User:Bear
From Textop Wiki
About me
My name is "Bear" Longyear, also Xiong Changnian. Right away, I bump into the UseRealNames issue, don't I? I'll discuss that in the proper place at the proper time.
I have edited Wikipedia extensively under the username Xiong; having been hounded out of the project once, I continue to edit under another username. I consider myself extremely proficient in use of the MediaWiki tool and have advanced knowledge of templates; however I am not a developer. I am a member of MeatballWiki and have developed a complex (yet certainly incomplete) understanding of the forces that bind and destroy online communities. I am both a metaprocess wonk and painfully aware that metaprocess is of little importance beside a project's SuperordinateGoal. I have participated in other wikis, for example OpenTutorial; I am starting a subwiki for the purpose of game development, Carnie. I attended the very first BarCamp (Palo Alto, 2005) during which I presented The Wikipedian Community: Preliminary Statistical Analysis [1]. I have had considerable experience in other Net activities, including websites, mailing lists, and online gaming.
My general experience began in computer hardware engineering and drifted to software; along the way I worked in amusements, glassblowing, and pneumatics as well as fields more commonly associated with microelectronics, such as industrial automation and test. I was a pioneer in the very early days of desktop publishing and have considerable experience as a print writer, editor, designer, and publisher. Recently, I taught English in China for 3 years and today I blend all three major areas of my background, tutoring youth and adults, creating graphic designs, and occasionally, still, engineering. My education has been in EE, CS, and TESOL. I am a veteran of the US Army Signal Corps. My hobbies include face painting and Old Time mountain banjo.
At 46, I consider my strongest asset my ability to reflect upon the many mistakes I've made, in hopes of avoiding repetition. My greatest weakness is my difficulty tolerating those who resist all opportunities to gain enlightenment. My political views are somewhere between socialism and libertarianism; my religious views a compromise between polytheism and Confucianism; and my position on grammar is that the masculine includes the feminine and Strunk & White is always right. I don't like spicy foods and would prefer a nail driven through my hand to an afternoon watching professional sports. A compulsive reader and doer, I have wide knowledge spanning multiple disciplines and extensive knowledge of several. A particular skill is associating patterns among disparate disciplines.
Wikipedia
I have been predicting the breakup/breakdown/implosion/ossification of Wikipedia for years. My position is that an expanding community demands periodic reorganization and that Wikipedia is enslaved to a set of crypto-anarchic ideals, which serve its community poorly. Therefore, the project is eventually doomed. The bigger they are, the harder they fall; Wikipedia is destined for an epic disaster. However, they also fall slowly and the demise may take a few more years. Unlike the death of so many great institutions, I see little reason to mourn this one. Technology and license combine to ensure that useful content is being salvaged from the corpus even as the decay progresses. Thus, I continue to edit, knowing that good work will not be lost entirely.
Citizendium
Many forks contend for Wikipedia's throne. Some attempts are mere half-hearted mirrors; some suffer from peculiar biases. Larry Sanger is well known; I have read many of his earliest contributions to Wikipedia as well as his external comments thereafter. If nothing else, he is not as intoxicated as Jimmy Wales.
I'd like to see if I can be of service here.
