Zatsugaku

While I have removed the "New User" banner, I still consider myself new or perhaps novice in so many regards that I request patience if I breach a protocol somewhere in my efforts.

I’m a writer and technical researcher in Virginia, the United States, with broad interests who has decided to spend more time contributing to Wikipedia. I anticipate learning enough to eventually collaborate on more substantial projects and to encourage and mentor other contributors and financial supporters. For the Wikimedia Foundation’s initiatives to reach their potential, they will need much more substantial resources, more contributors, and enhanced modes of content creation.

From mid-2021, I paused my personal Wikipedia projects/interests to work on academic papers and presentations. I hope to be back online more regularly in the fall of 2022.

March 2023 update: While the various presentations and papers were well received/published, the hiatus that I started almost two years ago was extended beyond last fall due to focusing on family health and medical issues. I am trying to be at least intermittently present and active although it is unlikely this year that I will be able to get back to the previous level of commitment and participation. I continue to encourage and occasionally mentor others in improving Wikipedia and provide modest financial support.

Wikipedia:GOCE

en

This user is a native speaker of the English language.

This user is a member of
the Guild of Copy Editors.

This user is interested in
science.

This user is interested in the scientific revolution.

This user is interested in aviation.

This user has published peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.

This user lives in North America.

Make articles, not wikidrama

User Name

Zatsugaku (雑学) means "miscellaneous knowledge" in Japanese.

Personal philosophy

Freedom, voluntary cooperation to mutual benefit, honesty, and benevolence are better than authoritarian mandates, forced sacrifice, dishonesty, and malevolence. We can choose to see people for their potential and help them reach it—and doing that is good for our own wellbeing and long-term self-interests.

My experience on Wikipedia

Circa July 2020: While I consider myself to be comparatively inexperienced with many of the details of page development (and apologize in advance for any oversights), I have made modest content contributions in brief spurts of motivation since the early days of Wikipedia, mostly on accounts that were lost to time or to change of service providers. I have created a handful of basic pages, substantively enhanced about a half-dozen others, and added a few dozen citations. About half of my content has survived and been expanded. I have observed but never participated in undo wars.

Looking back on content I added, in some cases perfectly reasonable, unremarkable cross-references have vanished, which I assume to be an artifact of bulk-editing without sufficient attention to what was being chopped. In one case, a culturally valuable piece of information was “erased” by a one-off/single edit IP account, with the most plausible explanation being a major corporate entity does not want the fact to be searchable.

Wikipedia Courses

Towards the goal of becoming a better WP editor and teacher and to be able to assist in projects, I've completed the The Wikipedia Adventure (WP:TWA) program, intended as an initial introduction to adding content. Of course, it is elementary for anyone who has been editing for a while but demonstrates a good curriculum approach and offers good coverage of topics and so I found it worthwhile. If one is in the position of encouraging other people to become editors, going through this course oneself makes it possible to appropriately recommend and explain it to others.

My views on encouraging more people to become Wikipedians

Over the last year, I’ve taken seriously the many underlying issues related to the health and advancement of Wikipedia—reading dozens of articles, blogs, essays and other pages on this topic (as well as a few hundred individual comments and revert war logs), and learning a bit ab about the many improvement projects. There are clearly some structural issues but also a lot of opportunities to do better. (Some interesting suggestions at the Idealab. )

With few exceptions, one underlying premise of growing the Wikipedian community has been that it is largely passive: the current community of Wikipedians engages online with those who are already trying to become editors. Yes, The Wikimedia Foundation through WikiEdu.org has outreach initiatives, and there are courses from the Wikidata institute, etc. But consider something much simpler and more direct: if you know someone who is a competent writer with a passion for some topical area, offer to mentor them. I’ve talked to several people and had varying degrees of success in getting a few interested and editing. In the future, once my own skills improve, I hope to more formally undertake mentoring.

Wikipedia Metacontent

Discussion about the future of Wikipedia that I've found interesting.

Youtube by Dr. Sara Thomas at Wikimedia UK regarding work on advancing minority wikis, in this case Scots. Posted 22 June 2021.

My views on Wikipedia content

As the use of Wikipedia expands around the world, I think contributing editors should look to creatively experimenting with new subheadings and data tables with an eye towards diversifying the purposes for which individuals can rely on Wikipedia. Novel subsections will certainly make some editors uncomfortable, but beyond broadening a particular article, it represents an exploration of topic categories that could benefit a broader base of users and enable new types of functionality.

Consider, for example that there is a well-established concept for cities called walkability which reflects how friendly an area is to getting around by walking. There are a variety of researchers who have developed scoring models, such as a walking audit. But Wikipedia pages for cities don’t at present contain walkability data. (I imagine many cities would not find it complementary.) But if we are interested in making cities more livable and more efficient, inclusion on Wikipedia’s pages will raise awareness and access to such data–in short, Wikipedia becomes a change agent. Exploring innovative data categories will also inspire new content and financial contributions.

If urban planning doesn’t inspire your interest, consider entries for musicians or musical compositions. Services such as Pandora radio contain far richer genres related metadata. Whereas on a Wikipedia an entry might say “easy listening jazz” on Pandora you will see terms such as, “mid-tempo swing feel”, “Brazilian jazz influences”, “major tonality”, and “use of modal tonality.” For movies, a hugely popular Youtube theme is the “kill count,” yet in Wikipedia that film attribute has almost no presence. (At this writing, only the pages for TV series characters Walt Longmire and for Antonio Dawson contain an explicit kill count section. The film John Wick includes a subheading for the films’ Characterization that includes aspects of the genre concretized by the kill count.

These may seem fairly trivial examples, but they represent the kind of data that people are obviously interested in, and which could be created or updated by bots. Supporting new interest areas could be beneficial to attracting more editors and fostering additional financial support for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia, Ontologies and AI

If one studies the field of artificial intelligence, a foundational concept is an ontology. In information science, it “encompasses …a formal naming and definition of categories, properties and relations between the concepts…” “…An ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related by defining a set of concepts and categories that represent the subject.” Without setting out to do so, Wikipedia has become an informal ontology. From that perspective, it becomes apparent that Wikipedia content can not only be accessed by systems such as Watson to answer discrete questions, but to frame an understanding of the world similar to the goals of the Cyc project. When combined with platforms such as the OpenAI GPT-3 initiative, one can envision, for example, entire biographies or documentary histories being threaded and composed automatically, integrating appropriate fragments of content chronologically from thousands of pages.

Some Research and Interest Areas

Education, curriculum development, instructional models, tools, etc.
Science education and outreach
Serious games and gamification
Story telling
Telecommunications
Artificial Intelligence
Data management
Knowledge management, time logged systems
Journalism, media and library sciences
Physical and cyber security
Military history and technology
Biomedical engineering
Aviation
Assistive technology
Public policy
Politics and philosophy
Law and justice systems
Investment (funds, derivatives, etc.)
Architecture
Urban design
Fitness tracking technology
Botany, landscape design
Classic science fiction
Think tanks, foundations, and private philanthropy
Entrepreneurship, technology, and organizational projects intended to inspire and fuel individuals being able to achieve their potential.

Personal

I’m married with adult children. I enjoy traveling and have either visited, lived, or worked in about twenty countries and have been to a majority of U.S. states. My hobbies include several sports such as hiking, biking, and swimming as well as gardening and miscellaneous household repair and DIY projects. My education includes a BA, MS, some additional post graduate studies, and several certifications, such as TESL.