User:Donovan

Introduction

My name is Donovan Jones. I am a software developer from New Zealand. I am a competent wiki editor and plan to assist the OSE in this capacity. I do not plan to collaborate or assist in other ways in the medium term. Essentially I am a WikiGnome, as such it is probably safe to ignore me.

If you don't like some of my edits please let me know on my talk page, I don't want to step on any toes, but I'm not going to seek approval for every edit. On aggregate I hope you will agree I am improving the wiki, so let me know when you feel I am not.

Current objectives

• MJ request - How_to_Create_Frames_and_Windows_in_Media_Wiki for Flashy XM, Flash Mob, and other pages.
  • I investigated support for widgets on OSE wiki, I was wanting to try: http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Iframe
  • I do not have permission to edit pages in the Widget namespace. So cannot try out this widget on the OSE wiki.
• Fix broken links to openfarmtech.org.
• Improve metric support on the wiki.
• Work on Work_Log_Guidelines particularly the Date_Format_Convention.
• Work on and improve categories.
• Wikifying pages: work on wiki linking.
• General grammar and spelling fixes.

Future objectives

• Collaborate with my father to contribute on Biofuels particularly butanol.
• Creating custom wiki templates
• Creating custom OSE infoboxes
  • keep any eye on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata which will make creating infoboxes much easier.
  • software infobox to include:
    • licence
    • ubuntu package name

Thoughts

As an outsider there are a few observations I would make about things that could be improved.

Support for the Metric System

Three countries use non-metric measurement systems: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. I believe for OSE to a have a global impact it needs better support for the metric system. Many collaborators will only be able to source metric parts. I want to help provide better metric support at least on the wiki.

Using Conversion Templates

Complex conversion templates are available from other media wiki sites eg: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Template:Convert. This system is very comprehensive http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Template:Convert/list_of_units but is quite complex and requires subtemplates. I have done a proof of concept with temperature conversion:

• {{convert|60|°F|°C|sigfig=3}} = 60 °F (16 °C)
• {{convert|16|°C|°F|sigfig=3}} = 16 °C (61 °F)

If OSE wish to use these templates I suggest following the instructions at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Templates#Copying_from_one_wiki_to_another, this will be much easier for someone with import rights on the OSE wiki (I do not have these rights). Without import rights each subtemplate needs to be copied manually which is tedious and is prone to cut and paste errors.

Wiki standards

Standards like the Date_Format_Convention are important in a wiki, they create consistency, help define a framework within which people can become more productive and in general help to make the wiki more functional. As such I will be editing peoples Logs, please let me know if you would prefer I left them alone.

Date formats

I have a definite opinion about what the best date format is but I will not be converting dates to this format or pushing this other than recommending it here.

The best date format is the ISO 8601 format. It looks like this: 2012-11-27, compare this to 02/04/03 which has three possible interpretations.

The reasons it is best are:

• it is unambiguous.
• it sorts correctly using string or numeric sorting.
• it is a formal standard.
• it is widely used.
• the format can also be used to represent precise date and time, with timezone information.

see also: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date

Other Skills

I do have some other skills that may be useful to the OSE. I am an experienced data munger, if you need scripts written to process and convert data feel free to drop me a line. Things like

• Writing cron jobs
• Talking to databases (postgres/mysql/sqlite)
• Pulling in xml,yaml,json,html,csv,wiki markup
• Spitting out xml,yaml,json,html,csv,wiki markup
• Talking to REST web services.
• Screen scraping and web automation.

My language of choice is perl. My collaboration method of choice is github. My development environment of choice is ubuntu. My server environment of choice is ubuntu/debian.