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Pigsonthewing

— Wikipedian ♂ —
Name	Andy Mabbett FRSA
Born	Birmingham
Country	England
Current location	Birmingham
Contact info
Website	pigsonthewing.org.uk
Skype	Ask!
Flickr	[http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigsonthewinguk/ pigsonthewinguk]
Twitter	[http://m.twitter.com/pigsonthewing @pigsonthewing]
Account statistics
Edit count	> 110,000
Userboxes
Wikipedia:Babel en-5 This user can contribute with a professional level of English. Search user languages Name This user's name is Andy Mabbett. This user is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. This user has been on Wikipedia for 20 years, 6 months and 8 days. This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than ten years. This user is a GLAM Ambassador. This user is a member of WikiProject QRpedia. This user is a participant in WikiProject Wikidata. This is a confirmed main account and not a sock puppet. (→ Verify - info) → I have met this user, verify! This editor is a Master Editor III and is entitled to display this Bufonite Editor Star. This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than 15 years. This user is one of the 250 most active English Wikipedians of all time. This user is ranked 402 on the list of Wikipedians by articles created. 100,000+ This user has made more than 100,000 contributions to Wikipedia. This user has autopatrolled rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify) This user has pending changes reviewer rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify) This user has rollback rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify) H This user had access to HighBeam through The Wikipedia Library. C This user has access to Credo through The Wikipedia Library. This user is a participant in WikiProject Accessibility. This user is a participant in WikiProject Articles for creation. You can help! This user has been a major contributor to 10 articles featured in the Did you know... section on the Main Page. Member of Wikimedia UK GLAM / TCM Indy project contributor GLAM / The Herbert project contributor This is a confirmed main account and not a sock puppet. (→ Verify - info) → I have met this user, verify! This user is interested in open access to research literature. “...”! US vs. UK This user uses logical quotation marks. Internal punctuation leads to factual errors. It's not a style issue! This user checks Wikipedia. This user's account is secured with a unique Committed Identity. This user watches over Wikipedia with the help of Navigation popups! This user watches over Wikipedia with the help of Twinkle! This user adds inline citations quickly and easily with Zotero. This user participated in Wikimania 2012 held in Washington, D.C., United States. This user participated in Wikimania 2014 held in London, United Kingdom. This user participated in Wikimania 2016 held in Esino Lario, Italy. This user lives in Birmingham. This user is a birder. This user is a member of WikiProject Birds. This user participates in WikiProject Biota of Great Britain and Ireland. This user is a participant in WikiProject Insects. This user is a member of the Pink Floyd WikiProject. This user is a professional writer or journalist. This user has published a book. MAGAZINE This user has had his work published in a magazine. This user is a professional webmaster. This user is a member of WikiProject Microformats. This user contributes to OpenStreetMap. This user participates in WikiProject Geographical Coordinates. This user is a member of the Museums WikiProject - You can help! This user is a member of WikiProject Libraries. This user is a member of the Public art taskforce. This user is a member of WikiProject UK Railways. This user is a member of WikiProject UK Waterways This user is a participant in WikiProject Rivers. This user participates in WikiProject West Midlands. This user is a member of WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom. This user is a member of the Military memorials and cemeteries task force of WikiProject Military history. This user participates in WikiProject Kosovo. This user is a participant in WikiProject Serbia. This user is an administrator on Wikispecies. (verify) This user is a participant in WikiProject Templates. This user is a skeptic. This user is an atheist. This user has a Flickr account as @pigsonthewinguk. This user posts on X as @pigsonthewing. BSc This user has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer studies. This user is a Commonist and has a user page at Commons.

Activities

• GLAMWiki UK collaborations
  • QRpedia (see Wikiproject QRpedia)
• improving Wikipedia's emission of metadata, including:
  • Adding Microformats to Wikipedia; see the Microformats Project
  • Facilitating Linked Data, via DBpedia; chiefly by using Infoboxes, and by disambiguating both their parameters; and our articles (see my blog post on the latter subject)
  • Considering the implictons of Schema.org
• Improving the accessibility of Wikipedia
• Improving Wikipedia's compliance with HTML standards
  • Adding the necessary CSS to be able to produce horizontal lists using proper mark-up
• Improving, standardising and rationalising templates; especially infoboxes (which also contribute to our metadata - see above)
• Resolving the issue of how to mark up dates and times which are "fuzzy" (imprecise) or in pre-Gregorian calendars (chiefly Julian)
  • including work on the HTML5 <TIME> element, and the Extended Date/ Time Format efforts.
• geotagging articles,
  • including how we do so for linear features
  • …and multiple points of interest in an individual article
  • developing systems for marking up non-terrestrial (lunar, Martian, etc) coordinates
• 20th century British ornithologists
• Anything related to Birmingham
• Gently reminding wikiprojects that it's a core policy that that don't own sections of Wikipedia.*
• Articles, templates and categories I've created (list is far from complete)
• My edit count on all Wikimedia projects (slow to load)

Ethos

I can't put this better than…

I agree with standardizing everything we can (and if it were up to me, we wouldn't have customizable signatures, but that's a different issue), because ultimately we would like to reduce the chore of building Wikipedia to a (necessarily very complex) algorithm. The more orderly Wikipedia becomes, the more tasks we can reliably relegate to bots, eliminating tedium and keeping the human work more conducive to generating the pleasurable sensations of flow. Teratornis, 11 Jan 09

and:

Contentions need proper sorting, not cop-out guidance. Jack Merridew 22 Aug 2010

Principles

A few things which I believe:

• Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikivoyage and other so called "sister projects" should be seen as parts of one project, and more tightly integrated.
• Wikivoyage should include Wikipedia links to individual features (e.g. museums, bridges), mentioned in its listings, where such articles exist
• There should, eventually, be a Wikidata entity for every source cited on Wikipedia and sister projects; and each citation should call that entity, adding page numbers and quotes as appropriate.

Guidelines

• WP:Advice pages

Essays

• My thoughts on Persondata
• Templates of Redundancy Templates
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Signatures (work in progress)

Infoboxes

"Eye-tracking study: Wikipedia readers look at table of contents first, then infobox, 'skim and scroll' long articles"; "many readers look only at the information box, summary text, lists, sub titles, references, or maybe only keywords": Full paper.

Wikipedia activity

• Pigsonthewing · (talk · contribs · deleted · cross-wiki · wikichecker· count · pages created · logs · lu · search an, ani, cn, an3)

IP

• All edits by 81.5.140.5 (talk · contribs) before 13 April 2010 are mine.
• All edits by 93.97.168.150 (talk · contribs) from 14 April 2010 are mine.

Articles I want

• Erebus555 has some good ideas!
• Disused railway stations of the West Midlands county
• West Midlands county
• British Birds Rarities Committee members
• Ornithologists
• Ornithological books
• Norman Hickin
• Shire Publications
• Something about adaptation to life at high altitude

Web for all

I believe strongly in adherence to web standards, making web pages as accessible as possible, to everyone, and that it's important to communicate using the simplest language necessary, to convey ideas clearly.

Browsing

I usually surf with Chrome (formerly I used FireFox, using Operator for parsing microformats)), and sometimes other browsers, under Windows XP, on a 10" Lenovo netbook. I also use an HTC Desire HD mobile device, which is superb.

Overall

…I'd rather be out bird-watching.

Contributions

Debate

If you wish to persuade me of something, the higher you are on this diagram, the more likely you are to succeed:

Warning