User: Nickj

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Greetings. My name is Nick. I live and work in the inner west of Sydney, Australia. I write, sell, and support software for a living.

Stuff I'm most interested in includes:

Projects

Current main interest is the Link Suggester and LinkBot - a project to suggest useful wiki links on the talk page of articles.
As a related project of suggesting links, the code for this needs to examine the wiki syntax of a page. It logs any pages that have malformed wiki syntax, such as malformed brackets. The project to get these problems fixed has grown and evolved to become the Wiki Syntax Project.

Articles

I award Nickj a barnstar for his incredibly excellent work on the Sydney suburb of Summer Hill! Personally, I reckon this is at featured suburb status :-)
Ta bu shi da yu 13:39, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Suburbs of the inner-west, as part of the Sydney Suburbs WikiProject. I'm starting with Summer Hill, and considering adding one of the following neighbouring suburbs next if that goes OK:
- Ashfield ; Have made a very rough start on this.
- Previously added Haberfield, but it really needs to be expanded; Can research with the Haberfield Society.
- Leichhardt.
- Lewisham. See Marrickville Heritage Society, Marrickville Road; Also see book by Chris Meader; Also Petersham Council maintains an archives in the local studies library, in the Old Marricville Town Hall.
- Dulwich Hill ; Can research with Canterbury Historical Society, who open 1st Saturday afternoon of each month, in the premises in a house in Church Street, Canterbury.
- Croydon - Needs disamgiuation page (redirects to UK Croydon currently); See Burwood Historical Society.
My girlfriend and I have a maine coon cat. They're an interesting breed - they're smart for one thing, and they're naughty too (e.g. whilst fast asleep, try being jumped on at 4 AM from a height of 8 feet by a 7 kilo cat - you wake up pretty quick).
Most articles involving Australia I'm happy to proof-read, if I've got time (which lately I tend not to). E.g. articles on the Australian wikipedian's noticeboard.

Possible future projects

These things are just ideas that interest me at the moment - nothing has been done on them yet - rather they're things I may do in the future.

Autocreate useful redirects and/or disambiguation pages.
- Redirects: I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be possible to create useful redirects and disambiguation pages from the data that we have already got in the Wikipedia. How? Well, consider any link where the label and target are different. For example: "November 2004 - [[George W. Bush|dubya]] re-elected". Now, one way of interpreting this is that the author of that bit of text thinks that "dubya" should be a redirect to "George W. Bush". In this case, there already is such a redirect - but what if there wasn't? Suppose this same thing happened enough times (say in 3 or more articles), all unanimously suggesting that "dubya" should be a redirect to "George W. Bush". Surely then we would have enough information to automatically create that redirect.
- Disambiguation: Now take another example, where people think the same links should point to different places. Suppose that in one article we find this: "[[Sydney|best city in Australia]]", and in another article we find this "[[Melbourne|best city in Australia]]", and some else writes this: "[[Canberra|best city in Australia]]". Then, just from this information, we can look to see if there is a page for "best city in Australia" (there isn't), and then we can create one, as a disambiguation page that says:

 '''Best city is Australia''' is either:
 * [[Sydney]]
 * [[Melbourne]]
 * [[Canberra]]
 {{disambig}}

Of course, I'm using this disambiguation page as a simple example, but hopefully it makes the point that it may well be possible to automatically fill in the blanks, using the information and content that we already have in the Wikipedia. Note: If there is already a page (any kind of page) at the target location, then in this idea it would leave those things alone - i.e. it would only add missing pages, and not modify any existing pages.

One thing I'd like to do (and I must strongly emphasise that this is just an idea at this stage, at the end of very long list of things to!) is this: HTML validate the entire English Wikipedia (and produce a list of all the errors, same as for the Wiki things). This should get every mismatched div tag, every stuffed HTML table, every bad HTML entity - the whole enchilada across the whole Wikipedia. I see this (for the HTML side) + the what the Wiki Syntax does already (for the wiki side) as being the ultimate combination for these types of problems.

Misc

Wiki contribs by Bec.
My homepage.
~~No longer interested in fixing pages with bad titles.~~
List of Wikipedians by number of edits.
Sandbox for me to test stuff.

My Wiki Timeline

19 Aug 2004: My first logged-in edit.
Made my 1000th edit some time on 6th Nov 2004 as part of the second batch of the Wiki Syntax project.

Licensing

I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

	Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.

Open Encyclopedia