This user is a member of the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians.

The motto of the AIW is conservata veritate, which translates to "with the preserved truth".
This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.

AIW


This picture of God by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel is rather nice. But this is not the way I think of him.

My full name is Jörgen Nixdorf, born 1948 (like Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne, go figure). I only do Wikipedia on my computer, you can think of this as my homepage. I used to work more on Susning.nu, then, following its closing on the Swedish Wikipedia but the large community and high quality focus of the English Wikipedia drew me here, so this is where I spend most of my time. I've been editing English Wikipedia articles since November 2002.

I am a Swedish catholic christian, though one of very troubled religious nature, that's why you will find me working a lot on pages like Gnosticism. Further I consider myself a liberal. Apart from that I'm a retired programmer, I used to spend a lot of time programming COBOL. Though I believe most people think of me as a rigid, narrow-minded, middle-class intellectual dry old engineer, I have been known to have a sense of humour.

I only use Linux though out of convenience, I know many people like Microsoft Windows but the Redmond product is too hard for me to understand. Linux is quite easy. I'm too old.

Wikipedia problems

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  • Verifiability is a big problem, i.e. know that the facts stated in articles are correct. There has been a lot of discussions on this issue, no real good solution in sight. Perhaps to freeze professionally peer-reviewed content so one knows that atleast that version is fairly accurate. Very hard.
  • Authors of "real" encyclopedias like to use pompous language: "the finest thinker of his time", "the best ..." and such value-charged authoritative statements. Wikipedia tries to avoid it, but that makes for quite boring reading without any commonplace opinions on the facts presented. The problem is: how do you define a commonplace opinion? Certainly, this used to be the opinion of people writing encyclopedias. It is definately not a democratic value: the idea of the populace is not founded in fact and often influenced by myth. So how do you avoid academic elitism, and flat prose produced using a lowest common denominator of value-free statements at the same time when writing articles? Very very hard.

Places of interest

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Interesting stuff

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Interesting people

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Interesting hypotheses

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Funny stuff

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Intuition

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Things intuitive:

Actually getting answers

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Wikipedia is good for getting answers if you already know the exact question in very exact and specific terms. If you want to ask the question in a more natural way, Quora is recently a good platform for this. For example I noticed that the question on Quora posed like this:

What do you call a person that won't assume any responsibility for things gone wrong in their life?

Yielded an excellent answer referring to locus of control.

Work done

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Fun things I've done: one of my friends is a collector of books and owns an original copy of Libri tres de occulta philosophia by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in the printing from 1533. I photographed and scanned some images from this book to the entry for pentagram. Very beautiful images.

I also like drawing figures in Dia and adding to Wikipedia entries.

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Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.