User:Benc/About me

About me

 * Name: Ben
 * Age: twenty-something
 * Alma mater: Virginia Tech (B.S., computer science)
 * Wikipedian editor since late June 2004; occasional reader since 2002

Random factoids

 * I don't spell-check my entries (althoug i amprety good speling)
 * For a while, I thought that "rv" meant "revert vandalism". I'm glad we don't have as much vandalism as I first thought!

Wikistats
I probably need to take a Wikivacation.
 * According to the 22 September 2004 List of Wikipedians making excessive numbers of edits, I've made:
 * 2022 edits in the article namespace (420th highest of all editors)
 * 4309 edits in all namespaces (271st highest of all editors)
 * 46.9% of my edits were in the article namespace


 * Wikipediholic score: 158.5 as of late August 2004. The test is constantly growing, though, so if I retook it now my score would probably be higher. FWIW, I haven't added any questions to the test, myself. :-)
 * I wrote edit counting to convince myself to stop visiting Wikipedians by number of edits. I was partially successful.
 * I have a relatively high edit count, I think, because (1) I do a lot of grunt work, and (2) I try to use the show preview function, but I almost always find a word I want to change after saving. Argh! Stop edit counting!

Verbosity
I'm verbose. I tend to write more than is strictly necessary. I write too much stuff. I need to write less.
 * Perhaps unsurprisingly given that I tend to wax verbose from time to time, I am also somewhat of an anti-deletionist. So many articles on VfD would be better sent to cleanup... or better yet, cleaned instead of nominated at all!
 * Also unsurprisingly, I tend to not create stubs. If I'm going to start an article, I research it and write a full-length article. If I'm not up to it, I make sure there are at least two or three of those lovely red links pointing to the needed article.

Interests

 * 24, the only TV show I've ever watched religiously
 * American football, mainly at the college level, but I'm a 'Skins fan, too
 * Artificial intelligence
 * Automata theory
 * History of the English language
 * Genetic algorithms
 * Linguistics
 * Literature
 * Mathematical logic
 * Mathematics in general
 * Number theory
 * And anything else that strikes my fancy :-)

Programming languages
My favorite computer programming languages:
 * 1) Python (see the scripts I've written for cyborg wiki'ing)
 * 2) SQL
 * 3) C++
 * 4) PHP
 * 5) JavaScript, which actually has surprisingly functional support for OOP. Too bad its name has been forever sullied by pop-up advertisers.

Notably absent from the above list: Java. I like OOP, but Java's bloat? Feh!