I edit articles on a pretty wide variety of topics. I usually come across topics because they caught my interest or because I wanted to check or learn something, not because I have any special expertise. I try to be careful with my contributions, and the slightest change takes me forever, but I still screw up sometimes, so apologies for any mistakes I make, and thank you for correcting them!
I live in Paris, France, and Taipei, Taiwan. I'm American, quite a bit French, half German, and 1/12th Spanish by repeated summer residence (if that makes any sense -- they are overlapping categories).
I work as a computer programmer, and occasionally as a translator. I studied science, and majored in philosophy, a long time ago.
Variation on edit count: view counts. Answering questions such as: how many total views have there been for the pages I created? How about for those I edited?
Emacs major mode for editing Wikipedia articles. Works well with the It's All Text! Firefox extension. Swore I would use this when a Firefox crash made me lose an entire article I had written on Forbidden Planet writer Irving Block. I don't like submitting many edits.
Assist in the generation of reference tags, written by Magnus Manske. Could make it handier as a bookmarklet. I keep forgetting to use this. The nitty-gritty of citing sources is such a pain. Anyway here's a simple bookmarklet that creates a reference from a web page, using the page URL, title, and selected text, if any: javascript:(function(){ var sel=''+(window.getSelection ? window.getSelection() : document.getSelection ? document.getSelection() : document.selection.createRange().text); var remoteWin=window.open('','','resizable=yes,width=500,height=300,left=508,top=122'); remoteWin.document.write('<html><body>'); remoteWin.document.write('<ref>'+'['+location.href+' "'+document.title+'"] '+sel+'</ref>'); })();
Access lots of interesting info without that pesky UI. For example, here are lists of what's being edited right now in different languages: enfrdeeszhru (more here). And here lists of just the new articles: enfrdeeszhru.
Determine who is responsible for a specific fragment of an article. Seems to be simpler and to work much better than WikiBlame below. Props to User:X!, who also runs one of the edit counters mentioned above.
Determine who did what when. Interface could be better though. Ideally I could select some text in an article, click on a bookmarklet or button, and get the first revision where the text appeared.
Enhanced text processing functions to edit pages in Firefox, using Javascript and a rich-text edit box. Impressive, but probably too fancy for me, and a bit slow, so I disabled it. I find editing articles hard due to the syntax and all. I'm still looking for a tool that makes it real easy, for example, to dash off a new article. It would make easy: imitating other similar articles, putting in the right categories, with the right templates, links to other languages, etc. Also I'd really love something that would simplify making references.
Hmm, dunno about those buttons, or userboxes or whatever those are... Like many things on Wikipedia, they're a pain to use. Click, scroll, copy, change page, paste, repeat... If there was one page where I could quickly select those that I want... Still, kind of a neat way to explore the Wikipedia universe. Makes me think of Scout badges... They're apparently controversial.
