User:Eisnel

Who am I?
I'm just some guy in Minneapolis, Minnesota (originally of Tucson, Arizona), who is staying up way too late editing Wikipedia pages (update: I haven't done much updating recently; I guess I've been distracted).

I joined Wikipedia on June 4th, 2004. I was playing around with the Wars of the Roses article, and figured it would be more efficient if I had an account. The rest is history. I have been an on-again, off-again Wikipedia editor.

One of my favorite movies, Dave, is named after me.

On weekdays, I'm a computer programmer by day and an avid sleeper by night (where night == 3am to 11am). In between I edit Wikipedia, listen to the Aubreyad on my iPod (I never learned to read), and watch Food Network in order to cook whatever Alton Brown tells me to. Up until a few months ago I was an avid World of Warcraft player, but I mysteriously stopped... I hope to return someday, a few of my friends are addicts and they want me back (update: I went back, then they stopped, go figure).

On weekends I sleep all day and drink all night. "Sunday" is synonymous with "hangover" for me.

Userboxes
I'll hop on this userbox bandwagon:

My Wiki personality type
WikiGnome | Eventualist | Communalist

What I love about Wikipedia is the fact that I learn so much while updating articles. I try to make it a point of not working on articles that are related to my work (computer programming). That way, when I work on an article, I'm often forced to learn about a whole new subject that I've had little or no exposure to. In this sense, I'm not at all the Lazy Thinker type.

A user named Architeuthis introduced me to a concept called WikiGnome, which I fit nicely, IMO. I don't often have grand ideas for new articles. Rather, I like to surf around until I find something interesting that's in need of an update or cleanup. Some of the time I'll heavily research an article and greatly expand it. But most of the time I make Stupid Little Edits, and I'm proud of it. I fit the profile of the Dabbler pretty well, except for one thing: I'll almost never create a new stub article. If I'm going to do something as significant as create an article, I'm going to go all out. This must be why I create very few articles (other than redirects, of course). =o)

I'm very non-confrontational, and as such I've never been in an edit war. As much as I don't like intentionally rocking the boat, I'm not afraid to be be bold when I do find an article that begs for my attention. Occasionally I'll stray into one of the highly disputed articles that's causing tension, but I usually don't stay there long. I'll add a comment to a heated debate occasionally, but generally I won't keep up any sort of argument that I deem to have become too emotional. As such, I relegate myself to the alleyways and dirt paths of Wikipedia, diligently working on articles that nobody is going to make a big fuss over. For this reason, I doubt I'll attract much attention here on Wikipedia. Oh well, such is life.

I consider myself a moderate Eventualist, and I have a pretty high degree of Wikifaith. However, this doesn't mean that I'm an Inclusionist; I'm not a Deletionist either, I fall somewhere in the middle. Rather, my eventualism manifests itself thusly: I'm an advocate of making wiki links from things that should be articles, even if they just create a red link at the moment. I'm troubled by what I percieve as a steep decline in the number of red links out there. Of course, this is party due to Wikipedia nearly doubling in the number of official articles, which is good. But I suspect a lot of red links have been removed simply because people thought they looked bad. Red links encourage submissions, they beg to be filled in, and I fear that their premature removal hurts our project.

I'm also a Communalist; I'm fairly anti-Authorism. Sometimes I'll come across an article that seems to be "owned" by a small group of editors who make it very difficult for others to contribute to their page. However, I realize that sometimes, through Darwikinism, a community of editors cooperate to keep a fairly evolved and robust article in pristine condition by applying a high standard to new edits. Sometimes this works out very well. It's a very fine line. I pity the controversial articles that are left in a perpetual state of mediocrity because the editors that hawkishly watch them for POV prevent them from evolving into beautiful articles. My anti-Authorism has a limit though: I don't like the Snoot, the editor who completely rewrites a popular and well formed article without any consensus from the Talk page. I'll Snoot stub articles, or small neglected ones that are nearly stubs, but I have to admit that it pains me to see a page that I and countless others have contributed to and taken pride in suddenly get a total rewrite, effectively throwing away all that work by other authors. Actually, completely rewriting established articles like that may be a sort of Authorism through usurpation.

Modus operandi
My usual method of finding articles to edit is to use the Random Page link. Sometimes I venture over to Recent Changes and find needy articles that way. Occasionally I dip into VfD to let my voice be heard... although I usually just end up making korny jokes.

Article licensing
I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of licensing in general or Ram-Man's dual licensing drive in particular, but if it makes Wikipedia more open, then I'll gladly dual license anything I do here. I also want to make sure that my work is compatible with any future copyleft licenses that Wikipedia adopts, as long as it maintains the GFDL's spirit of free and open content. So, taking a hint from Ram-Man's page:

All English Wikipedia main, main talk, and template namespace articles or edits produced by Eisnel are dual licensed as described below. Any other namespace (such as Wikipedia:) is excluded. This license is retroactive, however, I reserve the right to cease using the dual license at any time by removing this notice from my page. The most recent notice shall have priority.

My user pages

 * Useful links
 * Things to do

Selected articles I've worked on
This is by no means a complete list, not even close. These are just ones that I felt good about, prompting me to stop over here and make a note of it. ''Lately, I haven't been updating this list much. Oh well.''


 * 1644 (diff)
 * A Song of Ice and Fire - What a great series! Quite possibly the best fantasy series ever.
 * Aidan of Lindisfarne (Saint Aidan) - found this out of the blue, researched and added a bunch of stuff.
 * ANSARI X PRIZE
 * Anti-aging - one of my first Wikipedia edits, all I did was make a REDIRECT to Life extension, but Meelar thanked (and welcomed) me. I guess I'm easily pleased. =o)
 * Apep - demon from Egyptian mythology
 * August 29 (diff)
 * Bird Girl - Added a bunch of info to this. I think this is representitive of what I do here: find little, out-of-the-way articles that few will ever care about, and give them life.
 * Buys-Ballot's law - I do not often create new articles, it's generally not my style. This article made the Main Page's "Did You Know" section hours after I created it. Boy was I ever surprised!
 * Charlton Heston (diff)
 * Colin Kelly
 * Corin Nemec - from Parker Lewis Can't Lose.
 * Golden ratio - made the graphic in Freehand (Image:Golden ratio line.png). Sadly, it's being pushed lower and lower on the page.
 * Greek alphabet - just helping fix the copyvio problem... hope I didn't cause more harm than good.
 * GURPS Cyberpunk - mainly about the Secret Service confiscating it.
 * Harry Potter - after a while I stopped trying, too many people mess with this page.
 * Immortality - one of my first edits (don't judge me too harshly... I was young!)
 * Liliane Bettencourt - another one I found using the Special:Randompage button and felt compelled to research.
 * Lin Newborn - I should have performed the same update to the Daniel Shersty article. Since the two articles are so similar, I ran into my aversion to doing the same work twice.
 * List of dragons - cuz I'm a nerd (someone cut out all of my Shadowrun dragons shortly after I added them... oh well).
 * L'Oréal - no, I don't use make-up or care about make-up, but I just had to add to this after working on Liliane Bettencourt.
 * Mall of America - I go there a lot (to the place, not the article).
 * Operation Sundevil
 * Penn & Teller: Bullshit! - I don't always agree with them, but I admire their show nonetheless.
 * President (game) - Just played this over Memorial Day weekend... damn it gets you messed up!
 * Ringworld - plot synopsis update. Could still use more work.
 * September 10
 * Sharon Osbourne
 * Sleeper hit - wrote this one up from a tiny stub.
 * small-l libertarianism - I had never heard of the concept before, interesting stuff.
 * Smok Wawelski - dragon from Polish mythology. One of the articles I've started from scratch (a good chunk of it had already been started in the List of Dragons article). It's the Polish Collaboration of the Week.
 * SpaceShipOne - made the nifty little test flight table (that formatting has since been removed, which is probably good, it was gaudy).
 * Steve Guttenberg - Started this article. Can you believe he wasn't in the Wikipedia?
 * There's Something About Mary
 * Timocharis - I didn't do much here, but there's more than there was before.
 * United States v. Ross - did a big write-up on this, it was a one sentence stub. Interesting stuff!
 * USS Enterprise (1775) - pretty cool history of that name. Still some uncertainty about the original name of the British ship.
 * Wars of the Roses - one of my first edits. I still want to re-do that chart (nm, someone else took care of that).