User:Periglio

About me

Periglio? I needed a name and beside me was a plastic box decorated with old fashion text. I picked a word at random and signed up to Wikipedia. I have since looked up the word and it is an Italian form of the word danger. I have no idea if the box decoration was Italian or if it is just by chance that the word I picked had a meaning somewhere in the world.

This is my third Wikipedia account. I was very active a few years ago, actually adding content to articles. Some went to FA status if there were other editors actively involved. Many other article are no longer stubs thanks to my input. Eventually I hit upon fundamental flaw with Wikipedia - having to deal with other editors.

My first bad experience was with a pressure group who hijacked a bunch of articles I was working on by adding details of their publicity stunt. It turned a one line stub into a large article about their political aims, totally irrelevant to the original article subject. They knew the Wikipedia rules and because no one else cared about the articles, it was an impossible task to stop it happening. My second account was created to try and fight back, without being harassed on my main account.

After a few years of having to defend edits and articles against people using politician talk, I finally had enough and gave up editing.

A couple of years later, I'm back. I actually created this account on a peeve. People where I work decided that our company should have a Wikipedia page. Rather than asking my advice (as an experienced editor) they did it all themselves. Not sure what I was going to do with the account, but the article was quickly AfD anyway and I just chuckled to myself.

Recently I have been very active with the Persondata template, but for very esoteric reasons. I have my own database of birth/death dates extracted from Wikipedia. It was a one off curiosity exercise to see which notable people I have outlived. But as a professional and hobbyist programmer, I continued to develop my extraction, which now performs a lot of validation and has discovered a lot of old vandalism.

Update: I am now actively switching my project to Wikidata, see User:Periglio/Biography for progress.

Other links: Original persondata project and Wikidata vs Persondata analysis