User:DanShearer
Wikipedia articles are a good way to keep notes on things I want to remember or understand. I created this account in 2004, and now in 2023 Wikipedia tells me I have made over 800 edits and created 10 articles. This makes me a minor contributor, but I've gained a lot and recommend it to others. My first 500 edits qualified me for reading rights to hundreds of professional journals and news archives, and I retain those rights as long as I am a reasonably current editor.
Here is a graphical display of my list of contributions.
My contributions to the English Wikipedia are about 50/50 personal and professional.
Reasons I contribute on personal topics...
My own education: As an example of how the Wikipedia community works, I made an incorrect contribution to Abductive reasoning which a mathematician quickly reverted. After receiving some tutoring in public on the Abductive reasoning Talk page I now understand how abduction fits with other thinking approaches.
Curious or important things I meet in life: such as Tinel's Sign, or an update on the tragedy of Rosamund Kissi-Debrah who has helped officially establish facts about air pollution that matter to us all.
Documenting important evidence so it is harder to overlook: I added detailed evidence of the bad personal behaviour of Isaac Asimov, whose works influenced me positively as a child. I added credible medical articles addressing the nonsense Irlen Syndrome, since the coloured lenses developed for this non-existent condition are useful for other purposes and I use them every day.
Documenting problems I have solved for myself: Why do Scottish charitable incorporated organisations not appear at Companies House? The answer is because they are entirely regulated by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, which means that applicable law is Scottish despite looking like corporate law, which is at the UK level. This is confusing and the article was also confused. As part of untangling this I created the new article Scottish charitable incorporated organisation. I haven't created many articles so this took time to get right.
And so this is how my Wikipedia edit history is an strange diary of moments in life where I feel particularly ignorant and at a loss.
Why do I contribute to Wikipedia on professional topics?
I edit articles related to my daily work including LumoSQL, Sweet Lies and Legal Tech Matters. It takes a lot of effort and time to make a quality modification to a technical article. Articles I have made major changes to include:
- Shamir's secret sharing, a cryptographic concept that has been around since the 1970s but until recently the article was badly explained for non-mathematicians.
- MIT License, a software license that only seems simple, and whose subtleties related to patents I needed to master before adopting it for my own projects.
- Maildir, a way of storing email as files that has served me and millions of others well over the years. It doesn't look like it should work, but it does.
- Prepared statement, an important SQL construct I knew nothing about but which is highly relevant to LumoSQL.
- The Right to be forgotten, which definitely does not exist in the GDPR. I was unsure, because GDPR Article 17 is called Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’), but it turns out the word "forgetting" is left over from an early draft of the GDPR. Article 17 is only about limited erasure. As of May 2022, the GDPR part of this page is a mess but at least this small fact is now correct.
- In Berkeley DB I have recorded my painstaking research to list the public projects still using BerkelyDB (almost none.) I also untangled the confusingly similar names Oracle gave to BDB-related database products. The work done for this article demonstrates that BDB is dead in practical terms. I promote new and better Key-value stores including in LumoSQL, so it was useful to collect evidence that this ancient code is much less used than many sources seem to assume.
- PIC (markup language), because thanks to Pikchr, this 40 year-old language suddenly became relevant to me an many others. I plan to break up this article, because Pikchr is noteworthy in its own right and the things I want to remember about it are best stored in Wikipedia.
- Locally-administered MAC addresses is an example of an information hole in the middle of a very well-covered topic.
Dan Shearer (talk) 22:44, 11 October 2023 (UTC)