User:RossPatterson

I've started to add things to the Stuyvesant High School page and other related pages, so it's time to get a userid and (cue the What's My Line music!) "enter and sign in please!".

As to who I am, I'm the Ross Patterson you find on the web most of the time. I've been an active and occasionally noisy geek since at least 1972, when I was lucky enough to encounter an IBM 1130 computer system at Stuyvesant. Until 2000 or so, all the search engines knew about were me and some piano player. Since then, there was a movie called The New Guy, with some other Ross Patterson in a supporting role with Eliza Dushku. Ah, we should all be so lucky.

I've been doing email since 1978 (rap@mit-mc, if I recall), but haven't had much need to write on this "World Wide Web" thing (although I do support a small mainframe software package via a Geocities site). For many years I was involved with SHARE, an IBM-oriented computer user group - in fact, the oldest computer user group. I've also been active in the HTTP standardization effort, among many other Internet-related activities.

This user is a member of the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They Are Deletionists Est omnino difficile iudicare inclusionis meritum cuiusdam rei in encyclopædia cum ratio sciendi quid populi referat incerta sit, sed nihilominus aliquid encyclopædiam dedecet It is generally difficult to judge the worthiness of a particular topic for inclusion in an encyclopedia considering that there is no certain way to know what interests people, but some topics nevertheless are not fit for an encyclopedia. This motto reflects the desire of these Wikipedians to be reluctant, but not entirely unwilling, to remove articles from Wikipedia.

Stuff I look for again and again, so I'm putting it here and then I'll never have to again!

• I created Category:Articles with broken citations, so I monitor it for new errors.

• The AfD rules
• The AfD procedures
• The PROD rules and procedures
• The Speedy Deletion rules
• The Speedy Deletion procedures
• The IfD rules and procedures
• My edit history, courtesy of Interiot's "wannabe kate" tool.
• What version of Mediawiki etc. is running here?
• Bazzargh's citemark tool for scraping {{cite web}} info from web pages.

Temporary storage, wiped without warning from time to time:

I've got stuff in:

• /monobook.css - the Monobook user CSS file
• /monobook.js - the Monobook user Javascript file
• /ISO8601 to mmm dd yyyy.js - a script to add a tab called de-iso8601 to convert yyyy-mm-dd dates to mmm dd, yyyy, since my side lost the date-formatting war.
• /Reorganize References.js - a script to add a tab called RefReorg that moves all the references into the <references/> section.

I neglected to include you on my comment on the Eugene Delgaudio Talk page. You had posted there regarding the difficult task of cleaning up the non-RS sourcing which I expect may be placed there by the article's semi-literate subject. Activist (talk) 16:34, 12 February 2018 (UTC)