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User:Gaurav

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Gaurav (talk | contribs) at 09:56, 1 March 2012 (→‎The Day Job: Fixed text.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Hi there! I'm Gaurav Vaidya. I potter around Wikipedia occasionally, fixing bits and pieces when it strikes my interest.

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The Day Job

I'm a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder , where I've been since August 22, 2011 (13 years, 1 month and 6 days so far!). I'm working on problems of biodiversity informatics, planning to specialize in biological classification.

My Wikipedia Life (or: Pages I'm Proud Of)

As somebody who doesn't edit Wikipedia as much as I'd like (or, perhaps, have the patience for), my favourite Wikipedia activity is taking an article which is coming apart at the seams and tidying it up. In particular, popular articles have a lot of people adding facts, photographs or sentences anywhere vaguely appropriate; as these changes accrue, the article can get pretty messy.

Which is where I like to come in: taking an existing article, I'll merge the accumulated cruft, reorganize the facts so they flow smoothly, pinch out coherent sections and otherwise try to polish the article off. This works great with my available time, too: apart from discussions and vandalism reverts, the only time I spend on Wikipedia is three-four hour binges where I try to get one of these articles polished off. I'm quite proud of my work on Pune, the Deccan plateau and the Battle of Pratapgad.

As I've been on Wikipedia for quite a while (since 2002!), there's articles I'm proud of just because I started them. I'm pleased that Indian independence movement still retains the name I gave it; I also created the original stub for The Catcher in the Rye and Artemis Fowl (series). One of the most exciting things about Wikipedia is starting off an article that you'd like to read yourself, waiting a few years, and voila, Wikipedians have fleshed it out to a level you couldn't imagine. I started Order of the Phoenix (organisation) and fleshed out a very early article on Lord Voldemort ([1]) with this intention, and it succeeded brilliantly. And, one lazy afternoon, while listening to a short documentary on Peter Handford on BBC Radio 7, I visited Wikipedia to find out more. Horrors! No entry! The article I wrote in a rush is still around, has been polished up by others, and is a reasonably decent introduction to the man if anybody were to look him up in this encyclopedia.

Wikipedia events I've helped organize

Things I'd like to do when I've got the time

User subpages

I sometimes back up content which is being deleted elsewhere in the Wikipedia (inclusionist, remember?) to my user pages. You can look through this content with this handy link.

Committed identity

Committed identity: 676eb144c793f29d23ae84e08c47192d7838cf4831da41659800a9839a2ad47a is a SHA-256 commitment to this user's real-life identity.

But really, I'm just the guy at http://www.ggvaidya.com/ - that'll hopefully be an easy way to find me for ages to come.

Old versions of this page

2011 May 2
2010 June 17
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