User:Ben Finney

Ben Finney (on Wikipedia as Bignose), currently living in Melbourne[?], Australia. Email address is bignose (at) zip (dot) com (dot) au. My homepage is at http://bignose.squidly.org/ .

I discovered Wikipedia on 25 September 2001, after a kuro5hin.org (http://kuro5hin.org/) article about it. I looked up a topic I hoped was covered, the game of Go; it was, but I couldn't help myself from diving in and heavily editing it. This was before visiting the home page, before even figuring out whether Wikipedia and Nupedia were different things. I suppose that makes me a confessed Wikipediholic.

---

Subpages

• Wikipedia markup -- I ran afoul of LMS on my third day here :-) I think the issue of separating presentation from content and structure is particularly important for works of wide appeal like Wikipedia; please discuss there if you agree or disagree.

---

Hello from another Melbourne wikipediholic! -- Claudine

Hi, thanks for pinging my page and prompting me to seek out other Aussies on here :-) -- Ben Finney

---

Well, I've lived in Sydney since I was nine, but I was born in Melbourne, and lived there before I came to Sydney. I'm now 19, so that means I've spent slightly under half my life so far in Melbourne. -- Simon J Kissane

---

I went to Melbourne once. It was raining. --ManningBartlett (who is hoping no-one finds out he is originally from Tasmania)

When I first returned to Melbourne after spending most of my first 20 years in South Australia, I travelled overland by train, economy class (not recommended). I awoke from a restless sleep to find we were in a suburb called Sunshine[?]. I looked outside into the pouring rain... -- Ben Finney

---

Ummm - it's a matter of some debate whether every date needs a link, but I for one am sure we don't need more than ONE link to the same year in the same entry. Adrian IV just picked several of those. --MichaelTinkler

Yeh, I've been trawling through random entries and linkifying a lot tonight (27-Sep-2001), it's probably time I went to sleep. However, I think the balance of links is definitely on the low side of optimal for most entries, so in a way this is deliberately provocative to prompt a bit of debate. Even if every year and date in every entry was a link, I still don't think that would be over-wikification; every word and number would be too much, yes. Where do you think the balance lies? -- Bignose

I could do with more links, but surely not EVERY occurence of 1154 in one article needs to be linked? If you're going to do hyperlinking you do need to look and see if there's a convention lurking out there, like (please hit edit and see) cardinal Otherwise, have at it, Ben. Oh, by the way, there is a debate entry on this issue in one of the wikipedia policy pages, something about "only relevant links should be made." --MichaelTinkler

aha! Make only links relevant to the context debate. Notice that this is not a settled policy, so go ahead, link away! --MichaelTinkler

---

Well, Ben, I haven't said welcome yet, and you're evidently doing a lot of great work here. So, welcome! Good to have you here! Anyone who passionately cares about presentational vs. structural and semantic markup is probably smart and a good hand. --LMS

Thanks for founding Wikipedia, it's a blast being here. -- Bignose

---

Hi Ben. What does BFUOT mean? --Stephen Gilbert