up somewhere else (such as essays) will be incomplete while they are here.
Peruse these at your own risk. You may find some ideas, but probably not presented nicely yet. These are scratchpad pages where I get my
POV on.
User:Teratornis/Avoid jargon creep - this will be a futile plea against synonym disease, i.e., the overwhelming spontaneous human tendency to invent additional synonyms for canonical jargon terms we already have. (E.g., "mop and bucket" for "
administratorship".) Synonym disease generates
accidental complexity. (Of course by referring to the same phenomenon as "jargon creep" and "synonym disease" I'm guilty of it. However, "synonym disease" is more precise because there is a constant need to introduce new jargon terms to describe actually new things that the Wikipedia community invents.)
User:Teratornis/Outplacement - why we should organize an effort to find suitable
wikis for Wikipedia's deleted articles, rather than just deleting them.
User:Teratornis/Mechanical turk - notes about the possibility of creating a human-bot hybrid to efficiently perform repetitive editing tasks that are too difficult for an unaided bot.
The
red links are to pages I have not yet started. If any pages I start
get deleted, I'll remove them from these lists. I've concentrated much more on editing existing pages than starting new ones. As the lists show, I've started more
templates than
articles. I especially believe that almost every article on Wikipedia needs at least one
navigation template, and many Wikipedia articles have none yet.
Articles
The
red links are articles I have not started yet, but am thinking about starting. I've kind of leaned toward articles about
Wind power, because I have some interest and knowledge about the subject, and because the articles aren't likely to get
deleted.
Wind power in Italy -- Italy was the 7th largest wind power producer in 2007, the highest-ranked nation still lacking a "Wind power in..." article in 2008, so I started the article. I also categorized more images on
Commons into
commons:Category:Wind power in Italy.
{{Flickr free}} - search for photos on
Flickr having a given set of keywords in their descriptions, and a
CC-BY (attribution) or
CC-BY-SA (attribution and ShareAlike) license making them suitable to upload to
Commons using
Flinfo.
{{Search subpages link}} - generates a link to a Wikipedia search on a subpage tree.
{{Search help desk}} - generates a link to a Wikipedia search on the Help desk and its archive pages.
{{Help desk searches}} - a pseudo-navigation template that displays several search links that are useful for answering question on the Help desk (and to help with editing on Wikipedia generally), using {{Google custom}}.
{{All subpages}} - a template to display links to all the subpages of a given page, and their talk pages. But this seems to be unnecessary now that we can just say {{Special:PrefixIndex/pagename}}.
I started editing on
Wikipedia on April 28, 2006. Given that
wikis have been around since 1995, and I've been using the
Internet since the 1980's, I'm rather embarrassed to be so late to the wiki party. I'm still trying to figure out how I could have remained so unaware of wikis for so long, while learning
HTML, building
Web sites the "conventional" way, and so on. I had seen hints about wikis for some time, but I never quite "got" the idea, until somehow I had my "wikiphany."
If it wasn't
against the rules to propose a
neologism here, I would propose "wikiphany", as a
portmanteau of
wiki and
epiphany, to mean the nascent comprehension of enough of the nature and function of wikis to generate a sudden realization that one is going to do many wonderful, useful, and perhaps even revolutionary things with wikis. As of 20:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC),
google:wikiphany finds zero links, suggesting my neologism is novel (although I make no claim that it is). So maybe it's really a
protologism, and I'm not supposed to mention it in articles (
WP:NEO). So please imagine I did not just write this paragraph.
I slowly realized the usefulness of
wikis in other contexts, such as at the companies where I work. As with most organizations I have seen, most of what we do is severely under-documented, and people waste time re-inventing things that other people have already figured out. We need more efficient ways for people who discover or create knowledge to share it. Traditional documenting tools such as
Word,
DocBook, and
Help authoring tools are too difficult for casual use by non-specialists, especially while they are concentrating on solving some other problem (ideally, a documenting tool should require the least possible thought, so people can use it to document the other things they are thinking about). At the other extreme, an easy tool like
e-mail encourages everyone to contribute, and archiving programs like
MHonArc make messages permanently available as Web pages, but an archive of thousands of e-mail messages lacks organization, and may contain outdated information and errors that are hard to correct.
MediaWiki appears to fill the gap between traditional documenting tools and e-mail.
I installed my first
MediaWiki 1.7 instance on one of my company's
intranet sites in August, 2006.
04:38, 5 October 2006 (UTC): I made an account on
WikiBooks to make a few edits there.
16:41, 27 June 2007 (UTC): lately I seem to have become addicted to answering questions on the
Help desk.
See my notes.
About my user name
Teratornis is
Greek for
"
monster bird".
Teratorns
were large flying birds related to modern
condors
which died out in the
Pleistocene. I
picked this
user name because
nobody else is likely to use it, even on a large
wiki
such as
Wikipedia. Other than that, my user name has no significance.
Plan
Bicycling-related articles
Edit some existing articles and start some new articles relating to
cycling in and around
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. My interest is mostly about actually riding my bicycles and leading group rides, so I'm interested in articles I can put to direct use. (While I have raced bicycles, and I enjoy watching televised racing now and then, I have little interest in what seems to be the very large amount of racing-oriented article editing activity on Wikipedia from a fan's perspective. I'm primarily interested in riding bikes, putting more people on bikes, and finding ways to organize group rides so they function smoothly without requiring massive inputs of volunteer human labor. Documenting the exploits of a tiny genetically-gifted elite class of cyclists is a task I happily leave to others.) Related tasks include:
To the
Little Miami Scenic Trail article, add links to more articles that are about various things along the Trail (towns, parks, bridges, historical sites, etc.). To those articles, add links back to the
Little Miami Scenic Trail article.
I do as much riding on roads as on trails, but it's harder to know what I could write about roads which would be suitable for Wikipedia articles. Bike trails exist as distinct entities with a clearly-defined function, making it easy to write about them. In contrast, a typical road cycling route consists of many (dozens) of secondary roads; the cyclist typically rides a relatively short distance on each road and then turns onto another. The route is not a distinct, named geographical entity which lends itself to an article. Think about this.
It would be nice to work all the information in the
OKI Bicycle Route Maps into a Wikipedia article, somehow, but the information is inherently geographical and would only make sense as a large, annotated road map. I haven't seen a Wikipedia article yet that presents information that way. However, it would be nice to have a Wiki-like way to enable large numbers of cyclists to contribute their local knowledge of roads. Wikipedia itself does not seem suitable for this, as it would probably amount to
original work.
Participate in discussion about how to categorize pages which are about bicycle trails, rides, organizations, etc.
Learn about templates.
Learn about maps. Wikipedia seems to have no built-in mapping or GIS tools, at least not that I have found, but there are templates for linking to external map sites. For example:
Wikipedia:Coordinate-referenced_map_templates.
I recently stumbled across
OpenStreetMap which may be a way to do some of the geographic stuff I'd like to do. 21:06, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
I also have interest in
computing, both for work and recreation. When I see a way to improve an article about something relating to computing, I take a stab at it. I noticed that Wikipedia seems to have articles that define almost every computing concept and term. Many articles about software and so on seem to require the reader to have an extensive background in computing. I found that simply by hyperlinking every jargon term in such an article to the articles defining them, the article immediately becomes more understandable. Anyone lacking the background to understand the jargon in such an article can simply click a few links and go get it. I have not looked to see whether a
WikiProject exists to go through all the computing articles and make sure all their jargon terms have sufficient definitive hyperlinks. If there is no such project, it might be useful to start. 21:06, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
Little Miami Scenic Trail -- needs more content to cover recent additions to the Trail at both the south and north ends. The existing article about the Trail has (as of 21:34, 12 May 2006 (UTC)) the somewhat unfortunate title:
Little Miami Bike Trail. The vast majority of references to this Trail on the Web, on printed maps, and in brochures from various government agents call it the
Little Miami Scenic Trail. For example:
04:15, 28 January 2007 (UTC):
Web mapping had a high ratio of
jargon to
links when I first read it. It's a survey article, so it briefly mentions many jargon terms which have
Wikipedia articles. I'm adding links on as many jargon terms as I can find defining articles for.
Aphorisms
These are some
aphorisms I have written. Generally they will suck. I don't know whether I am the
first to say any of them. I may never have had a truly original thought, for
all I know. It's a big world.
Most of the material in the videos applies to any MediaWiki site, including
Wikipedia. The videos could be better, but they are not bad, and I
recommend them for wiki beginners as an easy way to get a quick overview
of how to edit on Wikipedia.
Hi-resolution .avi files
You may prefer to download the video files to view directly rather
than from the wiki page in
the previous section.
Here are direct links:
The above videos use the
x264 codec (a
lossless codec which
reproduces
screen shots clearly); to view the videos,
you may need to install one of these video players:
If you want to watch all the videos sequentially, you can download them to a
directory on your computer (for example, in
Microsoft Windows: C:\JUNK), and make
a playlist file for
VLC media player (for example,
C:\JUNK\mediawiki_video.m3u). In the playlist file, edit a
list of your video files in the order you want them to play:
and then you can open your playlist file in VLC media player via the usual
File | Open... command.
Low-resolution .mov files
If you don't want to install
VLC media player,
you can download lower-resolution (but still fairly legible) versions
of the videos in
QuickTime format from
Revver:
This is a Wikipediauser page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a
mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Teratornis.
User pages on other wikis
Meta (
wikiindex:Wikimedia Meta-Wiki) is auxiliary to all
Wikimedia Foundation projects.
My contributions to Meta include edits to the
MediaWiki manuals
and troubleshooting guides. I read the manuals to
solve problems with Wikipedia, and when I see a way to improve
the manuals, I do.
MediaWiki.org (
wikiindex:MediaWiki) is the
official site for the
MediaWiki software that powers
Wikipedia
(and
thousands of other wikis).
My contributions to MediaWiki.org include some edits I made originally
on
Meta to pages that later moved to MediaWiki.org -
when those pages moved, my edits moved along with them. Thus my
contributions on MediaWiki.org
contained a number of edits before I had actually registered my username
there (that seemed a bit strange until I understood what had happened).
OpenStreetMap (
wikiindex:OpenStreetMap) is a collaborative project to create
freemaps using data from portable
GPS
devices. I have some recreational interest in maps. I haven't actually
done any map-making for OpenStreetMap as of 18:42, 20 November 2006 (EST), but I did some edits on
the OpenStreetMap wiki, to categorize pages and so on.
You can learn more about wiki editing by joining a wiki in some area
of your interest. Thousands of public wikis exist, so you can probably
find some you like. See for example: