User:Willscrlt



At a glance
Contacting me: For matters specific to the English Wikipedia, please leave me a message on my talk page here. For time-critical issues, you may also e-mail me. For matters related to other languages or projects, it is best to leave me a message on my Meta Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons talk page.



About Me
Hello. My name is Will, but for over 25 years I have been known online as Willscrlt (yes, there was "online" prior to the World Wide Web).

The English Wikipedia ("en.wiki") is my home wiki, but I also frequently visit and edit on the Meta Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, where I also upload images. I also visit and occasionally edit on other wiki projects (mostly the English Wikibooks) and in other languages. I really only speak English, but I can comprehend some Spanish and French thanks to studying the languages in school. I also can decipher a bit of German, Italian, and Portuguese. Writing in any language other than English usually requires an online translator or sometimes a dictionary.

In mid-2010, I accepted a job that left little time for doing any wiki activities. In September 2011, the company laid off a large number of people, including me, and I returned to college to continue my education. Unfortunately, I still can find very little time to be an active editor on the wikis.

I registered for an account here on June 15, 2006. I made a few contributions prior to registering, but I do not remember what or how long ago. The task I find myself most drawn to, is developing interwiki-compatible, multilingual templates. I have learned a lot of useful skills by developing several templates in my userspace (see my meta templates page for a list). Most of them are only useful for me personally, but the experience I've gained developing them and testing them across multiple project sites has been quite helpful. I am branching out into the development of templates that are useful to multiple projects now, especially where there are not as many template developers as here at en.wiki.
 * What I enjoy doing here…

My reason for participating in the various Wikimedia Foundation Projects is to leave them better than I found them. That is how I got started editing Wikipedia. In December 2006, I noticed that the List of cocktails was in a terrible mess, so I started fixing it; that grew into a three-month reorganization and clean-up project editing nearly all of the mixed drink articles. The results of that project remain visible today.
 * My wiki experience…

Along the way, I joined several WikiProjects, learned how to create complex wiki templates, reverted the occasional vandalism, participated in various discussions, and a lot of other fun projects. Originally, I considered myself a Wikipedian (someone who primarily edits on Wikipedia). However, Wikipedia is like the Sun in our Solar system… it may be the biggest and brightest object, but it's certainly not the only object worth visiting. Commons, Meta, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wiktionary are other projects I enjoy visiting. They are all underutilized resource (at least compared to the English Wikipedia), and I hope that more people will participate and increase the content of these free, collaborative information repositories.

I enjoy meeting people, travelling to new places, and experiencing other cultures. For more information about me, you can visit my home page.
 * My life outside the wiki…

I have been using computers since sometime around 1980. My first computer was an Atari 1200XL, followed by an Apple IIgs, then an Apple Macintosh IIci, and then an old and abused Intel 80286-based PC (very briefly until it died). From that point on, I've stayed with MS-DOS and then Windows-based computers. My first online experiences were made using a 1200 baud modem on my Apple IIgs. I was a charter member of America Online (before it became known as AOL), and I became active in the local Bulletin Board System scene. In the 1990s, I was a Sysop of a fairly popular BBS. That introduced me to people who were putting together the first public regional Internet access (later to be known as a community Internet Service Provider). My first professional development experiences involving the Internet were developing gopher pages and later HTML pages for the ISP. Later, I branched out into my own Internet and graphic design business. From there I moved into computer consulting.

In early 1999, shortly before the dot.com bubble neared bursting, I relocated to Sacramento, California to help start an online auction company that lost funding by October of that year. For the next decade, I did computer network integration and consulting work. In mid-2011, I accepted an information technology position at a company that designed and manufactured weather instrumentation systems. Being in charge of 14 servers and 100+ computers was fun, but very challenging. One of the things I enjoyed most, was working with and providing support to the software developers. In September 2012, the company laid off many people, including me. I did not know it at the time, but that was the end of my I.T. career and the start of my early semi-retirement.

I returned to college with the plan to change to computer programming, full-time at first. My parents' health problems quickly reduced that to part-time. I became their full-time caregiver until their deaths. I took a little time off from a lot of things, though I still attended about one college course a semester. Extended family moved near me just after my mother passed, and it has been a life-changing experience. To the three wonderful children in that family, I have become an active co-parent; all five of us are so happy to have one another in our lives. I have become an active leader in the Cub Scouts and Sea Scouts programs of the Boy Scouts of America, and just started with the Girl Scouts as well. Our oldest boy is involved in high school wrestling, and that has inspired me to change my college major (yet again) to Kinesiology, with an emphasis on coaching. I have become a Bronze-level certified USA Wrestling coach, and I am working on other coaching certifications during my college breaks. I am attending American River College and Sacramento City College concurrently.

More years have passed since I wrote the preceding update, the world has been changed by a pandemic, I have gone through a few unrelated health issues, took a break from college, but returned in Fall 2021. Most of the extended family I wrote about moved away again, but I am still in touch with them on a regular basis, along with my other extended family. I am going to go back into information technology consulting again, but hoping to do more programming and application development this time around. Or maybe I will focus on security. Both are intriguing to me, and only time will tell. I mostly posted this update so that I would not become identified as a "missing Wikipedian", and to reassure my friends on here that I am still alive and generally doing well.





Essays and other Wiki writings
I have a hard time quietly sitting by without speaking out when I see things that I feel deserve some consideration, or even some change. I also sometimes write things that others find helpful. Here are a few of them:
 * Category suppression — How to suppress categories in templates. Revised 17 May 2009
 * How to move Geograph files to Commons — A simple, step-by-step guide that I wrote. 13:48, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * !Voting/Discussion buttons — Extra editing buttons for discussion and !votes, both with and without icons. 04:40, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * WikiHumanity — one of the biggest problems I see facing Wikipedia is the imbalance between efficiency and empathy. WikiHumanity is an important key to Wikipedia's success.

Counters
Counters and other tools


 * Edit counters
 * Luxo's counter
 * Stable edit counter
 * WikiChecker
 * X!'s counter
 * Yet another edit counter
 * GTools


 * Articles created
 * Escaladix's tool
 * X!'s tool
 * Automated edits
 * X!'s tool


 * Wikis with this username present
 * Purodha's tool
 * Huji's tool
 * Edit summaries
 * X!'s tool

(My inspiration for this) My edit counts as of 00:21, 24 November 2009 (UTC) Projects with 30 or fewer edits generally do not contain substantive edits to the projects themselves, but rather edits to my user page, my user talk page, and cross-wiki compatible template testing.

Service Awards
This editor is an Experienced Editor and is entitled to display the following Service Badges.



Nominations

 * Nominated to be an administrator
 * - Excellent Wikipedian, he is almost entirely responsible for the organization of mixed drinks in a very short interval of time. He has also encouraged and tried to get other wikipedians involved in the project thuglastalk 19:45, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
 * While very honored, I respectfully declined. Since I was involved with so many other projects, I did not feel I would be able to commit enough time to administrative duties and still complete the other projects.



General images
These are some of the original images and photographs I have created and contributed:

Logos
Wikibooks and WikiJunior were in need of new logos, so I submitted several images for consideration. See MetaWiki to view them.

Drinkware
I also created a unique collection of 45 drawings of 25 different varieties of drinkware; all the drawings were released into the public domain. Here are my favorites from the collection:



Licensing of My Submissions

 * Your licensing options and my attribution requirements
 * Example bibliographic citations