D-S-L! D-S-L! RAH RAH RAH!

David Gerard is an utter wikipediholic. He is apparently an administrator [1] [2] and arbitrator and helps clear the incoming spam on wikien-l. He is from Australia and lives in London.

My wife foolishly directed me here and I became an instant addict. Like Barney Gumble having that first beer.

My life has been spent filling my head with unbelievable quantities of trivia and rubbish. Here's a chance to get some of it out.

As a recovering editor, I can't see a grammatical or spelling error without my red-pencil hand twitching. Wikipedia provides tremendous opportunity in this field.

Contacting me

Put it on the article talk page in the first instance, my talk page in the second. If you email me stuff that would normally go on a talk page, I'll likely ignore it. I've also erroneously deleted such mail as spam before ...

If you're inadvertently affected by a block I've made, do of course email. (Direct address: dgerard at gmail dot com.) Collateral damage is bad.

I must write more articles

And not copyedit so much. And so must you. My scratchpad (for the terminally bored or work-avoidant). The Problem With Music.

Wikipedia 1.0 is my current obsession. Go to and Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have and help bring all listed articles to Featured Article status.

My personal style guide

"It's about viral payload density." — John Hawkes-Reed

We're writing articles for someone who knows nothing about a topic but needs to get up to speed really quickly. You have ten seconds.

• Who, what, where, when, why?
• Summary lead, then inverted pyramid).
• Omit needless words.
• The Economist Style Guide: clarity with precision. ("I love The Economist. It's like a really rational guy on crack." — Erithromycin)
• HOWTO: write bad documentation that looks good. "Why" is almost more important than "what."
• Notes on brevity.

I sometimes picture my reader as a very bright ten- to twelve-year-old. Someone with a good reading age, but who knows nothing yet. Did you used to devour encyclopaedias as a kid?

Trivia

Your humble editor has been inducted into the Western Australian Music Industry Association's Hall of Fame. I got in and Bon Scott didn't. User:Redcountess will never forgive me.

See also

I have logins on Meta , OpenFacts (which I mostly use to write articles during Wikipedia downtimes) and Disinfopedia SourceWatch (which can be fun to write for, not having our NPOV rules ;-).

External links

• My home page at Thingy (the original and best)
• My home page at Velvet (smaller but faster)
• Rocknerd (the first web hosting I have ever paid for)
• My LiveJournal (a reliable source of TMI and unutterably tedious for anyone who doesn't know me)

I personally favour weak copylefts. Please feel free to reuse my stuff: This only applies to my work in the main article space, not talk pages, Wikipedia: space pages or whatever. It does apply to images created by me and uploaded by me to Wikimedia.