I have a technical background, mainly connected with computers and programming, and a wide range of interests including evolution, mathematics, and several other topics (spread regrettably thinly). After a few edits as an IP, I made this account, choosing a name that protects privacy but conveys something of my past—the useful uniq utility was required as my first few attempted user names were taken.
I have done some article work to clean up weak or inappropriate wording, but most of my time is taken resisting the erosion of good content by unhelpful changes or linkspam. I'm frequently near a computer, but often don't have much spare thinking capacity, so significant content development is part of my future. That doesn't stop me from commenting on various dramaboards where I hope to provide minor assistance to those who are building the encyclopedia, and to resist others.
One reward from working on Wikipedia comes from interacting with a wide variety of amazing talent. Why do great contributors edit here? A factor is that evolution has shaped humans to enjoy cooperation and the passing of knowledge to others. Further, Daniel H. Pink has written a very interesting book asserting that rewarding people with payments will only go so far towards motivating them (and in fact, can produce negative effects on productivity). Instead, Pink suggests, the best results occur when people find intrinsic meaning in their work. The three key motivating factors for creative work are autonomy (choice of task and its implementation); mastery (urge to improve performance on a task believed to be worthwhile); and purpose (desire to improve the world). Enabling those factors has resulted in what is seen at Wikipedia. See the RSA animated lecture.
Comments or questions about what I have done are welcome, or if you notice some blunder I have made, please .
Tom was kind enough to post the following here, I think to brighten my drab page.
The Template Barnstar | ||
This barnstar is awarded from the grateful English-speaking nations of the world for your heroic and successful efforts in finding a solution to the Shapiro reference template for the Shakespeare authorship question article. Your elegant solution now allows two ISBN numbers to be displayed in one Harvnb template, thus saving countless hours of manual labour for Wikipedia editors on this and future articles and allowing speakers of both British and American English to be able to retrieve source cites from two different versions of the same work. He that edits this page and helps bring it to FA, when the history of Wikipedia is written, will stand a tip-toe when this article is named, and this accomplishment shall the good Wikipedian teach his son, and Shakespeare authorship shall ne'er be mentioned from this day to the ending of the world, but in it your contribution shall be remembered. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:18, 14 January 2011 (UTC) |