User:Teratornis

Welcome to my user page. I haven't tried to make it fancy. While I have nothing against fancy user pages, I mostly use mine as a scratchpad and a list of links. If you're looking for examples of leading-edge user page design, see: WP:EIW. I know a little more about Wikipedia than I did when I wrote some of what is here now, so I am gradually updating the old stuff to reflect my newer understanding.

I spend a big chunk of my Wikipedia time answering questions on the Help desk, trying to help other people with their problems. As of 04:06, 15 June 2008 (UTC), I seem to have had the most edits on the Help desk with: 3006.

As of 08:45, 6 November 2008 (UTC), most of my recent article edits are on the topic of Energy, especially topics relating to Renewable energy, Wind power, Peak oil, and Electricity generation.

Useful links
Some pages I refer to often enough to make them worth writing down here:


 * WP:HELPDESK
 * WP:VPT
 * Editor's index to Wikipedia (shortcut: WP:EIW) - Wow!
 * Template messages/Cleanup (shortcut: WP:TC)
 * Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant
 * More citation tools at: User:Teratornis/Notes

Subpages


These are my user subpages. They are in various stages of "completion" at a given time. Pages that will eventually end up somewhere else (such as essays) will be incomplete while they are here.


 * Special:PrefixIndex/User:Teratornis - all my user subpages
 * Special:PrefixIndex/User talk:Teratornis - and all their talk pages

Essays in fairly good shape

 * /Tips for teachers - oh yes, you absolutely do want to teach your students to edit on wikis. Wikipedia is one obvious choice, but not always the most appropriate.

Essays in appallingly rough shape
Peruse these at your own risk. You may find some ideas, but probably not presented nicely yet. These are scratchpad pages where I get my POV on.


 * /Avoid jargon creep - this will be a futile plea against synonym disease, i.e., the overwhelming spontaneous human tendency to invent additional synonyms for canonical jargon terms we already have. (E.g., "mop and bucket" for "administratorship".) Synonym disease generates accidental complexity. (Of course by referring to the same phenomenon as "jargon creep" and "synonym disease" I'm guilty of it. However, "synonym disease" is more precise because there is a constant need to introduce new jargon terms to describe actually new things that the Wikipedia community invents.)


 * /Do not fear complexity - a counterpoint essay to Avoid instruction creep. Very not done yet.


 * /How Wikipedia defeats Brooks' law - according to Brooks' law, Wikipedia should be getting less efficient as more people join the project, yet this does not seem to happen. Here's what I think about why.


 * /On "scientific bias" in articles about science - I received a request to write an essay about this, so I should at least see whether such an essay already exists.


 * /Outplacement - why we should organize an effort to find suitable wikis for Wikipedia's deleted articles, rather than just deleting them.


 * /Should editors be logged-in users? - my take on this endless debate.

Miscellaneous

 * /Barnstars - Barnstars I have given and received.

Sandboxes
These are pages for testing, usually things like templates, or when I want to see how some wikitext markup works.


 * /Sandbox
 * /Sandbox2
 * /Sandbox3
 * /Sandbox4

New pages I started
The red links are to pages I have not yet started. If any pages I start get deleted, I'll remove them from these lists. I've concentrated much more on editing existing pages than starting new ones. As the lists show, I've started more templates than articles. I especially believe that almost every article on Wikipedia needs at least one navigation template, and many Wikipedia articles have none yet.

Articles
The red links are articles I have not started yet, but am thinking about starting. I've kind of leaned toward articles about Wind power, because I have some interest and knowledge about the subject, and because the articles aren't likely to get deleted.


 * Lebanon Countryside Trail -- my first article with some actual content. I started it because Little Miami Bike Trail referred to this trail, but not by the official name (which I fixed).
 * Wind power in Italy -- Italy was the 7th largest wind power producer in 2007, the highest-ranked nation still lacking a "Wind power in..." article in 2008, so I started the article. I also categorized more images on Commons into commons:Category:Wind power in Italy.
 * Wind power in Austria
 * Wind power in Japan - the biggest wind power country which still has no article as of 06:28, 23 March 2010 (UTC).
 * List of wind turbines on public display - I'm thinking about splitting out the section: Unconventional wind turbines into its own article, as there are probably dozens of such wind turbines around the world, and the number appears to be growing. I made a corresponding media category on Commons: commons:Category:Wind turbines on public display.
 * Hoosier Wind Farm
 * Meadow Lake Wind Farm
 * LaCrosse Wind Farm - starting as User:Teratornis/LaCrosse Wind Farm
 * Buckeye Wind Project - starting as User:Teratornis/Buckeye Wind Project
 * Wood County Wind Farm - starting as User:Teratornis/Wood County Wind Farm
 * BP Wind Energy - starting as User:Teratornis/BP Wind Energy
 * BP Alternative Energy - starting as User:Teratornis/BP Alternative Energy
 * Dry Lake Wind Power Project
 * Wind power in Arizona
 * List of power stations in Arizona to go with the Power stations in Arizona template I started
 * List of power stations in Ohio

06:28, 23 March 2010 (UTC): I could try the Articles for creation/Wizard-Introduction. Not that I think I need it, but so I can see how it might look to the new users I advise on the Help desk.

Redirects

 * Nameplate capacity

Templates
I started these templates, that is the ones whose links are not red:


 * Search templates:
 * Google custom - generates a link to a Google custom search form to search a specific site, or a subdirectory tree on a site.
 * Google help desk - derived from Google custom, to search just the Help desk and its archive.
 * Google wikipedia - derived from Google custom, to search just the English Wikipedia.
 * Google scholar - generates a link to a Google Scholar search.
 * Google scholar cite - generates a link to a Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant search.
 * Translate wikipedia - not exactly a search template, but a wrapper for Google translation which translates an article from a foreign-language Wikipedia to English.
 * Flickr free - search for photos on Flickr having a given set of keywords in their descriptions, and a CC-BY (attribution) or CC-BY-SA (attribution and ShareAlike) license making them suitable to upload to Commons using Flinfo.
 * Search subpages link - generates a link to a Wikipedia search on a subpage tree.
 * Search help desk - generates a link to a Wikipedia search on the Help desk and its archive pages.
 * Navigation templates based on Navbox:
 * Bioenergy
 * Electricity generation
 * Energy films (the deletionists destroyed this one: Templates for deletion/Log/2009 April 26)
 * Geothermal power
 * Ocean energy
 * Peak oil
 * Wind power
 * Help desk searches - a pseudo-navigation template that displays several search links that are useful for answering question on the Help desk (and to help with editing on Wikipedia generally), using Google custom.
 * Generating stations in Arizona - modeled after the already-existing Generating Stations in Indiana
 * Wikipedia template messages
 * Various utility templates:
 * Shortcut compact - a variation on Shortcut that fits on one line.
 * Energy templates - to add to the "See also" sections of documentation subpages of Category:Energy templates.
 * Tmm - for making quick links to Wikipedia: The Missing Manual and chapters thereof.
 * All subpages - a template to display links to all the subpages of a given page, and their talk pages. But this seems to be unnecessary now that we can just say.

Categories

 * Category:Help desk templates
 * Category:Wind farms in Arizona
 * Category:Wind turbines on public display
 * Category:Wind power in Austria
 * and see commons:User:Teratornis

Project: namespace

 * Help desk/How to ask
 * and see commons:Commons:Editor's index to Commons

A brief history of my wiki time

 * I started editing on Wikipedia on April 28, 2006. Given that wikis have been around since 1995, and I've been using the Internet since the 1980's, I'm rather embarrassed to be so late to the wiki party. I'm still trying to figure out how I could have remained so unaware of wikis for so long, while learning HTML, building Web sites the "conventional" way, and so on. I had seen hints about wikis for some time, but I never quite "got" the idea, until somehow I had my "wikiphany."
 * If it wasn't against the rules to propose a neologism here, I would propose "wikiphany", as a portmanteau of wiki and epiphany, to mean the nascent comprehension of enough of the nature and function of wikis to generate a sudden realization that one is going to do many wonderful, useful, and perhaps even revolutionary things with wikis. As of 20:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC), wikiphany finds zero links, suggesting my neologism is novel (although I make no claim that it is). So maybe it's really a protologism, and I'm not supposed to mention it in articles (WP:NEO). So please imagine I did not just write this paragraph.
 * I slowly realized the usefulness of wikis in other contexts, such as at the companies where I work. As with most organizations I have seen, most of what we do is severely under-documented, and people waste time re-inventing things that other people have already figured out. We need more efficient ways for people who discover or create knowledge to share it. Traditional documenting tools such as Word, DocBook, and Help authoring tools are too difficult for casual use by non-specialists, especially while they are concentrating on solving some other problem (ideally, a documenting tool should require the least possible thought, so people can use it to document the other things they are thinking about). At the other extreme, an easy tool like e-mail encourages everyone to contribute, and archiving programs like MHonArc make messages permanently available as Web pages, but an archive of thousands of e-mail messages lacks organization, and may contain outdated information and errors that are hard to correct. MediaWiki appears to fill the gap between traditional documenting tools and e-mail.


 * I installed my first MediaWiki 1.7 instance on one of my company's intranet sites in August, 2006.


 * As of 18:04, 7 September 2006 (UTC) I am learning how to be a MediaWiki administrator.


 * 04:38, 5 October 2006 (UTC): I made an account on WikiBooks to make a few edits there.
 * 16:41, 27 June 2007 (UTC): lately I seem to have become addicted to answering questions on the Help desk. See my notes.

About my user name
Teratornis is Greek for "monster bird". Teratorns were large flying birds related to modern condors which died out in the Pleistocene. I picked this user name because nobody else is likely to use it, even on a large wiki such as Wikipedia. Other than that, my user name has no significance.

Bicycling-related articles

 * Edit some existing articles and start some new articles relating to cycling in and around Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. My interest is mostly about actually riding my bicycles and leading group rides, so I'm interested in articles I can put to direct use. (While I have raced bicycles, and I enjoy watching televised racing now and then, I have little interest in what seems to be the very large amount of racing-oriented article editing activity on Wikipedia from a fan's perspective. I'm primarily interested in riding bikes, putting more people on bikes, and finding ways to organize group rides so they function smoothly without requiring massive inputs of volunteer human labor. Documenting the exploits of a tiny genetically-gifted elite class of cyclists is a task I happily leave to others.) Related tasks include:
 * To the Little Miami Scenic Trail article, add links to more articles that are about various things along the Trail (towns, parks, bridges, historical sites, etc.). To those articles, add links back to the Little Miami Scenic Trail article.
 * Bring the Cincinnati-area Trail articles up to the standard proposed by: Tom guyette in his talk page comment and exemplified in his article: Arroyo Seco bicycle path.
 * I do as much riding on roads as on trails, but it's harder to know what I could write about roads which would be suitable for Wikipedia articles. Bike trails exist as distinct entities with a clearly-defined function, making it easy to write about them. In contrast, a typical road cycling route consists of many (dozens) of secondary roads; the cyclist typically rides a relatively short distance on each road and then turns onto another. The route is not a distinct, named geographical entity which lends itself to an article. Think about this.
 * It would be nice to work all the information in the OKI Bicycle Route Maps into a Wikipedia article, somehow, but the information is inherently geographical and would only make sense as a large, annotated road map. I haven't seen a Wikipedia article yet that presents information that way. However, it would be nice to have a Wiki-like way to enable large numbers of cyclists to contribute their local knowledge of roads. Wikipedia itself does not seem suitable for this, as it would probably amount to original work.
 * Write some new articles about bicycling in cycling in and around Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Examine what others have done, for example: Bicycling in Chicago. Start an article: Bicycling in Cincinnati and create stub articles for some or all of the bicycle organizations, rides, trails, routes, etc., that I mention.
 * Recruit other cyclists from Cincinnati to join WikiProject Cycling.


 * Possibly encourage cyclists from surrounding cities such as Dayton, Lexington, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Columbus to make similar pages about bicycling in their cities.


 * Participate in discussion about how to categorize pages which are about bicycle trails, rides, organizations, etc.


 * Learn about templates.


 * Learn about maps. Wikipedia seems to have no built-in mapping or GIS tools, at least not that I have found, but there are templates for linking to external map sites. For example: Coordinate-referenced_map_templates.
 * I recently stumbled across OpenStreetMap which may be a way to do some of the geographic stuff I'd like to do. 21:06, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
 * My User Page on OpenStreetMap.


 * I may also contribute to the general-interest articles relating to cycling.

Articles relating to Computing
I also have interest in computing, both for work and recreation. When I see a way to improve an article about something relating to computing, I take a stab at it. I noticed that Wikipedia seems to have articles that define almost every computing concept and term. Many articles about software and so on seem to require the reader to have an extensive background in computing. I found that simply by hyperlinking every jargon term in such an article to the articles defining them, the article immediately becomes more understandable. Anyone lacking the background to understand the jargon in such an article can simply click a few links and go get it. I have not looked to see whether a WikiProject exists to go through all the computing articles and make sure all their jargon terms have sufficient definitive hyperlinks. If there is no such project, it might be useful to start. 21:06, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Energy
I'm also interested in energy, specifically topics relating to Renewable energy and Peak oil. See my notes in User:Teratornis/Energy.

Existing articles I have edited
My early edits included:


 * Little Miami Scenic Trail -- needs more content to cover recent additions to the Trail at both the south and north ends. The existing article about the Trail has (as of 21:34, 12 May 2006 (UTC)) the somewhat unfortunate title: Little Miami Bike Trail. The vast majority of references to this Trail on the Web, on printed maps, and in brochures from various government agents call it the Little Miami Scenic Trail. For example:
 * Results 1 - 30 of about 333 for "little miami bike trail". (0.20 seconds)
 * Results 1 - 30 of about 9,880 for "little miami scenic trail". (0.19 seconds)

I made an article: Little Miami Scenic Trail, initially as a redirect to Little Miami Bike Trail. However, I suggest eventually moving the article content to Little Miami Scenic Trail and making Little Miami Bike Trail a redirect to it. I solicit comments from anyone with interest.

Some not-so-recent editing

 * 04:15, 28 January 2007 (UTC): Web mapping had a high ratio of jargon to links when I first read it. It's a survey article, so it briefly mentions many jargon terms which have Wikipedia articles. I'm adding links on as many jargon terms as I can find defining articles for.

Aphorisms
These are some aphorisms I have written. Generally they will suck. I don't know whether I am the first to say any of them. I may never have had a truly original thought, for all I know. It's a big world.


 * On Wikipedia's rules:
 * Whenever someone cites a rule to justify doing anything to any article, any number of other articles are simultaneously violating that rule.

To-do: add more as I think of them.

MediaWiki training videos
An administrator of a public wiki recorded some MediaWiki training videos, to help people learn how to edit on his wiki:


 * http://www.learnprogramming.tv/wiki/index.php?title=LearnProgramming:How_to_edit_our_wiki

Most of the material in the videos applies to any MediaWiki site, including . The videos could be better, but they are not bad, and I recommend them for wiki beginners as an easy way to get a quick overview of how to edit on.

Hi-resolution .avi files
You may prefer to download the video files to view directly rather than from the wiki page in the previous section. Here are direct links:

 001-intro.avi 002-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi  Warning: the above video shows an example page on Wikipedia which contains a potentially offensive word in its title.  003-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi 004-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi 005-shortcuts-and-interwiki-links.avi 006-wikitext-markup.avi</li> <li>007-wikitext-markup.avi</li> <li>008-wikitext-markup.avi</li> <li>009-wikitext-markup-lists.avi</li> <li>010-wikitext-markup-links.avi</li> <li>011-wikitext-markup-links.avi</li> <li>012-wikitext-markup-tables.avi</li> <li>013-wikitext-markup-templates.avi</li> </ul>

The above videos use the x264 codec (a lossless codec which reproduces screen shots clearly); to view the videos, you may need to install one of these video players: <ul> <li>VLC media player</li> <li>VideoLAN</li> <li>X264</li> </ul>

If you want to watch all the videos sequentially, you can download them to a directory on your computer (for example, in Microsoft Windows: ), and make a playlist file for VLC media player (for example, ). In the playlist file, edit a list of your video files in the order you want them to play:

C:\junk\001-intro.avi C:\junk\002-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi C:\junk\003-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi C:\junk\004-pagenames-and-namespaces.avi C:\junk\005-shortcuts-and-interwiki-links.avi C:\junk\006-wikitext-markup.avi C:\junk\007-wikitext-markup.avi C:\junk\008-wikitext-markup.avi C:\junk\009-wikitext-markup-lists.avi C:\junk\010-wikitext-markup-links.avi C:\junk\011-wikitext-markup-links.avi C:\junk\012-wikitext-markup-tables.avi C:\junk\013-wikitext-markup-templates.avi

and then you can open your playlist file in VLC media player via the usual File | Open... command.

Low-resolution .mov files
If you don't want to install VLC media player, you can download lower-resolution (but still fairly legible) versions of the videos in QuickTime format from Revver:

<ul> <li>http://one.revver.com/find/user/brianwill</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91522.mov &mdash; part 1 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91446.mov &mdash; part 2 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91447.mov &mdash; part 3 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91448.mov &mdash; part 4 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91521.mov &mdash; part 5 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91450.mov &mdash; part 6 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91451.mov &mdash; part 7 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91452.mov &mdash; part 8 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91453.mov &mdash; part 9 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91454.mov &mdash; part 10 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91455.mov &mdash; part 11 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91456.mov &mdash; part 12 of 13</li> <li>http://media.revver.com/qt;download/91445.mov &mdash; part 13 of 13</li> </ul>

User pages on other wikis
<ul> <li>Meta (Wikimedia Meta-Wiki) is auxiliary to all Wikimedia Foundation projects. My contributions to Meta include edits to the MediaWiki manuals and troubleshooting guides. I read the manuals to solve problems with, and when I see a way to improve the manuals, I do.</li> <ul> <li>m:User:Teratornis &mdash; contributions</li> <li>First edit date: September 7, 2006</li> </ul>

<li>MediaWiki.org (MediaWiki) is the official site for the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia (and thousands of other wikis). My contributions to MediaWiki.org include some edits I made originally on Meta to pages that later moved to MediaWiki.org - when those pages moved, my edits moved along with them. Thus my contributions on MediaWiki.org contained a number of edits before I had actually registered my username there (that seemed a bit strange until I understood what had happened).</li> <ul> <li>mw:User:Teratornis &mdash; contributions</li> <li>First edit date: September 7, 2006 (edits that copied over from Meta)</li> <li>Date of the first edit I actually made on MediaWiki.org: September 18, 2007</li> </ul>

<li>Commons - I've been categorizing photos of wind turbines by country, manufacturer, etc.</li> <ul> <li>commons:User:Teratornis &mdash; contributions</li> <li>First edit date: November 6, 2008</li> </ul>

<li>Wikibooks (Wikibooks (English)) is a wiki for creating books. It is a Wikimedia Foundation project. As of 15:07, 21 November 2006 (EST), I have made few edits on Wikibooks. However, it might be a good place to write at length about some computing topics.</li> <ul> <li>wikibooks:User:Teratornis &mdash; contributions</li> <li>First edit date: October 5, 2006</li> </ul>

<li>Wikiquote (Wikiquote) is a wiki for publishing a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books and proverbs, and to give details about them. </li> <ul> <li>wikiquote:User:Teratornis &mdash; contributions</li> <li>First edit date: March 27, 2007</li> </ul>

<li>OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap) is a collaborative project to create free maps using data from portable GPS devices. I have some recreational interest in maps. I haven't actually done any map-making for OpenStreetMap as of 18:42, 20 November 2006 (EST), but I did some edits on the OpenStreetMap wiki, to categorize pages and so on.</li> <ul> <li>user page &mdash; contributions</li> <li>First edit date: July 1, 2006</li> </ul>

<li> Bicycling wiki (BicyclingWiki) is a small wiki about bicycling. </li> <ul> <li> user page &mdash; contributions </li> <li>First edit date: July 20, 2006</li> <li>19:50, 25 January 2010 (UTC): the site seems to be defunct now.</li> </ul>

<li>RationalWiki (RationalWiki) is a wiki about science, rationality, atheism, and is pretty much the opposite of Conservapedia.</li> <ul> <li>user page &mdash; contributions</li> <li>First edit date: October 11, 2007</li> </ul>

<li>Appropedia (Appropedia) is a wiki about sustainable development.</li> <ul> <li>Appropedia:User:Teratornis my user page &mdash; Appropedia:Special:Contributions/Teratornis my contributions</li> <li>First edit date: July 9, 2009</li> </ul> </ul> You can learn more about wiki editing by joining a wiki in some area of your interest. Thousands of public wikis exist, so you can probably find some you like. See for example:
 * Wiki
 * WikiIndex:Welcome