User:Kaicarver



Hi, I'm Kai Carver.

I've been making minor edits to Wikipedia articles for over 15 years (since 2005): at last count, over 2000 edits on 1000 English articles, 400 edits on 300 articles in French, and a few edits on other wikis, with a  global edit count approaching 3000 on 18 projects so far. So my contributions are modest (I'm one of 50,000), I make an edit every 2 or 3 days, and I'm a big fan of Wikipedia.

I edit articles on a pretty wide variety of topics. I usually come across topics because they caught my interest or because I wanted to check or learn something, not because I have any special expertise. I try to be careful with my contributions, and the slightest change takes me forever, but I still screw up sometimes, so apologies for any mistakes I make, and thank you for correcting them!

I live in Paris, France, and Taipei, Taiwan. I'm American, quite a bit French, half German, and 1/12th Spanish by repeated summer residence (if that makes any sense).

I work as a computer programmer, and occasionally as a translator. I studied science, and majored in philosophy, a long time ago.

I've always been a bit of a languages fan. And I love scripts.

My first encounter with wikis was around 1998, on Ward Cunningham's original wiki, where it seems my user page still lives (and here's an even older version).

Feel free to leave me a message on my Talk page.

Interesting stuff

 * Map with animation of Wiki edits in every language


 * Wikipedia motto of the day: inactive since mid-2015 (?), or just too silly, but old mottoes may still be fun to read.


 * someone or something left me a message here: https://pnb.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%AA%D9%86_%DA%AF%D9%84_%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AA:Kaicarver#c-KaleemBot-20230524080700-%D8%AC%DB%8C_%D8%A2%DB%8C%D8%A7%DA%BA_%D9%86%D9%88%DA%BA%21 immediately after I visited the pnb (Western Punjabi?) page for Baklava when I was looking into different translations of the word... I think it's a welcome message, Google Translate tells me it's Urdu.

Stuff by me

 * My English contributions (plus some early anonymous ones).


 * 20+ English articles created by me, 2 French ones.


 * My other Wikipedia/Wikimedia pages: French, German, Wiktionary, Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks, Wikisource, wikimediastrategy.


 * Other wikis: Wikitravel, CEDICT Chinese dictionary (contributions ).


 * Edit counters: English, French. Another counter: English, French. Another French counter with stats.


 * Two overviews of my contributions in all the various wikipedias, with edit count for each and total edit count (about 1300 last time I looked):
 * my latest contributions in each wikipedia.
 * list of all wikimedia sites where I have a single user login (SUL).

Scraps
Example of using Wikipedia to research names of obscure (to me) 17th century composers:


 * Oeuvres de Pablo Bruna, Juan Cabanilles, Antonio de Cabezón, Francisco Correa de Arauxo, Peeter Cornet, Abraham van den Kerckhoven

idea for a wikipedia page needed in English and French: la Fontaine de Médicis in Jardin du Luxembourg:


 * Sicilian river-god Acis and milk-white sea-nymph Galatea loved each other, but jealous Cyclops Polyphemus killed Acis with a boulder.


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acis_and_Galatea_(mythology)


 * the Italian-style facade was built in 1631 for Queen Marie de Médicis. It became a fountain in 1799, and the sculpture was added in 1862.


 * http://www.senat.fr/visite/fontaine/

needs improvement:


 * translation of song http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Pieterszoon_Hein

More scraps in a subpage: User:Kaicarver/Scraps

Ideas

 * Make web page that shows the translation of a term in all languages it has Wikipedia articles for. Use the API, e.g.: "Nitrogen", "Coffee", "Cinnamon". Use the list of all languages in Wikipedia and, for the English name of each language, see this list of Wikipedias (is there a better way via the API?). See Perl API client code: MediaWiki::Bot or MediaWiki::API for ways to interface the API in Perl.
 * I actually implemented that but I forget where...


 * Variation on edit count: view counts. Answering questions such as: how many total views have there been for the pages I created? How about for those I edited?


 * Also, an extension that displays the view count for every article (example JSON view counts for this page).

Tools
Some interesting Wikipedia tools I use or have tried out:
 * The Wikipedia Library : When you need a reference... and you can't find one for free on the web or in Google Books: the Wikipedia Library, a kind of reward or perk for active Wikipedia editors, can be really useful. I first used it for Niesen.
 * Tools/Navigation_popups (now easily activated via the General tab in Special:Preferences) : Very very nice and useful hover preview feature that everyone should be using. On to the clickless Web!
 * wikipedia-mode.el : Emacs major mode for editing Wikipedia articles. Works well with the It's All Text! Firefox extension. Swore I would use this when a Firefox crash made me lose an entire article I had written on Forbidden Planet writer Irving Block. I don't like submitting many edits.
 * MakeRef : Assist in the generation of reference tags, written by Magnus Manske. Could make it handier as a bookmarklet. I keep forgetting to use this. The nitty-gritty of citing sources is such a pain. Anyway here's a simple bookmarklet that creates a reference from a web page, using the page URL, title, and selected text, if any:  javascript:(function{ var sel=+(window.getSelection ? window.getSelection : document.getSelection ? document.getSelection : document.selection.createRange.text); var remoteWin=window.open(,,'resizable=yes,width=500,height=300,left=508,top=122'); remoteWin.document.write(' '); remoteWin.document.write('&lt;ref>'+'['+location.href+' &quot;'+document.title+'&quot;] '+sel+'&lt;/ref>'); }); ''
 * MediaWiki API : Access lots of interesting info without that pesky UI. For example, here are lists of what's being edited right now in different languages: |timestamp|user&rclimit=20 en |timestamp|user&rclimit=20 fr |timestamp|user&rclimit=20 de |timestamp|user&rclimit=20 es |timestamp|user&rclimit=20 zh |timestamp|user&rclimit=20 ru (more here). And here lists of just the new articles: |timestamp|user&rctype=new&rcnamespace=0&rclimit=20 en |timestamp|user&rctype=new&rcnamespace=0&rclimit=20 fr |timestamp|user&rctype=new&rcnamespace=0&rclimit=20 de |timestamp|user&rctype=new&rcnamespace=0&rclimit=20 es |timestamp|user&rctype=new&rcnamespace=0&rclimit=20 zh |timestamp|user&rctype=new&rcnamespace=0&rclimit=20 ru.
 * Blame: Find addition of text in a page history : Determine who is responsible for a specific fragment of an article. Seems to be simpler and to work much better than WikiBlame below. Props to User:X!, who also runs one of the edit counters mentioned above.
 * WikiBlame : Determine who did what when. Interface could be better though. Ideally I could select some text in an article, click on a bookmarklet or button, and get the first revision where the text appeared.
 * wikEd (now easily activated via the General tab in Special:Preferences) : Enhanced text processing functions to edit pages in Firefox, using Javascript and a rich-text edit box. Impressive, but probably too fancy for me, and a bit slow, so I disabled it. I find editing articles hard due to the syntax and all. I'm still looking for a tool that makes it real easy, for example, to dash off a new article. It would make easy: imitating other similar articles, putting in the right categories, with the right templates, links to other languages, etc. Also I'd really love something that would simplify making references.
 * Wikipedia article traffic statistics : wherein it is revealed that in December 2010, Wikileaks beat Christmas (6 million visits vs. 3 million).
 * Stats on major language editions of Wikipedia (with pretty language flags) : from a Russian user's page. I'd like to find an English version of these stats boxes and flags.

Citation needed around the world


https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modèle:Référence_nécessaire

de:Benutzer:Kaicarver es:Usuario:Kaicarver fr:Utilisateur:Kaicarver ru:Участник:Kaicarver zh:用户:Kaicarver

More vanity/humility
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages/en.wikipedia.org/Kaicarver/all

Special:Statistics

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/User:Kaicarver/

Userboxes
Hmm, dunno about those buttons, or userboxes or whatever those are... Like many things on Wikipedia, they're a pain to use. Click, scroll, copy, change page, paste, repeat... If there was one page where I could quickly select those that I want... Still, kind of a neat way to explore the Wikipedia universe. Makes me think of Scout badges... They're apparently controversial.