User:User24
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| This is a Wikipedia user page.
This is not 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 Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:User24. |
Please click here to leave me a new (public) message.
Contents |
[edit] Vanity
My website[1] has just about everything you might want to know about me. Of significant interest would be:
- my work on CAPTCHAs, which includes:
-
- freeCap, my PHP CAPTCHA script, which has been used by mozilla on the firefox userpanel signup page (now defunct) and several other big projects
- research on breaking CAPTCHA scripts, cited by the W3C.[2] (note that at the moment, they also incorrectly cite me as the author of gimpy, which is by Mori et al.)
- gDrive, a PHP web interface used to store files on gMail. (I don't really develop this any more)
[edit] Significant Interests
- computing: PHP, mySQL, C, AI, CAPTCHAs, VB6/VB.NET, firefox
- tv/film: anime, Sherlock Holmes
- philosophy: philosophy of language, logic, AI, spinoza
- misc: knives, photography, meditation, neo-paganism
those interests in bold I feel I know enough about to add meaningful content to on wiki (but that doesn't mean I have yet, or plan to)
[edit] Wiki Ideas
an easier way to revert pages[3]- autosigning option for additions to talk pages
- automatic 'user online' or 'user last active: 21:54, 24 Oct 06' thing for user pages.
- a bad article template.
- a way to add Special:whatlinkhere/xxx to your watchlist (to aid ongoing disambiguation)
[edit] Stuff I've done / am doing here
I'm too new around here to consider myself as having a 'philosophy' regarding edits, but I'm going to list things I think are indicative of my 'style', if I have one.
- I'd rather add references/cleanup/NPOV an article, than add a template telling people it needs to be done (see wiki ideas, above).
- Deletion;
-
- If a page does not exist, and no-one needs it, that's ok*.
- If a page does not exist, and someone needs it, that's bad.
- If a page exists, and no-one needs it, that's ok.
- If a page exists, and someone needs it, that's good.
- *though I think that no pages will fit into this category; you can rarely tell what people might need.
- From the above, we can deduce that pages should only be deleted if it is certain that no-one will ever need the page as it stands right now.
- Some examples of such pages would include obvious nonsense (kerflippity), and pages with obvious notability issues (eg 'my flat', or 'user24').
[edit] Completed / Ongoing Projects
- I often revert vandalism by patrolling Recent Changes
- I sometimes go through all pages linking to a disambiguation page, and dab them if there's a more suitable page for them to link to.
- Pages I've done this to so far:
- I spent a few hours trying to dig up citations for benchmade (if Benchmade are reading this, how about a freebie for my hard work, eh?)
- I've significantly cleaned up the page for Wenger.
- Complete list of contributions
see also: my wiki bookmarks
[edit] Future Projects
- clean up and ref Phreaking
- finish cleaning Spyderco
- add a page for Nieto knives
- add a page for Hibben knives
- add a page for Boker knives
[edit] References
- ^ Howard Yeend. pureMango.co.uk. Retrieved on 2006-10-23.
- ^ Matt May (2005-11-23). Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA. w3.org. Retrieved on 2006-10-23.
- ^ an easier way to revert pages.
[edit] Rantings
- This section may very well violate WP:Civil. Bite me.
- I think userboxes are way overused, almost to the point of me wanting to rip them out of wikipedia and burn their pixels.
- I think that wikipedia suffers far too much bureaucracy and ego-pumping.
- bureaucracy
- mostly in the form of templates. it astounds me how so many edits can contribute so little.
- For instance, there is a common template for "this article doesn't cite sources". Now, I agree that articles should cite sources, but having a template for it makes it seem like only the articles with that template need citations, and the rest are fine. This is far from true. I would guess that the majority of wikipedia articles do not cite sources, or that if they do, the sources are unreliable.
- a potential situation that has no doubt occured in the past:
- editor 1 "foo is bah"
- editor 2 This article claims that "foo is bah", we need a source for that.
- editor 1 creates website stating that "foo is bah" and links wikipedia to it
- editor 2 Ok, good, carry on.
- Perhaps the <ref> syntax should include a "credibility level" indicator (eg, for UK law, web sources that are hosted at HMSO could be rated '1', those on a forum topic titled "UK Law as regards xyz" rated '3', those at Joe's page on blah that happen to mention xyz, '5').
- ego-pumping
- Perhaps myspace should offer a wiki version, maybe then most of the categories [here] might disappear... I mean honestly 'Wikipedians addicted to Wikipedia', 'Wikipedians who hope to own dogs', 'Wikipedians who use dual monitor configurations' * - there may be people who do care, I conceed, but we're trying to build an encyclopedia here, people.
- *actual examples
