User:Teratornis

This user has rollback rights on the English Wikipedia.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Welcome to my

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.

As of 08:45, 6 November 2008 (UTC), most of my recent

Electricity generation
.

Some pages I refer to often enough to make them worth writing down here:

Useful searches

Subpages

I don't mind being called an "ass hat," but it doesn't tell me anything I don't already know.

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.

Essays in fairly good shape

Essays in appallingly rough shape

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.

  • 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.)
  • Brooks' law
    , Wikipedia should be getting less efficient as more people join the project, yet this does not seem to happen. Here's what I think about why.

Notes

  • Help desk
    , based on my experiences as a helper there.
  • 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.

Miscellaneous

  • Barnstars
    I have given and received.

Sandboxes

These are pages for testing, usually things like templates, or when I want to see how some

wikitext
markup works.

In case I missed any

New pages I started

The

navigation template
, and many Wikipedia articles have none yet.

Articles

The

deleted
.

06:28, 23 March 2010 (UTC): I could try the

Help desk
.

Redirects

Templates

I started these

red
:

Categories

Project: namespace

A brief history of my wiki time

  • I started editing on
    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
      WP:NEO
      ). So please imagine I did not just write this paragraph.
  • I slowly realized the usefulness of
    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.
  • As of 18:04, 7 September 2006 (UTC) I am learning how to be a
    MediaWiki administrator
    .
  • 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 "

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

  • Edit some existing articles and start some new articles relating to
    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.
    • Bring the Cincinnati-area Trail articles up to the standard proposed by: Tom guyette in his talk page comment and exemplified in his article: Arroyo Seco bicycle path.
    • 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.
    • Write some new articles about bicycling in
      Bicycling in Chicago. Start an article: Bicycling in Cincinnati and create stub articles
      for some or all of the bicycle organizations, rides, trails, routes, etc., that I mention.
    • Recruit other cyclists from Cincinnati to join WikiProject Cycling.
  • Participate in discussion about how to categorize pages which are about bicycle trails, rides, organizations, etc.
  • Learn about templates.
  • I may also contribute to the general-interest articles relating to cycling.

Articles relating to Computing

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)

Energy

I'm also interested in energy, specifically topics relating to Renewable energy and Peak oil. See my notes in User:Teratornis/Energy.

Existing articles I have edited

My early edits included:

I made an article:

Little Miami Bike Trail a redirect
to it. I solicit comments from anyone with interest.

Some not-so-recent editing

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.

  • On Wikipedia's rules:
    • Whenever someone cites a rule to justify doing anything to any article, any number of other articles are simultaneously violating that rule.

To-do: add more as I think of them.

MediaWiki training videos

An administrator of a public wiki recorded some MediaWiki training videos, to help people learn how to edit on his wiki:

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: 

C:\junk\001-intro.avi
C:\junk\002-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi
C:\junk\003-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi
C:\junk\004-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi
C:\junk\005-shortcuts-and-interwiki-links.avi
C:\junk\006-wikitext-markup.avi
C:\junk\007-wikitext-markup.avi
C:\junk\008-wikitext-markup.avi
C:\junk\009-wikitext-markup-lists.avi
C:\junk\010-wikitext-markup-links.avi
C:\junk\011-wikitext-markup-links.avi
C:\junk\012-wikitext-markup-tables.avi
C:\junk\013-wikitext-markup-templates.avi

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
:

WikiProjects I have joined


User pages on other wikis

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:

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