User:Mxn

Hi, I’m Minh  (Minh Nguyá»…n), a software developer in the San Francisco Bay Area and Stanford Computer Science alumnus originally from Loveland, Ohio, United States.

I volunteer as a bureaucrat at the Vietnamese Wikipedia and Vietnamese Wiktionary, as well as an administrator at the Vietnamese Wikibooks, and Vietnamese Wikisource – and formerly the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, Multilingual Wikisource, and Wikipedia 10 planning wiki. I’m also one of the people who keep the main Wikipedia portal up-to-date. (If you know HTML, you can too!)

Outside of Wikipedia, I volunteer contributions to OpenStreetMap.

For those not using a Unicode-capable browser, you can call me Minh Nguyen. But I'm not related to that Minh Nguyen. Or this one. Or probably any other Minh Nguyen you come across.

Concentrations
Although I copyedit articles of all topics as I come across them, I typically write detailed, rigorously sourced prose on the following topics:


 * Cincinnati geography, schools, media, and history
 * Ohio culture, symbols, and roads
 * Santa Clara Valley media, architecture, and businesses
 * Vietnamese language and cuisine

If you’re writing articles about any of these topics and have questions, feel free to send them my way and I’ll do my best to help.

Contributions
My first contribution to Wikipedia was a minor, anonymous edit at United States presidential line of succession that was later shown to be incorrect.

Most of my contributions occur at the Vietnamese Wikipedia and Wiktionary, where I serve as a bureaucrat, kind of like a forum’s “super-administrator”, but less dictatorial. I made many of the first contributions to the Vietnamese Wikipedia in late 2003 and started the Vietnamese Wiktionary not long after. In high school, my marathon editing sessions would offer an effective form of procrastination, as well as an outlet to learn Vietnamese. These days, I’m no longer quite as active on these wikis but continue to play a supporting role.

Being an administrator at a Wikimedia wiki is tons of work, but it allows you to actively collaborate with countless people and visibly shape an important project. Participating in smaller projects, like the Vietnamese-language wikis, is like working for a startup: you work day and night, handling numerous poorly-defined roles, and recognize just about everyone you encounter. You make real, lasting decisions that aren’t so much influenced by written policies or guidelines as by common sense and intuition. On the other hand, if you tell your meatspace friends you’re working on the Vietnamese Wiktionary, you get a blank stare.

So working for the English Wikipedia is like working for a huge conglomerate whose logos appear on the sides of buses: even if you get a lot done, your contributions aren’t going to stand out too much. Nevertheless, you’re part of something big. I turned down an offer to run for administrator here in 2007. Most of my contributions here come in the form of typo corrections and interwiki links (see WikiGnome). But I’ve also contributed some original content here, too. My first Good Article was "Flag of Ohio".

Licensing
After much thought and consideration on the topic – about three seconds’ worth – I’ve decided to be generous with my pittance of contributions here, especially to free the Rambot articles:

Licensing

With respect to the permission granted below, I specifically add Anthony DiPierro in addition to the Wikimedia Foundation for any contributions automatically generated and added by the rambot from the public domain census bureau statistics. The above exclusions still apply.

(I typically license my original work under the Attribution license anyhow.)

Tasks

 * Write some more articles:
 * Metrobot
 * Girls' Town of America