User:Alvestrand

Note on languages: I can read Danish, Swedish and Nynorsk pretty fluently (especially nynorsk) - everyone who speaks Norwegian will do, because of how closely the languages are related. But asking me to write Danish and Swedish will be a disaster. In German, which I've studied for years in high school, I get the sense of the text, more or less.

If you want to know more about who I am, check out *blush* Harald Tveit Alvestrand.

Projects
These days, I don't do much Wikipedia stuff - I've been working over at Geni.com instead.

But most of my on-Wiki time is spent on Find-A-Grave famous people - which started as a list of ~46.000 persons that might or might not have a Wikipedia article, now whittled down to ~13.000 names of people who probably don't have one. I regard this as a perfect channel for the "do something else" urge that tends to strike at inopportune moments - you can do a worthwhile effort (like search for a person under different spellings and note the result) in a minute or two while waiting for something to compile, or you can check out fifty while lending an ear to the evening news.

Other projects I've been dabbling in:


 * Linking all looose pages starting with T
 * Looking at dead people starting with T (see /Find-A-Grave)
 * Why not T missing articles?
 * Keep an eye on Dead-end pages/P-T
 * Wikify pages needing wikification at T
 * Merge tags left around for a while starting at T
 * Perhaps I should consider the T's in Category:Articles with topics of unclear notability? Check User:Alvestrand/Notability.
 * Remove disambiguation pages from Special:Lonelypages
 * Grappling with Category:All unreferenced BLPs, which is a disaster waiting to happen solved problem - see /Unreferenced BLPs

The only excuse for my obsession with that particular letter is my middle name....

I have promised to help with:


 * Copyright problems and Suspected copyright violations

Also (things that I note here so that I do not forget):


 * Trying to document that Aage Kvalbein satisfies the criteria at Notability (music)
 * Tracking down details on Benjamin Chew Tilghman - see /Tilghman notes
 * Wondering who Tom Kerr was, apart from a pen name for a British comics artist
 * Checking /RFC authors to see who's on Wikipedia

Contributions
Stuff I've started or significantly edited (kept here because my watchlist is too long):


 * Relativity priority dispute
 * John Seely Brown
 * List of computer size categories
 * Bell (wind)
 * Howie Weinberg
 * Royal C. Taft
 * Joanna Lee (actor) - seeing that it had been deleted as non-notable twice, I did some actual work on it.
 * Gasconade Bridge train disaster
 * Charles Jasper Glidden (translated from German)
 * Tom Talbert

Pages I watch
These are pages I tend to check out when they appear on my watchlist, because of my history with them:


 * Relativity priority dispute - I became embroiled in a February 2006 dispute over Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaré and David Hilbert - my notes on the dispute are deleted, since they were felt to be inconsistent with WP:POLEMIC.
 * Unity Church - i discovered a debate on Unity Church, and became embroiled. See /Unity Church notes.
 * Photon Belt - attempting to keep the article from looking as if Wikipedia is uncritically promoting this crackpot nonsense.
 * Battle of Opis - sigh. See /Opis notes.
 * The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy - one guy keeps "rebutting" it, now as an IP-hopping anon. See /DeFrancis notes.
 * Friedwardt Winterberg - people keep on trying to hide his unfortunate LaRouche connection. /Winterberg notes.
 * Sami Yusuf - a couple of words trigger a huge amount of anger, mostly from IPs. /Sami Yusuf notes.
 * Office Open XML - since I was part of the Norwegian OOXML committee at the time of standardization (and was on the losing side of the tussle), I don't do much here. But I occasionally speak up against obvious attempts to whitewash the controversies. Notes here.

As part of copyvio stuff and dead-end pages work, I've touched a lot of pages. Some of them rather forcefully.

Latest watch: Pepe Iglesias - exists on other Wikipedia, made an extreme-stub with a translate request. Waited to see if someone picks it up before creating more from the F-A-G people with articles on other Wikipedias - it did happen, but it took 6 months. Useful as calibration.

TODO list
Learn to use cite book and cite journal and apply them to pages above

More generic: Template messages/Sources of articles

Signs of serious brain damage
On List of Wikipedians by number of edits of September 23, 2006, I was listed as #2210, with 4366 edits.


 * Nov 4, 2006: #2045 - 5262. Worse and worse.
 * Nov 30, 2006: #1892 - 5965.
 * 2007-02-09: #1798 - 7065
 * 2007-05-27: #1660 - 8956
 * 2007-08-02: #1639 - 9793
 * 2007-11-01: #1410 - 12349
 * 2008-01-20: #1251 - 14604
 * 2008-07-23: #1410 - 15462 (hooray - finally falling!)
 * 2009-02-25: #1154 - 21538 (ouch. Up again.)
 * 2009-04-22: #1134 - 22417
 * 2011-02-19: #1381 - 26,136. 2010 was a quiet year

The signs of brain damage is that I care enough to note it, and that my user page is the first place I think of to jot down that fact.... of course, number of edits are meaningless (see Editcountitis for details).

And - someone's nominated me for adminship. Successfully.

In memoriam
I used to have on my projects list:


 * Programmatically inserting names into people named T...., filling in from the list of living people starting at T - see User:Alvestrand/LoP Experiment

But after this discussion, there doesn't seem much point to continuing the work.

And some other stuff
Where else should one keep these?

no:Bruker:Alvestrand