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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 103.6.159.85 (talk) at 17:02, 15 April 2016 (→Personal life: copyedit, rm trivia). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

  • Comment: The subject may be suitable for inclusion, but not in the present state of this article. @Ram-Man: Please do not use blogs, tweets, linkedin and Wikipedia project pages as references. If you really need to use LinkedIn to source the fact that you're a software engineering manager, you notability can be questioned. 103.6.159.88 (talk) 08:27, 14 April 2016 (UTC)Okay, following the talk page clarification, use of LinkedIn as ref is found to be compliant with policy. 103.6.159.87 (talk) 18:02, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment: Can we please have the content of the refs added inline? This would allow for editors to review the text and refs more easily. 103.6.159.71 (talk) 04:11, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment: Thank you for your feedback. It is extremely helpful. Let's discuss the points you raised on the talk page. -- RM 16:28, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
Derek Ramsey
Derek Ramsey, 2016
Born (1980-05-22) May 22, 1980 (age 44)
Ephrata, Pennsylvania, United states[1]
NationalityAmerican
Other namesRam-Man (Wikipedia username)
Alma materRochester Institute of Technology (B.S. and M.S.)
OccupationSoftware engineering manager
Known forWikipedia bot

Derek Lee Ramsey (born May 22, 1980) is a contributor to the English-language Wikipedia, who is known most for his activity in October 2002, where he created a bot to create stub articles 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 Wikipedia articles by up to 36,973.[2] This has been called "the most controversial move in Wikipedia history".[2] An article in Wired News in 2005 referred to him as the "No. 1 most active Wikipedian".[3][4]

Wikipedia

Ramsey joined Wikipedia on September 8, 2002,[5] having first heard about Wikipedia and Nupedia on Slashdot.[6][7] He became an administrator in June 2003.[8] He has logged nearly 200,000 edits altogether (including the bot edits).[9]

A template originally created by Ramsey for citing sources to websites, was the subject of an xkcd comic.[10]

Rambot

Immediately upon joining Wikipedia, 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.[9][11] The data was compiled into a unified database from which text for 3,141 county articles was generated and he manually copied and pasted them into new Wikipedia pages.[2][12] After generating the data for over 30,000 cities, it became apparent that manually creating articles would take too long, perhaps months,[2] prompting Ramsey to put his Java programming skills to use and making a bot that would upload each article one by one.[4][3][2][13]

The "rambot spike" in late 2002 into early 2003

Starting with the article on Autaugaville, Alabama on October 5, 2002, he started manually adding the city articles one by one.‎ On October 18, 2002, he ran the bot for the first time, creating the article on Fort Defiance, Arizona. The bot added thousands of articles per day until it completed its first run on October 25, 2002 with the article on Upton, Wyoming.[14] Over this time it increased the article count of Wikipedia by approximately 60%.[13] 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 Wikipedia article count and growth graphs.[2]

As the article count climbed, so to did the criticism. Some compared the article content to entries in a phone book,[15] citing the the generally accepted principle that Wikipedia is not intended to be a directory of information.[2] Some worried about it degrading the overall quality of Wikipedia.[13] Some community members complained that the articles made too much of the total article count, although later this became a non-issue as local residents and others improved the bot's article and increase in other content meant that the articles now constituted only a small proportion of all articles.[16] The "Random article" feature was rendered useless because it would return a boilerplate city article about half the time.[11] Some of the articles created had incorrect data.[17][18] The rambot also uncovered a bug in the article counter that had inflated the count of the number of articles in Wikipedia.[2][11]

A more serious problem was with the "Recent Changes" listings and to a lesser extent, editor watchlists.[13] Such lists were used by editors to check for and revert vandalism and other forms of degrading edits, but were now less able to do so because such edits tended to be interspersed with hundreds of bot edits.[19] The bot had to be slowed to as little as 6 transactions per minute, which also had the further benefit of cutting down the server load.[13] Eventually the Wikipedia software developers created a "bot flag" that allowed bot changes to be hidden from recent changes listings by default.[20] After demands from the editing community that bots be regulated, Ramsey contributed to the creation of an official bot policy which laid down the rules and restrictions in connection with use of automated bots. Bot developers had to show that their bots conformed to policy for approval and granting of the boot flag.[11][13]

Deletionists thought that the articles on minor cities should be outright deleted, while the inclusionists argued to keep them.[13] Eventually a consensus was reached that none of the articles on cities be deleted.[2][11] The outrage generated broad discussions on policy that would ultimately turn into Wikipedia's notability policy.[11]

In early 2004, a Wikipedia user, Seth Ilys, started a project to add maps to the pages created by rambot.[2][3] Ramsey signed up to do Pennsylvania, uploading more than a thousand maps.[21]

Multilicensing

Jimmy Wales and Derek Ramsey at a Wikipedia meetup in NYC in December 2004

With the introduction and growing popularity of Creative Commons licenses and the problems with the GFDL, there was a growing desire to either fix the GFDL or change to the CC BY-SA license. The Wikimedia meta-wiki "Guide to the dual-license" was started in January 2004 to raise awareness. A few users agreed to multi-license their changes using the instructions provided.

On May 26, 2004, Wikipedia user Zhen Lin introduced a dual-licensing template to the English Wikipedia to make it easier to dual-license changes.[22] Following this, in November 2004, Ramsey created the Wikipedia multi-licensing guide along with a new collection of templates and started asking editors on their user talk pages to multi-license their changes so that the rambot articles could be used in Creative Commons licensed works.[23] Many users agreed to multi-license some or all of their contributions, including a member of the Board of Trustees for the Wikimedia Foundation.[24]

At its peak, 12.8% of all users with at least 100 edits and almost 30% (or 1.5 million) main namespace edits were multi-licensed.[25] The success alarmed Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. He was concerned that Ramsey was trying to fork Wikipedia. The two met at the New York City Wikipedia meetup on December 12, 2004 where they discussed the issue.[26] As a result he created a new template designed to give the Wikimedia Foundation permission to choose the license for the changes.[27] This method prevented anyone from forking Wikipedia while still allowing the Foundation licensing flexibility.

This template was placed on user pages to grant the Wikimedia Foundation permission to re-license that user's works.

Ramsey soon abandoned his efforts when it became clear that the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and Free Software Foundation were working together to make the Creative Commons Share Alike license compatible with the GFDL, eliminating the need for the multi-licensing effort. Wikipedia dual licensed in 2009.[28]

Photography

A painting by Sarah Barr based on one of Ramsey's photos.

Ramsey joined Wikimedia Commons on November 4, 2004. He has uploaded more than 2000 photos.[9]

Ramsey took many photos of monarch butterflies and milkweeds to illustrate these Wikipedia articles. It soon became clear that these images could be used to advocate for butterfly in the face of declining butterfly populations. The photos have been used to illustrate an academic paper.[29], a cover article for the American Botanical Council HerbalGram peer-reviewed journal[30], a Xerces Society conservation group website[31], the cover of a book[32], and articles by Popular Science[33], National Geographic[34], and the Associated Press[35]

In 2013, Sarah Barr made an oil painting based on one of Ramsey's monarch butterfly photos. The painting was created for Rally on the Runway to auction to raise money for childhood cancer research. [36] It has sold twice at auction, raising $3,750 in 2013 and $9,000 in 2015.[37]

Chess

In high school, Ramsey played in the Pennsylvania State scholastic team chess tournament at Bloomsburg University, scoring 2.5/5 in 1996 and 3/5 in 1995, 1997, and 1998. He lost to Greg Shahade of Julia R. Masterman School in the opening round of the 1996 tournament, the same year the school won their first of four National High School Chess Championships.

In 1996 he tied for first in a local tournament with a score of 3.5/4, as the 5th seed out of 16. In 2005 he won a 5-round, 52 player club event with a score of 4.0/4.

His official USCF rating is 1679. He has played in 84 rated games with 53 wins, 20 draws, and 21 loses. He has lost to four players rated lower than himself. The highest rated player he has beaten was rated 2041.[38]

Education

Ramsey attended Lancaster Mennonite High School [39]. He received a B.S. with highest honors in computer science in 2003 and a M.S. in software development and management in 2010 from the Rochester Institute of Technology.[2] He is currently a Software Engineering Manager.[40]

Personal life

Derek resides in Aston, Pennsylvania with his wife Julie Ramsey, an occupational therapist and four children: two boys and two girls. The girls were both adopted from China and have special needs.[39] He has preached in the Church of the Brethren denomination.[41]

References

  1. ^ Ramsey, Derek L. "Ram-Man". www.rit.edu. Archived from the original on April 8, 2016. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; September 16, 2004 suggested (help)
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Lih, Andrew (March 17, 2009). The Wikipedia Revolution. Hachette Digital, Inc. pp. 99–108. ISBN 9781401395858.
  3. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b Pink, Daniel H. (March 1, 2005). "The Book Stops Here". WIRED.
  5. ^ "User:Ram-Man". Wikipedia. September 8, 2002. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
  6. ^ "Britannica and Free Content". Slashdot. 26 July 2001.
  7. ^ "Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Ram-Man". Wikipedia.
  8. ^ a b c Anderson, Jennifer Joline (2011). Wikipedia: The company and its founders. ISBN 978-1617148125.
  9. ^ Munroe, Randall. "Citogensis". xkcd.com. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  10. ^ a b c d e f Livingstone, Randall M. (January 4, 2016). "Population automation: An interview with Wikipedia bot pioneer Ram-Man". First Monday. 21 (1). doi:10.5210/fm.v21i1.6027.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  11. ^ User talk:Rambot: Rambot FAQ
  12. ^ a b c d e f g Livingstone, Randall M. Network of Knowledge: Wikipedia as a Sociotechnical System of Intelligence (PDF) (Ph.D. dissertation). University of Oregon. Retrieved April 8, 2016.
  13. ^ Fred Kaplan, Professor in Digital Humanities at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne:
    Kaplan, Frederic (May 26, 2015). "16 des 20 contributeurs les plus actifs sur Wikipedia sont des bots". fkaplan.wordpress.com.
    Frederic Kaplan [@frederickaplan] (April 1, 2015). "Derek Ramsey develops the first Wikipedia bot called rambot in 2002. Rambot created 33000 articles, at a rate of thousands of articles/day" (Tweet). Retrieved April 8, 2016 – via Twitter.
  14. ^ Bot policy discussion
  15. ^ Ayers, Phoebe; Matthews, Charles; Yates, Ben (2008). How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it. No Starch Press. p. 8. ISBN 9781593271763.
  16. ^ Niederer, S.; van Dijck, J. (2010). "Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system". Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  17. ^ van Dijck, Jose (Mar 21, 2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press USA. ISBN 978-0199970780.
  18. ^ "Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26". Wikipedia.
  19. ^ "Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26: Difference between revisions". Wikipedia.
  20. ^ "08 March 2005". Great Map. March 8, 2005.
  21. ^ Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA
  22. ^ Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual, Template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-2.0, Template:MultiLicenseMinorPD, Template:MultiLicensePD, Template:MultiLicenseWithCC-BySA-Any
  23. ^ "Disclaimers and licenses". Wikipedia.
  24. ^ Ramsey, Derek. "User:Rambot#Progress". Wikipedia. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
  25. ^ "Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/December 2004". Wikipedia. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
  26. ^ "Template:WikimediaTextLicensing". Wikipedia. April 30, 2015. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
  27. ^ "Press releases/Dual license vote May 2009". Wikimedia Foundation.
  28. ^ "BC's Coast Region: Species & Ecosystems of Conservation Concern Monarch (Danaus plexippus)" (PDF). University of British Columbia. March 2011. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  29. ^ Mader, Lindsay Stafford (February 2014). "Milkweed: Medicine of Monarchs and Humans". HerbalGram (101). American Botanical Council: 38–47. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  30. ^ "Western Monarch Count Resource Center". Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  31. ^ 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
  32. ^ Diep, Francie (November 5, 2013). "Americans Would Pay $4 Billion To Save Monarch Butterflies". Popular Science. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  33. ^ Yong, Ed (January 25, 2013). "Chinese Mantis Guts Its Toxic Caterpillar Prey". Phenomena. National Geographic. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  34. ^ Flaccus, Gillian. "How California's Drought Is Helping Monarch Butterflies". kqed.org. Associated Press. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  35. ^ "Sarah's Journey: Crystal Clear". journeywithsarah.wordpress.com. April 17, 2013. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
  36. ^ "Sarah's Journey: Rally on the Runway & Sarah's Painting". journeywithsarah.wordpress.com. May 9, 2013. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
  37. ^ "US Chess Federation - Member Services Area". US Chess Federation. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  38. ^ a b Hochman, Anndee (October 7, 2015). "The Parent Trip: Julie and Derek Ramsey of Aston". The Inquirer. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  39. ^ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramman LinkedIn profile
  40. ^ "Philadelphia First Church of the Brethren: Sermons". churchofthebrethren.com. 2013. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
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