Hi, I'm Gidi from the Netherlands. I'm on Wikipedia mostly as an eager user of information, both professionally and for personal interests, but sometimes I edit and add stuff I find to be wrong or missing. So, if you want to know what I'm about, you'd get a good idea by looking at my contributions. I'm also on Wikimedia Commons (as commons:User:Gidi70) and the dutch Wikipedia (as nl:Gebruiker:Gidi70).
Professionally I use Wikipedia for computer stuff like programming and software design methods and descriptions of open source and commercial packages. Personally I look at an eclectic lot of subjects ranging from physics to entertainment via tennis and volleyball. I'm especially interested in people in the widest sense of the word.
Comment: quality of nl page isn't that great either, will need copyedit afterwards.
Ok, translating is done, so proofreaders can check language etc; the article itself needs more work, more info and definitely more references, but that's a separate issue from translating.Gidi70 05:07, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Requested by:Gidi70 03:45, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Interest of the translation: More information at the nl page, quality of en page was questioned
Regarding Wikipedia I support the effort to keep it as encyclopaedic as possible. But I do envisage the need for other outlets and stores of information.
Sales figures of certain magazines show that there is clearly a need to read gossip and many incorrect edits to Wikipedia are done because people want to provide the information for that. Why not make a rumourNet, a central wiki store of all rumours anyone has heard? It reduces vandalism to Wikipedia and also makes life easier for celebrities: a free source of gossip means less magazines bought by the public, less income by the magazine publishers, less money paid to paparazzi photographers and therefore less people hiding in the bushes. The rules for such a rumourNet would be: agree to disagree, state your opinion or rumour only once and don't try to get to a consensus because in rumourNet, there will be no single truth. Or any truth.
Another big wiki source of information could be a central knowledge base of everything the human race knows. This sounds like Wikipedia but is completely different: this knowledge base of Life, the Universe and Everything would contain original research, while Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia will never be a first source but always needs references to reliable other sources. In a way, such a KB of everything is very much like the computer on Star Trek: one place that just stores everything, logs everything, correlates everything. Except that on Star Trek they use local offline copies, while I would prefer one central source. But then, if you're on a starship, local offline copies seem the way to go; there's only so far that subspace can stretch.
What could this KBase (or shall we actually call it LCARS?) contain? Physics research papers. No peer review before publication, but possibly peer reviews attached to it afterwards. Film and music reviews. Your analyses of politic problems. Things that went wrong in history, so we don't need to do it again. Software design patterns. How to use dating sites effectively. Understanding women, once mankind has figured that one out. How to repair a bicycle. Course material. In short: anything...
Some novelty tv programmes I watch: De Mol in its original Belgian format, Mythbusters and especially the fun Kari Byron has and how she keeps pretending she doesn't have a mean streak. I loved and completely expected Nicola Jackson to win the Spy reality series: in that series a group of students received real spy training and the best one would win. At the end one of the tutors said: You're a cut above the rest. In the real world you would have made a great spy. And you just sense that he regrets that this is for tv; she really would have been great. I've got it on dvd and rewatching it makes me admire all her subtle tricks more and more.
I play volleyball, indoors and on the beach. I watch that as well, but I also like watching F1 and tennis. I prefer women's tennis over men's, because the different way they play (more angles, more slice, more tactics) is better to watch; and they are better to watch...
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