Hosta

I'm a member of Wikimedia UK We are a group of local Wikimedians helping to create "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Love Wikimedia? Live in the UK? Donate, Volunteer, and Get Involved!

Activities

• GLAMWiki UK collaborations
  • QRpedia (see Wikiproject QRpedia)
• improving Wikipedia's emission of metadata, including:
  • Adding Microformats to Wikipedia; see the Microformats Project
  • Facilitating Linked Data, via DBpedia; chiefly by using Infoboxes, and by disambiguating both their parameters; and our articles (see my blog post on the latter subject)
  • Considering the implictons of Schema.org
• Improving the accessibility of Wikipedia
• Improving Wikipedia's compliance with HTML standards
  • Adding the necessary CSS to be able to produce horizontal lists using proper mark-up
• Improving, standardising and rationalising templates; especially infoboxes (which also contribute to our metadata - see above)
• Resolving the issue of how to mark up dates and times which are "fuzzy" (imprecise) or in pre-Gregorian calendars (chiefly Julian)
  • including work on the HTML5 <TIME> element, and the Extended Date/ Time Format efforts.
• geotagging articles,
  • including how we do so for linear features
  • …and multiple points of interest in an individual article
  • developing systems for marking up non-terrestrial (lunar, Martian, etc) coordinates
• 20th century British ornithologists
• Anything related to Birmingham
• Gently reminding wikiprojects that it's a core policy that that don't own sections of Wikipedia.*
• Articles, templates and categories I've created (list is far from complete)
• My edit count on all Wikimedia projects (slow to load)

Ethos

I can't put this better than…

I agree with standardizing everything we can (and if it were up to me, we wouldn't have customizable signatures, but that's a different issue), because ultimately we would like to reduce the chore of building Wikipedia to a (necessarily very complex) algorithm. The more orderly Wikipedia becomes, the more tasks we can reliably relegate to bots, eliminating tedium and keeping the human work more conducive to generating the pleasurable sensations of flow. Teratornis, 11 Jan 09

and:

Contentions need proper sorting, not cop-out guidance. Jack Merridew 22 Aug 2010

Principles

A few things which I believe:

• Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikivoyage and other so called "sister projects" should be seen as parts of one project, and more tightly integrated.
• Wikivoyage should include Wikipedia links to individual features (e.g. museums, bridges), mentioned in its listings, where such articles exist
• There should, eventually, be a Wikidata entity for every source cited on Wikipedia and sister projects; and each citation should call that entity, adding page numbers and quotes as appropriate.

Guidelines

• WP:Advice pages

Essays

• My thoughts on Persondata
• Templates of Redundancy Templates
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Signatures (work in progress)

Infoboxes

"Eye-tracking study: Wikipedia readers look at table of contents first, then infobox, 'skim and scroll' long articles"; "many readers look only at the information box, summary text, lists, sub titles, references, or maybe only keywords": Full paper.

Wikipedia activity

• Pigsonthewing · (talk · contribs · deleted · cross-wiki · wikichecker· count · pages created · logs · lu · search an, ani, cn, an3)

IP

• All edits by 81.5.140.5 (talk · contribs) before 13 April 2010 are mine.
• All edits by 93.97.168.150 (talk · contribs) from 14 April 2010 are mine.

Articles I want

• Erebus555 has some good ideas!
• Disused railway stations of the West Midlands county
• West Midlands county
• British Birds Rarities Committee members
• Ornithologists
• Ornithological books
• Norman Hickin
• Shire Publications
• Something about adaptation to life at high altitude

Web for all

I believe strongly in adherence to web standards, making web pages as accessible as possible, to everyone, and that it's important to communicate using the simplest language necessary, to convey ideas clearly.

Browsing

I usually surf with Chrome (formerly I used FireFox, using Operator for parsing microformats)), and sometimes other browsers, under Windows XP, on a 10" Lenovo netbook. I also use an HTC Desire HD mobile device, which is superb.

Overall

…I'd rather be out bird-watching.

Contributions

Debate

If you wish to persuade me of something, the higher you are on this diagram, the more likely you are to succeed:

Warning