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NOTE: Misplaced Pages:Autobiography, Misplaced Pages:Articles for creation, Misplaced Pages:Notability, and Misplaced Pages:Conflict of interest.

Compare with Simon Pulsifer and Justin Knapp

Derek Ramsey
Derek Ramsey, 2004
Born (1980-05-22) May 22, 1980 (age 44)
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
NationalityAmerican
Other namesRam-Man
Alma materRochester Institute of Technology (B.S. and M.S.)
OccupationSoftware Engineering Manager
Known forMisplaced Pages bot

Derek Lee Ramsey (born May 22, 1980 in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is a contributor to the English-language Misplaced Pages, who is known most for his activity in October 2002, where he created a bot to create stubs for every missing county, town, city, and, village in the United States, based on free information from the United States Census of 2000. He thus increased the number of Misplaced Pages articles by up to 36,973. This has been called "the most controversial move in Misplaced Pages history". An article in Wired News in 2005 referred to him as the "No. 1 most active Wikipedian".

Misplaced Pages

Ramsey joined Misplaced Pages on September 8, 2002, having first heard about Misplaced Pages and Nupedia on Slashdot. He was made an administrator in June, 2003. He has 196,000 edits using the user accounts User:Ram-Man, User:RM, and User:Rambot.

Rambot

Immediately upon joining Misplaced Pages, he started working on articles related to geography. Realizing that articles on many places in the U.S. did not exist, he turned to the Census Bureau and other public sources of geographic data, such as coordinates. The data was compiled into a unified database. From this source data, text for 3,141 county articles was generated and he manually copied and pasted them into new Misplaced Pages pages. After generating the data for over 30,000 cities, it became apparent that manually creating articles would take too long, perhaps months. Ramsey put his Java programming skills to use and made a bot that would upload each generated article one by one.

The "rambot spike" in late 2002 into early 2003

Misplaced Pages had just passed its 50,000th article on September 30, 2002‎, Bryan County, Georgia, a county article created by Ramsey. Starting with Autaugaville, Alabama on October 5, 2002‎, he ran the bot for the first time. It completed its first run on October 25, 2002 on Upton, Wyoming. Over this time it increased the article count of Misplaced Pages by approximately 60%. It continued to run into early 2003 creating articles that could not be created during the first run due to naming problems and generating disambiguation pages. The result was the "rambot spike" shown in Misplaced Pages article count and growth graphs.

As the article count climbed, so to did the criticism. Some compared the article content to entries in a phone book, citing Misplaced Pages:What Misplaced Pages is not. The "Random article" feature was rendered useless because it would return a boilerplate city article about half the time. The rambot had created so many orphan articles that the "orphan pages" feature used by some editors had to be abandoned. Deletionists thought that the minor cities should be outright deleted. Some of the articles created had incorrect data. The rambot also uncovered a bug in the article counter that had inflated the count of the number of articles in Misplaced Pages. The outrage generated policy discussions that would one day turn into policies such as Misplaced Pages:Notability. Eventually a consensus was reached and the none of the articles were deleted.

Perhaps the most serious problem was with the "Recent Changes" feature. Many editors used the feature to check for article vandalism, but could not find the articles through the hundreds of bot changes. The bot had to be slowed to one modification per second or slower. Eventually the Misplaced Pages software developers created a "bot flag" that allowed bot changes to be hidden from recent changes listings by default. Ramsey wrote the official bot policy to manage the bot flag and ensure that bots were approved and caused no damage. He served on the Bot Approvals Group.

In early 2004, Misplaced Pages user Seth Ilys started the Dot Project to add maps to the rambot-created pages. Ramsey signed up to do Pennsylvania, uploading more than a thousand maps.

Multilicensing

Jimmy Wales and Derek Ramsey at a Misplaced Pages meetup in NYC in December 2004

With the introduction and growing popularity of Creative Commons licenses and the problems with the GFDL, there was a growing desire to either fix the GFDL or change to the CC BY-SA license. The Wikimedia meta-wiki "Guide to the dual-license" was started in January 2004 to raise awareness. A few users agreed to multi-license their changes using the instructions provided.

On May 26, 2004, Misplaced Pages user Zhen Lin introduced a dual-licensing template to the English Misplaced Pages to make it easier to dual-license changes. Following this, in November 2004, Ramsey created the Misplaced Pages multi-licensing guide along with a new collection of templates and started asking users on their User talk page to multi-license their changes. Many users agreed to multi-license their contributions, including some members of the Board of Trustees for the Wikimedia Foundation.

At its peak, 12.8% of all users with at least 100 edits and almost 30% (or 1.5 million) main namespace edits were multi-licensed. The success alarmed Jimmy Wales, founder of Misplaced Pages. He was concerned that Ramsey was trying to fork Misplaced Pages. The two met at the New York City Misplaced Pages meetup on December 12, 2004 where they discussed the issue. As a result he created a new template designed to give the Wikimedia Foundation permission to choose the license for the changes. This method prevented anyone from forking Misplaced Pages while still allowing the Foundation licensing flexibility.

This template was placed on user pages to grant the Wikimedia Foundation permission to re-license that user's works.

Ramsey soon abandoned his efforts when it became clear that the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and Free Software Foundation were working together to make the Creative Commons Share Alike license compatible with the GFDL, eliminating the need for the multi-licensing effort. Misplaced Pages dual licensed in 2009.

Article Citation

In December 2004, frustrated by the lack of an easy way to cite sources when writing Misplaced Pages articles, Ramsey created a template to make citations for web sites. Through extensive development by other users, it grew in capability and scope. As of 2016, it is used in more than 2 million pages. The template, Cite web, was the subject of an xkcd comic.

Photography

Ramsey joined Wikimedia Commons on November 4, 2004. He has uploaded more than 2000 photos.

Ramsey took many photos of monarch butterflies and milkweeds to illustrate these Misplaced Pages articles. It soon became clear that these images could be used to advocate for butterfly in the face of declining butterfly populations. The photos have been used to illustrate an academic paper, a cover article for the American Botanical Council HerbalGram peer-reviewed journal, the Xerces Society conservation group, the cover of a book, and articles by National Geographic, Popular Science, and the Associated Press.

Chess

In high school, Ramsey played in the Pennsylvania State scholastic team chess tournament at Bloomsburg University, scoring 2.5/5 in 1996 and 3/5 in 1995, 1997, and 1998. He lost to Greg Shahade of Julia R. Masterman School in the opening round of the 1996 tournament, the same year the school won their first of four National High School Chess Championships. His official USCF rating is 1679. The highest rated player he has beaten was rated 2041.

Education

Ramsey attended Lancaster Mennonite High School . He received a B.S. in computer science in 2003 and a M.S. in software development and management in 2010 from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is currently a Software Engineering Manager.

Personal Life

Derek is married to Julie Ramsey, an occupational therapist, and has four children: Avery, Logan, Addilyn, and Lucy. The latter two are both adopted from China. They reside in Aston, Pennsylvania. He has preached in the Church of the Brethren denomination. His hobbies include photography, woodworking, cooking, gardening, chess, aquariums and computers.

References

  1. Ramsey, Derek L. "Ram-Man". www.rit.edu. Archived from the original on April 8, 2016. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; September 16, 2004 suggested (help)
  2. ^ Lih, Andrew (March 17, 2009). The Misplaced Pages Revolution. Hachette Digital, Inc. pp. 99–108. ISBN 9781401395858.
  3. ^ Terdiman, Daniel (March 8, 2005). "Wiki Becomes a Way of Life". WIRED. Archived from the original on April 8, 2016. Retrieved March 14, 2014.
  4. User:Ram-Man contributions
  5. "Britannica and Free Content". Slashdot. 26 July 2001.
  6. Ramsey, Derek L. "Ram-Man". www.rit.edu. Archived from the original on April 9, 2016. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; August 26, 2001 suggested (help)
  7. Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_adminship history
  8. Rambot edit countRM edit countRam-Man edit count
  9. ^ Anderson, Jennifer Joline (2011). Misplaced Pages: The company and its founders. ISBN 978-1617148125.
  10. User talk:Rambot: Rambot FAQ
  11. 50,000 article reference
  12. Bot policy discussion
  13. Village pump orphan page discussion
  14. Niederer, S.; van Dijck, J. (2010). "Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Misplaced Pages as a sociotechnical system". Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  15. van Dijck, Jose (Mar 21, 2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press USA. ISBN 978-0199970780.
  19. "08 March 2005". Great Map. March 8, 2005.
  20. Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA
  21. Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual, Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-2.0, Template:MultiLicenseMinorPD, Template:MultiLicensePD, Template:MultiLicenseWithCC-BySA-Any
  22. Ramsey, Derek. "User:Rambot#Progress". Misplaced Pages.
  23. Misplaced Pages:Meetup/NYC/December 2004
  24. Template:WikimediaTextLicensing
  25. Web reference history
  26. Cite web history
  27. Munroe, Randall. "Citogensis". xkcd.com. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  28. "BC's Coast Region: Species & Ecosystems of Conservation Concern Monarch (Danaus plexippus)" (PDF). University of British Columbia. March 2011. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  29. Mader, Lindsay Stafford (February 2014). "Milkweed: Medicine of Monarchs and Humans". HerbalGram (101). American Botanical Council: 38-47. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  30. "Western Monarch Count Resource Center". Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  31. López-Hoffman, Laura; McGovern, Emily D.; Varady, Robert G.; Flessa, Karl W. (eds.). Conservation of Shared Environments: Learning from the United States and Mexico. ISBN 978-0816528783. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help). Cover
  32. Yong, Ed (January 25, 2013). "Chinese Mantis Guts Its Toxic Caterpillar Prey". Phenomena. National Geographic. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  33. Diep, Francie (November 5, 2013). "Americans Would Pay $4 Billion To Save Monarch Butterflies". Popular Science. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  34. Flaccus, Gillian. "How California's Drought Is Helping Monarch Butterflies". kqed.org. Associated Press. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  35. "US Chess Federation - Member Services Area". US Chess Federation. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  36. ^ Hochman, Anndee (October 7, 2015). "The Parent Trip: Julie and Derek Ramsey of Aston". The Inquirer. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  37. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramman LinkedIn profile