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User talk:Ram-Man/sandbox

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ram-Man (talk | contribs) at 02:20, 11 April 2016 (→Rambot: bot policy). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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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.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). }}

  1. Cite error: The named reference Ramsey was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  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. ^ User talk:Rambot: Rambot FAQ
  10. ^ 50,000 article reference
  11. ^ Bot policy discussion
  12. ^ Village pump orphan page discussion
  13. ^ 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)
  14. ^ van Dijck, Jose (Mar 21, 2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press USA. ISBN 978-0199970780.
  15. Hochman, Anndee (October 7, 2015). "The Parent Trip: Julie and Derek Ramsey of Aston". The Inquirer. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  16. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramman LinkedIn profile
  17. Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA
  18. Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual, Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-2.0, Template:MultiLicenseMinorPD, Template:MultiLicensePD, Template:MultiLicenseWithCC-BySA-Any
  19. Template:WikimediaTextLicensing
  20. Ramsey, Derek. "User:Rambot#Progress". Misplaced Pages.
  21. Misplaced Pages:Meetup/NYC/December 2004
  22. "BC's Coast Region: Species & Ecosystems of Conservation Concern Monarch (Danaus plexippus)" (PDF). University of British Columbia. March 2011. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  23. "Western Monarch Count Resource Center". Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  24. Mader, Lindsay Stafford (February 2014). "Milkweed: Medicine of Monarchs and Humans". HerbalGram (101). American Botanical Council: 38-47. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  25. Yong, Ed (January 25, 2013). "Chinese Mantis Guts Its Toxic Caterpillar Prey". Phenomena. National Geographic. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  26. Diep, Francie (November 5, 2013). "Americans Would Pay $4 Billion To Save Monarch Butterflies". Popular Science. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  27. Flaccus, Gillian. "How California's Drought Is Helping Monarch Butterflies". kqed.org. Associated Press. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  28. 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
  29. "US Chess Federation - Member Services Area". US Chess Federation. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  30. Web reference history
  31. Cite web history
  32. Munroe, Randall. "Citogensis". xkcd.com. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  33. "08 March 2005". Great Map. March 8, 2005.