I'm Peter Benjamin Meyer. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, its software and its international descriptive community. I'm on the Wikimedia DC chapter's board of directors. I edit on many subjects, notably early aviation, economics and economic history, technology history, U.S. government institutions, and things related to our chapter. I took a special interest in the Alice case on software patents, created that article, and attended the Supreme Court hearing of the case.
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For many years I've been pressing for this software to be available across the U.S. government for defining terminology and brainstorming, as is done in the Intellipedia, Diplopedia, Bureaupedia, and Canadian civil service GCPEDIA. We have started an internal U.S. federal government site called Statipedia for definitions and procedures and other information that government staff would benefit from sharing broadly with one another. The site's good but not yet notable enough for Wikipedia. It's a joy to develop it and recruit for it. Along with regular software upgrades the most important thing that could happen for Statipedia is a single-sign-on system within the US government so that URLs to the site work directly when a civil servant tries to go to one in their browsers. Instead, for now, they see a logon screen and few of them have a user id. That user breakthrough is not close yet but if it ever happens, Statipedia will be a wonderful time-saver and cost-saver and morale-booster for government staff.
Professionally I research the sources and effects of technological inventions, economic history, and productivity statistics. For many years I've focused on the invention of the airplane, which came about from the efforts of a large network of experimenters, authors, and others. Their stories are wonderful, spectacularly well documented, and there is straightforward useful research to quantify these efforts in new and interesting ways.
In 1998 I started econterms.com] as a searchable database of economics terms. It was cited on Wikipedia a good bit. The program running on the server was a "CGI" program in C, and ran fast, but it's stopped running, now. Someday perhaps I can rebuild it.
Contents
Subpages hereEdit
my toolbox | my milestones | my conflict of interest statement |my CSS | experimental infobox for journals | experimental doc for that infobox. See also: Wikinews wikinews:user:econterms | /Wikipedia visit spikes
Essays by myself and othersEdit
- Draft essay: /Is Wikipedia a publication?
- Draft by me on ideological risks with chapter partners
- my first draft on speedy-deletion: don't delete broken redirects immediately | to integrate into prev policy and essays: Wikipedia: Why I hate speedy deleters ; Wikipedia talk:Why I hate speedy deleters ; Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion | Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion/Overturned speedy deletions ; essay on deletion by Kudpung
- Wikipedia is dying: Why, and What can be done about it, by User:Jorge Stolfi -- highlights decline in #s of editors of English Wikipedia; analyzes why and makes recommendations ; shows timing matches restrictions on IP-addr-edits not the Siegenthaler affair ; there's more; it's got data and graphs
- Templates that I sorely miss, by User:Jorge_Stolfi -- funny!
- Policy on Wikipedia essays in general
Hopeful plansEdit
- study how these images are tagged in the HTML from Alexandria, Virginia: (a) the 2015 memorial image in the infobox comes in "right" for JAWS which can identify it as an image ; (b) the "alt text" for the image of the 1878 map is not being read and the image is not identified as an image to JAWS. Zack wanted to use the "G" function in JAWS to get to the next image but could not.
- work on John Whitefield Kendrick, major national statistician and economic historian
- add to Carroll D. Wright from [1] and [2]
- to do's: fill in Manufacturers Aircraft Association, Henri de la Valette, sources for Aéro-Club de France, look for better sources in Reforms of French orthography
- strengthen citations of Octave Chanute ; fill out Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith
based on the Deutsch wikipedia sources ; put Gibbs-Smith into the French Wikipedia ; expand French page on Lilienthal ; comment on talk page of FOLDOC that it helped as design model for econterms and maybe google and was pre-WWW, and got lots of use. - tasks at Wikidata | tasks at Wikisource
- add http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/inmemoriam/erichenrymonkkonen.htm to SSH ; also Steckel, perhaps Abbott
- use: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/community/text6/text6read.htm, http://web.archive.org/web/20080407092901/http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/library/news/colored.american.html
- launch /Pattern-mixture models
- launch /Ming-Chen Wang
- Needs work: Office of Inspector General, U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Inspector General (United States), National Agricultural Statistics Service (which reports to research/educ/econ office)
- to study: Grand Canal (China), Manchu people
- add Gustave Hermite -- note multiple redlinks now
- indirect seasonal adjustment -- isn't even defined
- Tobin's q -- the lead needs to say why this statistic gets attention, and the article needs to be sharpened with fewer or less lengthy quotations from sources ; the history of the article has clearer versions
- Template:Poetic forms -- add more stanzas and rhymes and offer it to WP:Poetry
- Virginia House of Delegates districts -- keep going
- join Women in Red
- propose Patents on Wikidata: [3]
- for multiple chemical sensitivity: review [4], [5] and [6]
- for upcoming conferences, review [7]
- add mereological fallacy, drawing from [8] and other searches; the term is used in a couple of articles already.
Done!Edit
FunEdit
- Possible record for most errors in an edit summary. A text deletion was summarized thus: "Walter Shaub was fired by McGahn. His tweets are not objective." But (a) Shaub wasn't fired, (b) McGahn didn't fire him, (c) the text referred to wasn't from tweets, (d) objectivity isn't required in a critique, rather it needs to be informative.