User:Waitak



= Waitak - 维德 - Duy Đức =

Question of the hour: What does a sustainable culture look like in detail?

I've spent time as a professor, CTO, CIO and head of an NGO. I'm active again on Wikipedia after a long hiatus. Things I've done as a Wikicitizen include:

I keep an eye on pages on my watchlist (see here for a list).
 * In particular, I spend a lot of time with food and plant related lists:
 * List of vegetable oils (my first featured list), and anything to do with vegetable fats and oils
 * List of plants with edible leaves,
 * List of plants used in herbalism,
 * List of culinary nuts (my third featured list),
 * List of culinary fruits,
 * List of melons,
 * List of gourds and squashes,
 * List of basil cultivars (my second featured list).
 * A handful of natural languages, including Esperanto, Chinese languages &mdash;Toisanese, in particular.
 * Some non-mainstream economic topics
 * Topics related to natural disasters, including the H5N1 family of pages &mdash; particularly a couple of templates (used here and here)
 * I do a lot of reference cleanup.
 * I make regular use of templates, particularly on user pages of newbies and minor vandals.
 * I love to see people who start off on the wrong foot turning into valued members of the community. I can't resist welcoming people to Wikipedia.

(More on my contributions below.)

Plant and food related

 * List of culinary vegetables - write proper entries, with references
 * List of plants used in herbalism - add more entries
 * List of leaf vegetables - repair the formatting that was broken recently
 * Types of plant oils - finish writing
 * List of melons - try to get this up to FL quality, and nominate
 * List of gourds and squashes - beef up the entries, and try to bring this to FL quality
 * List of food additives - general cleanup and improvement

Language related

 * List of writing systems - needs some cleanup
 * Bible translations by language
 * Incorporate writeups from languages that have a main article
 * Incorporate examples from more languages
 * Make entries more consistent
 * Ref repair
 * I wonder if this could be a FLC?

Everything else

 * Telecommunications data retention‎ - ref repair
 * Massimo Montanari‎ - lots of work needed here
 * Password vault - new article listing password vaults on various platforms

Things that interest me include:

Tech stuff

 * Software engineering and computer programming. My current favorite language is Python, but Lua is also a contender. I program regularly in C, C++, Python, Go, Typescript, Dart, SQL and on top of XML, JSON and YAML, often all in the same application.
 * I seem to do a lot of Web applications these days. Platforms that I've used include Django, Plone/Zope, Ruby on Rails/Radiant CMS and Drupal.
 * Data visualization and knowledge discovery (more statistical than rule-based).

Via economics

 * Local economies, and the role of barter in developing them. Current question: How would a sabbath economy work in practice?

Via information technology

 * Eliminating poverty, particularly in ways involving information technology and other applications of appropriate technology. I see projects like XO-1, Simputer and Jhai as good ideas, although none of them quite gets there. Among other things we're working on an 8Mb Linux distribution. uClinux, uClibc, Lua and Buildroot are all components we're looking at. There are lots of tiny little cool tools that help, like Zile for example.

Via engineering

 * I'm interested in what might be called appropriate engineering - community scale manufacturing that whose products and methods are appropriate for developing nations with very little infrastructure or capital investment. Some great examples of appropriate engineering (many agricultural):


 * Jock Brandis' peanut sheller
 * 1996 Rolex Award laureate Sanoussi Diakité's fonio husking machine
 * 2000 Rolex Award laureate Mohammed Ba Abba's earthenware cooling system
 * Low cost drip irrigation systems, by organizations like SIMI
 * Forcefield's Low RPM Disk Alternator ("The cutting edge of low technology" – I like these guys)


 * Kevin Kelly's Street Use blog is great food for thought.

Via agriculture

 * Understanding and promoting underutilized and otherwise useful crops (related to permaculture). I can hardly wait to see moringa trees cultivated in Hong Kong.
 * Preserving heirloom and other plants that are in danger of being lost.

Languages and linguistics

 * Natural languages. Current focus: deciding whether to learn Tagalog or Ilocano. I'd also like to work on Indonesian, Vietnamese and German. I'm working half-heartedly on Esperanto as well. Ido is probably a better language than Esperanto, but it doesn't look like it has a real chance of success.
 * Systems of writing (many of which are alphabets or abugidas or other sorts of syllabaries these days - with the exception of Han). I find the Mongolian and Tibetan scripts particularly beautiful.

R&R

 * I can be often be found in Hong Kong's wilder places (no, not those... the other sort of wild...)
 * I play several musical instruments, some more interesting than others.
 * I love jazz, contemporary Christian and many other kinds of music, and am grateful that Internet radio makes up for the lack of jazz stations in Hong Kong (Radioio Jazz is my station of choice)
 * I've eaten gumbo in New Orleans, mussels in Bruges, dim sum in Hong Kong, sashimi in Tokyo, clam chowder in Boston and San Francisco, salmon in Alaska, uhu in Kona and Wiener schnitzel in Vienna. I've been to Manila and Baguio, and enjoyed the bagoong, but I drew the line at balut. Eating moringa leaves was a high point.
 * I'm fond of Belgian beer, especially Grimbergen, Bush (which is not made by these guys), Delirium Tremens and Kwak.

Articles I've started
I tend to contribute most to Wikipedia by writing content. Some of the articles that I've started include:


 * Sabbath economics and one or two other economics articles that ended up being deleted
 * List of vegetable oils and List of essential oils, Ben oil, Babassu oil, Amaranth oil and many other vegetable oil pages
 * Zile (editor) and Emacs
 * H5N1 Human Mortality (used in Transmission and infection of H5N1), H5N1 case graph (used in Global spread of H5N1 and elsewhere) and a few other pages related to H5N1
 * Amaranth grain, Euphorbia tirucalli and other pages on useful plants, particularly those in Category:Underutilized crops
 * Gifts in kind
 * Pollard script
 * Chuck Pierce, Michael Harrison, Sanoussi Diakité and a few other pages on people that I'm interested in
 * Xaphoon

plus a lot of redirects. Here is a list of (non-redirect) articles that I've started.

Edit stats

 * First edit: May 23 2005 to Dairy product
 * 500th edit: April 24 2006 to Peanut oil
 * 1,000th edit: June 4 2006 to List of vegetable oils
 * 2,000th edit: September 10 2006 to Taishan dialect
 * 3,000th edit: January 5 2007 to List of basil cultivars
 * 4,000th edit: October 1 2011 to List of plants used as medicine

Other contributions

 * You can check on how many edits I've done here.
 * I was very active from February, 2006 until January, 2007, tapered off between then and October, 2008, when I pretty much dropped my activity to an occasional checkin. I really started being active again in September, 2011.
 * Here is a list of the 120 content (non-talk, non-user) pages that I've edited more than twice as of March 3, 2007.

Other communities

 * Lernu
 * 43 things
 * last.fm
 * StumbleUpon

Tests (some sillier than others)

 * Political compass: 4.88 left, 1.03 libertarian
 * Geek test: 39.25049% - Major Geek
 * Myers-Briggs INFJ (11%, 88%, 50%, 56% respectively)

eo:Uzanto:Waitak fr:Utilisateur:Waitak