User:AndrewKepert

Me

• Maths lecturer at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
• Based at Ourimbah campus, a multi-sector campus shared by the University of Newcastle, TAFE NSW and the Central Coast Community College.
• Double Bassist - Classical and Jazz. (Gotta fix that article getting there)

Andrew's hand

Me and WikipediA

Previously a sporadic skimmer of wikipedia, I took the plunge on 18:26, 4 Aug 2003 with MetaPost. Not intending to be a hard-core wikipedian, you can find some of my contributions below

• MetaPost (and related adjustments to TeX, Metafont, etc)
• Computers and Typesetting (more of the above)
• Gosford, Wyong and Ourimbah (where I live & work) and related adjustments to Central Coast, New South Wales
• A random spray of edits around numeral system including golden mean base, decimal.
• Double Bass (contribs, photos)
• category:polyhedra and many of the articles

My claim to fame/shame on Wikipedia

I started the page 1729 (number) (aka 1729 (anecdote)) in November 2003. I included a note about classifying numbers as interesting/uninteresting, as it had crossed my mind to list on the page (or section as it was then) for 38 that its only interesting property was that it was the smallest uninteresting number. At the time wikipedia had "interesting" properties listed for all numbers 1 to 37 (disclaimer: some of these I wrote). So this was not an original thought, just a whimsical comment on the process of identifying interesting properties for numbers to put in wikipedia. This page lead to an edit war way out of proportion with the innocuous content:

• One thousand seven hundred and twenty nine - the original page
• History of 1729_(anecdote)
• History of 1729_(number)
• talk:1729 (anecdote)
• talk:1729 (number)
• Interesting and uninteresting numbers
• Interesting number paradox
• etc

None of this has improved my original half-arsed article terribly much. There has been months of activity on this material, and yet little or no new content, only bickering about tightening up the semantics of a construction that was clearly intended to be an amusing observation based on a sloppy definition. As a result, there is now just a mess of overlapping pages with trivial differences, protected pages and protected redirections to empty protected pages. Want my opinion?

1. People who want to cooperate should figure out how to cooperate.
2. People who don't want to cooperate are free to grab the wikimedia code and the wikipedia database and run their own wiki server behind a firewall where they are God and can purge it of all content contributed by their sworn enemies.

There, I've said it, now I'll shut up about it.

Where to next

As the mood takes me, I may be writing/editing the following at some point

• University of Newcastle (NSW) for whom I work (Oh how cool - Snorre has written this for me.)
• Australian Census including basic data on the 2001 Census, based on my experience extracting data from it. Also the fun stuff like Jedi.
• User:AndrewKepert/17gon some draft stuff I am working on for 17-gon
• Talk:Johnson solid tracks my progress creating images for the Johnson solid page. And /poly.pov contains my version of the source (can't seem to upload on top of User:Cyp's version). And Template:Infobox Polyhedron and Template:Infobox Polyhedron with net are to make my life easier when creating the polyhedron pages.
• /polyhedra for a "hub" of all polyhedra-related developments
• /symmetry group for some work on images for the symmetry group page, including povray code
• Figure out how to do a {{User TeX}} thingy . . . Template:User TeX

---

How much you can re-use my contributions

As suggested in the Free the rambot Articles project it is useful if wikipedians be a bit more explicit about the licensing of their contributions. So here it is:

Unless otherwise stated, I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Bookmarks (for my benefit)

HOWTO

• MediaWiki User's Guide on Meta-Wikipedia
  • Editing overview
  • Using tables
• Extended image syntax
• MediaWiki custom messages like {{msg:stub}}
• Wikipedia:Categorization
• Wikipedia:Deletion_policy and Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion

WP todos

• Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics
• List of functional analysis topics
• List of general topology topics
• Requested articles/mathematics

Keep an eye on

• Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Australia