User:Brian Olsen

My name, if you hadn't guessed from my terribly clever username, is Brian Olsen. I'm a director for theater living in New York City. I first began using Wikipedia some time ago as a research tool for shows I was working on. I took a closer look at it, and quickly became hooked on editing.

My primary interest is in the Doctor Who Wikiproject, with a few scattered interests elsewhere. When I'm bored, I fix messy links. I've also got a quickly growing interest in templates.

My user page is rather drab - it's mostly a place for me to store links I like to have easy access to. Sorry.

Feel free to leave me messages on my talk page.

Pages I've created (or significantly revamped)
I just created my first page, The God of Hell. It's a play by Sam Shepard. I saw the red link on the page for Shepard, and since I was assistant director for the original production, I figured I should try and tackle it. --August 21, 2005

Later the same day, I've created my second page, A Bright Room Called Day. It's a play by Tony Kushner. I recently directed a production of it, so it's fresh in my mind, and I've got the research materials lying about. --August 21, 2005

I just did a complete revamp of Gorilla Repertory Theatre Company. I didn't create the page, but I pretty much rewrote it (previously, it was really just the company's mission statement). I've worked with the company pretty extensively, but I think I've managed to keep a neutral point of view. --June 6, 2006
 * I pretty much stay away from this page now. I was accused of editorializing, which I don't think is fair or accurate. An anonymous user apparently complained about some of the content, and it was removed for reasons that I don't really understand. I was going to pursue it further, but the whole thing really upset me. So I'm done with it.

Created The New School for Drama, which I've been working on for a few days in my sandbox. --December 19, 2006

Template I've created
I've made a few templates for use of the Doctor Who WikiProject. They're all modifcations of existing templates, although to one of them I ultimately made some significant changes that taught me a lot about template syntax.

I created the templates Brief ep, OG ep, DWRG ep and OG review ep for use on the articles for episodes of the new series of Doctor Who. They were just shorthand for external links we put on those articles, but they put the title of the episode in quotation marks instead of italics. (The original series uses italics for serial titles.) After learning a bit more about templates, I modified the originals to be able to use either italics or quotation marks, and put my own templates up for speedy deletion.

Cite serial I'm rather proud of. I adapted it from Cite episode, but made some changes and additions to it. It's a citation template for use on television serials.

Doctorwhocitenav is for use on Doctor Who episode citation pages. I've put a lot of work into those pages - they've got all the citations for every episode of the show ready to copy and paste into an article, so that people who don't really get the citation syntax can still cite episodes properly. This template is a navigation box for the various subpages.

Images I've uploaded
Image:Grantmarkham.JPG (This was the first image I uploaded, and I wish I had formatted the name differently. It's unlikely any other article will ever link to it, though, so it's probably ok.)

Image:Ssard.jpg

Image:Stacy_Townsend.jpg

Image:Ashley_album4_web.jpg - Cape Breton musician Ashley MacIsaac. Deleted because of the more vigorous enforcement of Fair Use/Free Image guidelines. It's a fair cop.

Image:NSDlogo.jpg - the logo for The New School for Drama.

My Bookmarks
Citation templates

Template:Cite episode

Doctor Who episode citations

How to use ref tags

Template:Reflist

Template:Information

Disambiguation pages with links

Disambiguation pages maintenance

WikiProject Comics

WikiProject Theatre

WikiProject Templates

edit counter

My sandbox

Special:ExpandTemplates

Milestone edits
My very first edit, made on July 8, 2005 to Liz Shaw. Starting small. I don't believe I made any anonymous edits before this (but I could be mistaken).

My 500th edit, made on January 23, 2007 to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Doctor Who. A talk page! Boring. That's an awful long time for only five hundred edits.

My 1000th edit, made on August 13, 2007 to Talk:Method acting. Another talk page! I need to start watching for these milestone edits. The second 500 edits came faster, at least.

My 1500th edit, made on December 31, 2007 to The Daleks. Happy New Year! This was a much bigger edit (although I confess I was watching my edit counter in order to make this a good one).