User:Seth Ilys

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The Ant

an ant

The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.

So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?


-- Ogden Nash

Me

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S2b-wc.jpg
Me, circa 8:30 p.m., 25 March 2005.

Seth Ilys (leave a message at the sound of the tone (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Seth_Ilys&action=edit&section=new)) is

  • "...just another guy with weird philisophical objections... which I cannot profess to understand." - Fennec
  • in agreement with Jengod in saying "Semicolons are my favoritest punctuation..."
  • one of the "oddly freakish people who are exceptional." - User:Menchi
  • "prefer[s] to work behind the scenes. The reward is nearly as great, and the risk far, far less." - Londo Mollari, in Babylon 5: "The Coming of Shadows," written by J. Michael Straczynski

You can reach me by posting a message on my Wikipedia talk page (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Seth_Ilys&action=edit&section=new), sending an email to seth (dot) ilys (at) gmail (dot) com, catching me on IM (AOL, MSN, Yahoo) as JehanneDaix, or finding me in the wikipedia IRC chatroom on Freenode (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_channels),

Seth's Wikipedia Policy Trifecta

These should be all the basic rules we need. In fact, it's probably overkill. See Wikipedia:Policy trifecta for a public restatement of these.

(Credit to Ayn Rand for style)

Important corollaries to these include:

Seth's NPOV Primer

Because people tend to forget that NPOV policy is actually a positively phrased policy and not a negatively phrased one (because the N doesn't stand for No!), I thought I'd paraphrase a familiar song as a reminder:

(credit to Cookie Monster for, well, everything)

N is for Neutral. That's good enough for me.
N is for Neutral. That's good enough for me.
N is for Neutral. That's good enough for me.
Neutral, neutral, neutral starts with Ni!

Wikipedia Meets Real Life

  • Everyone on Wikipedia should read Charles van Doren's 1963 essay "The Idea of an Encyclopedia." Since it's kinda hard to come by, I've posted illegal (copyvio) pics of it here: 1 (http://img177.echo.cx/img177/6052/vandoren13qn.jpg), 2 (http://img177.echo.cx/img177/9918/vandoren29ks.jpg), 3 (http://img177.echo.cx/img177/171/vandoren30lh.jpg), 4 (http://img177.echo.cx/img177/9131/vandoren42az.jpg), 5 (http://img177.echo.cx/img177/885/vandoren52gq.jpg), 6 (http://img233.echo.cx/img233/8328/vandoren69sp.jpg).
  • I was profiled in Daniel Teridman's 8 March 2005 Wired News article "Wiki Becomes a Way of Life (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66814,00.html/wn_ascii)" and was one of the Raleigh Independent Weekly's (http://www.indyweek.com/) Our Favorite Geeks (http://indyweek.com/durham/current/cover2.html) on 6 April 2004 (article scan (http://img102.exs.cx/img102/5062/independentarticle8br.png)).
  • I was at the I.T. Littleton Seminar (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/news/libraries.php?p=959&more=1) at NCSU on April 13, where Blaise Cronin (http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/cronin/) will speak on “Who Dunnit? Agency, Attribution, and Authority in an Age of Hyperauthorship.” I had a nice little chat with him afterwards, too. See my rough notes and a blog post (http://somewhereindurham.blogspot.com/2005/04/quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes.html) on the lecture.
  • I intend to make it to the May 2005 D.C. Meetup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup#Wikipedians_of_the_East_Coast_field_trip), and would like to but probably won't make the August 2005 Wikimania conference (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Main_Page) in Frankfurt (because of the horrendous cost of airfare).

Works in Progress



Major Projects

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Usinprogress.PNG


  • 2005 College of Cardinals: wrote articles for every remaning cardinal elector at the 2005 papal conclave (April 2005)
  • U.S. County Redirects: created redirects and disambiguation pages from "Name County" to "Name County, State," for all U.S. counties. (completed, late March 2004)
  • North Carolina General Assembly: stub bios of all current NCGA members, with pics. (completed, early February 2004)
  • U.S. Executions since 1976: list of all executed prisoners in the U.S. since 1976, by state. (completed, December 2003)

Catalysis

Barnstar.png
Nobody has given you a BarnStar! Insane. Do I need to even give a reason? This (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_most_recent_edit&oldid=3467860) says it all really. Thanks! Tom- 23:13, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
Image:Barn star free zone.png
Aside from the above, this page is a Barnstar-free zone. - Seth Ilys 12:21, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

One of the things that Wikipedia demonstrates amazingly well, as people have noted, is the power of collaborative journalism; our articles on breaking news events tend to become very good, very quickly. As something of a news junkie, I like to think that I've helped pushed a few of these articles along in their infancy and that the community has made them great. Some of the articles I'm proudest of that I had a hand in catalyzing at their creation:

Articles that I'm also proud of that weren't breaking news:


Wikipedia Signal-to-Noise Statistics

As I (used to) spend a good deal of time at Special:Newpages patrolling new article additions, I thought I'd generate some statistics as to how much what content is being added (at least, in brand-new articles). The results of my completely unscientific study are summarized in the table below and are surprisingly encouraging. I'll continue to add to the data over time, so hopefully the ratios will steady-out eventually. (These data are from early 2004. I'll try to do this again sometime during summer 2005).

  Stubs: Articles:
Competent: 50 31
Halfway: 20 13
Lacking: 6 2
Garbage: 20
Vanity: 2
Copyvios: 4

Another interesting statistic regards who creates new articles. From a casual glance at Newpages, there are three broad classes of users: anyonymous users (shown as IP addresses), logged in users without userpages (usually relatively new Wikipedians), and logged in users with userpages (usually more experienced Wikipedians. Page creation breakdowns run roughly thus:

Anons: 44
No-pages: 33
Pages: 52

Copyrights

I have a hard time coming up with any moral or practical justification for copyright law. Because of that, and because Wikipedia is a free project, you can use any of my text submissions to Wikipedia freely, with no restrictions, or you can apply the GFDL, or CC-By-Sa, or any other free or copyleft license, at your discretion. I try to remember to tag all the images I take myself as public domain, but some (like the dot-maps) are adapted from other (more restricted) sources. When in doubt, ask me, and I'll probably tell you it's PD.

Template:MultiLicensePD Template:MultiLicenseWithCC-BySA-Any Template:WikimediaTextLicensing

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