User:Vivers

About Me
BS, MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Experience in machine design for optics, power transmission, composite manufacture and prosthetics. Also have experience in engineering management, sales support, application engineering, forensic engineering of mechanisms and devices and technical writing. Currently employed as a Senior Engineer (meaning an engineer whose hair is turning to gray).

Have programming experience in Visual Basic, Lisp, Fortran, Forth and PHP. Interest in programming started with a connection to mainframe timeshare apps through a teletype in my high school geometry class. Later learned to hack into a Space Invaders clone on an Apple II+. Once wrote and sold a video game in 6502 assembly for the Commodore 64 (ancient history, lame game but wonderful experience). Have written numerous programs for technical calculations and a system to collect operating data from power transmission devices over the web.

Teach hands-on oriented engineering courses to K-8 students on Saturdays through school year. Also teach summer camps and after-school engineering camps.

Currently studying to take the U.S. patent bar.

Main Wikipedia interests: gearing, tribology, mechanical engineering, engineering standards, computer programming, IP law.

First contribution to Wikipedia was in July, 2004. Had a brief love affair with Wikipedia that ended primarily due to demands of my day job and developing materials for the engineering courses for kids. However, I have used Wikipedia fairly often as a resource for both my work and general interest.

Recently, I have been thinking that I might like to help Wikipedia be a better resource for young adults researching careers in engineering, young engineers learning the job and experienced engineers needing quick hit information on new industries and applications. I've watched Wikipedia change over a number of years and am curious how the environment works and doesn't work for subject experts. I don't necessarily consider myself a subject expert in any one area but I feel I have a sense of the kinds of information that would be valuable to the types of users listed above. My expertise would be largely in knowing how to find information for those things that make sense for inclusion in the encyclopedia and organizing it for those users.

I just read (or misread) in The Wikipedia Revolution that the English Wikipedia's growth is slowing and seems to shifting to maintenance mode. Maintenance mode may be appropriate for the multitude of general knowledge articles, but there is a wealth of domain-specific knowledge outside of programming and mathematics that has yet to make it's way into the encyclopedia. That's the most exciting aspect of Wikipedia for me.