My primary interests are in renewable energy, climate change (climate science, mitigation, personal action, and the psychology of human response to climate change), energy policy, energy security, car-free living, composting, gardening, finding new ways to further cut my carbon footprint, and moving bits instead of bodies.

I like to edit on wikis,W but I am even more interested in the process of building successful wikis.[1] The most successful wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) are the most effective systems for remote collaboration I have yet seen, and may be the first really credible alternative to meatspaceW communication which is a primary cause for the highly destructive levels of motor travel in the developed and developing nations. If everybody knew how to edit on wikis,[2] we could probably sweep the roads almost clear of automobiles and the sky of airplanes, drastically reducing greenhouse gasW emissions,W conventional pollution,W noise pollution,W fossil fuel depletion,W and vehicle violence,W while saving a fortune and making human communities more livableW for humans again.

Contributions[edit | edit source]

The following are pages I have created (blue links) or hope to create (red linksW) on Appropedia, by namespace.W

User subpages[edit | edit source]

SubpagesW are a feature of the MediaWiki software that powers Appropedia.[3]


Help pages[edit | edit source]

Mainspace pages (i.e., articles)[edit | edit source]

Project pages[edit | edit source]

Adminship[edit | edit source]

Thanks! So now I am an administrator on Appropedia. If anyone needs help from an administrator, let me know.

Initially I expect to delete my share of the daily spam blast, visible on Special:RecentChanges. Appropedia needs enough administrators to keep up with the spammers.

See wikipedia:WP:EIW#Admin for links to the extensive documents about being an administrator on Wikipedia. Some of that material describes administrative tasks and aspects of being an administrator that are common to all MediaWiki wikis, including Appropedia. However, as of 2011, Wikipedia is far more complex than Appropedia, with formal procedures for dealing with many administrator-related tasks including the deletion of articles, media files, and other pages.

In most respects I will continue to edit as before. According to wiki culture,[4] adminship does not confer any special status on a wiki user's position in a dispute over content. Disputes on a wiki are generally decided according to whose arguments are better, not on who has more editing privileges.

In terms of wiki philosophy, I lean toward inclusionism.

Edits on other wikis[edit | edit source]

My user page on the English Wikipedia is Wikipedia:User:Teratornis.

I have a big mess of notes in Wikipedia:User:Teratornis/Energy relating to some edits I have done (or thought about doing) on Wikipedia.

As of 22:02, 9 January 2011 (PST), I happen to have the most edits on the Wikipedia Help deskW with 5853, although I may soon lose the top spot to the equally prolific Primehunter.W One could say that I enjoy answering questions, especially on a site as well set up for answering questions as Wikipedia is. It's also been fun to help build question-answering tools there, such as the Editor's index to Wikipedia.W

Wikipedia, regrettably, forbids procedural knowledge in articles,W and that is very limiting for anyone with a practical problem to solve. Fortunately, there is Appropedia. I've enjoyed finding clever bits here about how to make compost bins and so on, and I'd like to help out.

About my user name[edit | edit source]

I took it from Teratornis merriami, a species of large extinct flying bird similar to modern new world vultures and condors. I chose the user name primarily because it is almost never already in use on sites where I want to create a pseudonymous account. And because teratorns were just cool. To see how cool, check out this video on YouTube (caution: loud metal soundtrack song).

Notes and references[edit | edit source]

  1. That is, I am interested in all the things that have to happen to make (and then keep) a wiki as a comfortable place for people to edit. An analogy is using tools vs. building tools. Most people are happy enough to swing an axe; some people want to know where the axe comes from. The ingredients of a successful wiki tend to be subtle and unobvious.
  2. Editing on wikis involves much more than learning the basic wikitext markup.W See the Editor's index to Wikipedia for an overview. A competent wiki editor needs at least a general awareness of most topics covered in that index, and a detailed understanding of the topics he or she specializes in.
  3. User subpages are subpages of user pagesW which are suitable for keeping notes, and prototyping content which a user may later move to other namespacesW to be collaboratively edited by other users. By convention, other users do not usually edit a given user's user page and subpages, but every page on a wiki must comply with its site policies, and user pages are subject to removal if they do not.
  4. At least on the English Wikipedia, where the party line is that adminship is "no big deal".W Whether that is actually true in practice may be a different story.

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