User:Charles Matthews

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At the seaside

To be found often in Cambridge, UK, and sometimes in Southwold, Suffolk, where the pic was taken. I recently helped organise the first-ever Cambridge meetup.

[edit] Recent essay

Wikipedia:Merging encyclopedias, arising from much of my editing in 2008.
/WikiProject DNBMerge, in drsft.

My Thursdays: Headway Cambridge

A teaching game

[edit] Wikimania 2008

Someone's rough notes on panel discussion on enWP
- Yes, I need to correct some of that ...
Oooh, and I got quoted by James Gleick [1]
Andrew Lih "forgot" to photograph me there, so here's one of Phoebe's finest socking hour [2].
I brought a go set, found a few players (Mako too popular for panel sessions to actually play).

[edit] 2007

Wikimania 2007 party - who's the over-friendly Wikia guy?

I attended Wikimania 2007 in Taipei - a blast. Also some perspective on 'free culture' and so on. Working on enWP remains central for me. Another angle with stroopwaffels. Another photo, and another. And sneaking out of a talk.

[edit] 2006

At the Kampala YMCA. Thursday 15 June I talked on Wikipedia and its future at the Grand Imperial Hotel, Kampala, 5 - 7 pm, to around 100 people.

They wanted PowerPoint, I wanted an OHP! Old-style lecturer in action.

Mostly I was in Uganda to teach go.

Kampala June 2006

I decided to stand for the WMF Board 2006 Board Elections (debate was at meta:User:Charles Matthews/WMF Board Election 2006). I came 7th, with about 380 votes.

An essay: /Conflict of interest, from October 2006 when it was a hot potato. The policy at WP:COI has assumed greater and greater importance as time has passed.

[edit] Some other meetups to which I made it

Going completely wild at the Birmingham meet-up, 2006

Attendee at the meet-up in London June 5, 2004, the London meet-up December 3, 2004, London 11 September 2005, and Birmingham January 21 2006, and London September 13 2008.

[edit] A bit about me

My main interest was go (board game) for about a decade. For which see my writing at Sensei's Library and at [3]. This is what took me to Uganda in 2003 and 2006.

Wikipedians who have also played me at go include Matthew Woodcraft, Jitse Niesen, Alex Hermes, William Connolley=William Connolley and Peter Jackson; I've also met Paul Erdös, Frank Adams, Richard Borcherds, Elwyn Berlekamp, Robert M. Solovay, Richard A. Parker and Ross Anderson over the board.

Before that, I had a time working on the theoretical end of functional programming. I'm supposed to be writing about something quite else, at present. Details of my semi-brilliant mathematical career ~~on the user talk page~~ moved now to User talk:Charles Matthews/About me.

[edit] Systemic bias

I have signed up with the 'systemic bias' project here; not because I necessarily agree with everything that is said about bias under that heading (still less, with what could be hung on the peg), but because it does seem likely that bias will be a long term issue for WP.

The business about pictures with everything, for example for featured articles, does seem to be a bias of the systemic kind. Obviously a person's importance is not to be judged, mainly, on how easy it is to have a photo of them on the site.

My biggest effort under this heading was in cleaning up articles about Japan in an odd Spanish-influenced dialect of English (very strange). These days I mostly interpret this as going to work in any unpopular area.