User:GreenReaper

Welcome! Want general information? Try [//www.greenreaper.co.uk/ my homepage] or WikiFur's page about me. Furry photos? See [//www.flickr.com/photos/greenreaper/sets/ my Flickr sets]. Pictures? Try [//inkbunny.net/GreenReaper Inkbunny]. Professional experience? See my LinkedIn profile, and Phabricator. Questions? Ask, or email.

Wiki activities
I enjoy writing; I have a couple of good articles to my name here, and some more at Wikinews. I also help WikiProject Furry. However, most of my wiki experience has been as founder and administrator of two popular wikis — [//creatures.wikia.com Creatures Wiki] and WikiFur — on which I've spent an inordinate amount of time and made 50,000+ edits. I presented at Wikimania 2006 on the creation and maintenance of such wikis.

Wikinews
I've spent a bit of time at Wikinews - in particular, I penned Furry fans flock to Further Confusion 2007 after attending the convention; it was subsequently selected as a featured article. Later I got a for Anthrocon 2007 draws thousands to Pittsburgh for furry weekend.

Nowadays, what time I have free to spend on journalism is usually spent on furry news and features site [//www.flayrah.com/ Flayrah], which I took over in January 2010 (after three years of [ contributions] to [//www.flayrah.com/category/tags/wikifur-news WikiFur's news section]). It was voted Best Magazine in the Ursa Major Awards for 2011 and 2013, and is in Google News.

Wikibase
In 2019 I became involved with Wikibase, seeing it as WikiFur's solution for semantic data storage. By 2021 I was using [//wbstack.com WBStack] to [//furry.wiki.opencura.com/ prototype WikiFur Data], and [//twitter.com/WikiNorn/status/1374786772018794496 in doing so played] with lexemes, [//addshore.com/2021/05/wbstack-setting-changes-federated-properties-wikidata-entity-mapping-more/ mapped entities], rank-based SPARQL, and the use of Shape Expressions (EntitySchema) for validation and Cradle form-based creation – [//github.com/wbstack/mediawiki/issues/69 incidentally] [//github.com/wbstack/cradle/issues/2#issuecomment-818352157 identifying] [//github.com/wbstack/mediawiki/issues/50 various] [//github.com/wbstack/mediawiki/issues/47#issuecomment-817246495 issues]. I've worked with Wikibase developers identifying concerns around Docker/WDQS security and poking about updates, as well as [//github.com/ProfessionalWiki/WikibaseEdtf/issues/3#issuecomment-827353816 feedback] on [//github.com/ProfessionalWiki/EDTF/issues/70 time intervals] and [//github.com/ProfessionalWiki/EDTF/issues/69 a denial-of-service] with Extended Date/Time Format.

During this period I became involved with the Wikibase Community User Group, responding to support queries and development discussions on Telegram and its mailing list, and attending many meetings. Aware that its affiliate status was [//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikibase_Community_User_Group&oldid=21772952#Notification_of_User_Group_Expiration_-_Renewal_pending_submission_of_reporting at risk] due to the absence of its founders and non-filed reports, I nominated myself in July 2021 as its primary WMF contact, and was elected with unanimous support. I was interviewed by WMDE on my involvement.

Wikipedia
My main involvement with Wikipedia relates to furry fandom, including:
 * Creating furry convention to head off further creation and deletion of articles about smaller furry cons (featured on Did you know? and became a good article)
 * Spinning off list of furry conventions, which uses painful hacks to shoehorn an additional colspan row into sortable tables
 * Samuel Conway (what happens when I spend a weekend writing a biographical article - now also a good article)
 * Work on WikiProject Furry, including furry fandom, a book version and Portal:Furry (now gone - [//web.archive.org/web/20160410150923/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Furry here's what it looked like])
 * Providing free photographs for many furry topics

Much of my early time on Wikipedia was spent on the expansion and creations of articles related to my past employer. Stardock, Object Desktop, ThinkDesk, GC2: Dread Lords and most of their "children" in Stardock were largely my work as of January 2007. I also wrote most of Elemental: War of Magic and I've edited Impulse.

However, I'm not here just to write about things related to my hobbies or where I work. I've also worked on several failed initiatives - and one ironic success!


 * The addition of Visual Basic .NET to Major programming languages, which was disputed, and resulted in a [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Visual_Basic_.NET&diff=14972893&oldid=14917500 complete rewrite] of the article - after which the template was deleted.
 * Defense of Subarticleof (eventually merged to a similar template and… later deleted - well, I tried! :-)
 * Trying to get deviantART typed properly. It's getting close!
 * Portal:Portal (apparently Wikipedians still have a sense of humour, although further discussion a decade on led to a move to avoid confusion).

Creatures Wiki and WikiFur
I am a [//creatureswiki.net/wiki/User:GreenReaper co-founder] of Creatures Wiki and sole founder of WikiFur. Creatures Wiki (launched at the start of 2005) reached 2000 articles in September 2005, while WikiFur (launched July 2005) reached that level on 30 October 2005. Both wikis were among the top ten Wikicities by database size as of October 2005 (prior to the name change to Wikia). They were also featured on 21 February 2005 and December 2005 respectively. Over 1000 articles were added to WikiFur in the first whole month after it was founded (August 2005); we broke 10,000 on October 7, 2008, and 15,000 on April 3, 2012.

Creatures Wiki was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about Wikicities - I still contribute irregularly, though it's now achieved a point of incremental improvement until a new Creatures game comes along. I intend to bring WikiFur to the point where it deserves a Wikipedia article; August 2005 was definitely too soon, but the article created in February 2006 stuck around until its deletion that November. It, too, has been mentioned in the press (e.g. Pittsburgh City Paper and Cracked.com).

Due to changes in the services Wikia wished to provide, WikiFur moved hosts onto [//wikifur.com/ its own server], now hosting over twenty languages, plus [//stats.wikifur.com/ stats] and [//dumps.wikifur.com/ dumps]. This is a further time sink, but it's worth it. We also have a JavaScript-based (and wiki-based) [//en.wikifur.com/FurryConventionMap.html map of furry conventions] that I rewrote to add numerous features and JSON-LD event support.

Wikimania and Wiki-Conferences
I was a speaker at Wikimania 2006, where I gave a presentation on techniques for building, managing and promoting collaborative communities to around 30 people. It seemed well-received and I had a great time there.

I also attended NYC Wiki-Conference 2009, presenting on [//greenreaper.co.uk/panels/StartingAWikiProject.zip starting a WikiProject] (with ClockworkSoul and Invertzoo) and [//greenreaper.co.uk/panels/MakingMediaWikiFly.zip making MediaWiki fly]. I received a real life barnstar, which was a nice end to the weekend.

More recently, I attended Wikimania 2014, including its developer days, and handed out WikiFur & WikiProject Furry flyers. There sure were a lot of us!

In 2021, fellow user group lead Lozana and I were invited to solicit and review proposals and curate the schedule of the Wikibase track of WikidataCon 2021 - together we organised seven hours of presentations by developers and users (18 sessions).

MediaWiki
I've had [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19382 several] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19392 picky] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19761 efficiency] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19849 patches] merged, and submitted a [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15944 few] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16357 more] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19576 bugs] that were fixed. Together these changes saved almost 0.5 KB in every MediaWiki page, mostly in the size-critical header. I have commit access, and am responsible for starting Extension:MediaWikiAuth.

Philosophy
I am generally an inclusionist and eventualist; I believe that it is better to have information here than nowhere, though if there is a better place I would suggest moving it. I founded WikiFur because I felt there needed to be a place for the knowledge of the furry fandom. Some things should be here, too, and I'm willing to put effort into that where possible.