User:Jarble

Possible solutions to Wikipedia's chronic editor retention crisis

• Try to make Wikipedia's policies and guidelines less confusing.
• Prevent vandalism using a peer review system instead of relying exclusively on blocks and bans.
• Find constructive alternatives to arbitration enforcement (which appears to have a chilling effect on editor participation).

About me

This user is a member of the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians The motto of the AIW is Conservata veritate, which translates to "With the preserved truth". This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.

	This user is a member of Wikipedians against censorship.

I am the author of a natural language programming system called EngScript. I have also written a JavaScript natural language user interface.

In the future, I will try to create an improved version of EngScript using an Earley parser.

I have created a proof-of-concept grammar for an English-like programming language in the JavaScript Moony parser syntax:

expr (
    seriesOfSentences (
        @sentence | (@sentence, " ", @seriesOfSentences)
    ) |
    sentence (
        (@IfThen, ".") |
        (@action, ".")
    ) |
    action (
        "print a random number" |
        ("print ", (@NumExpression | @BoolExpression)) |
        "send an email" |
        (@action, " and ", @action)
    ) |
    BoolExpression (
        (@NumExpression, " is greater than ", @NumExpression) |
        (@NumExpression, " is less than ", @NumExpression) |
        (@BoolExpression, " or ", @BoolExpression) |
        (@NumExpression, " == ", @NumExpression) |
        "true" | "false" | @Variable |
        ("(", @BoolExpression, ")")
    ) |
    NumExpression (
        (@NumExpression, " to the power of ", @NumExpression) |
        (@NumExpression, " times ", @NumExpression) |
        @Number | @Variable
    ) |
    IfThen (
    ("if ", @BoolExpression,  " then ", @action) |
    (@action, " if ", @BoolExpression)
    ) |
    (@Variable | @Number | @NumExpression | @action) |
    ("(", @expr, ")")
)

An example sentence that can be parsed using this grammar:

if 3 is less than 4 then 4 is greater than 3

Another syntactically valid example:

if a then print 4. if b then print 5. print a. print z if 3 == 3.

Soon, I will try to incorporate this system into another project called loyc.

I hope that it will someday be possible to combine the syntax of multiple languages in one source file, like this:

//Ruby
def stringContains(str1, str2)
    return str1 in str2
end
//Ruby
def inRange(num1, num2)
    return num1..num2
end
//PHP
function squared($num1){
    return num1 * num1;
}
//Python
def joinStrings(str1, str2):
    return str1 +","+ str2;
//Java
public static void main(String[] args){
    System.out.println(joinStrings(str1, str2));
    System.out.println(squared(5));
}

My favorite programming tools and programming paradigms

• Hygienic macros (especially Sweet.js)
• Natural language programming tools
• Source-to-source compilers
• Prolog

Some topics I'm interested in:

• Functional logic programming
• Extensible programming
• Natural language processing
  • Natural language programming
  • Natural language user interfaces
• REBOL

Pages that need to be disambiguated:

• ?: refers to two separate operators, but this page is only about one of those operators. There is no clear primary topic, so a disambiguation page might be useful here.
• New Order: This page is about a band, but "New Order" also refers to an entire era of Indonesian history, along with many other unrelated uses. Jarble (talk) 01:18, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

List of technical issues that I want to fix eventually

• WP:Broken section links haven't been updated since February 2013.
• {{mergeto}} and {{mergefrom}} don't work properly with section links.
• {{findsourcesnotice}} can't be included within articles.
• WP:VisualEditor still isn't working properly, and it still isn't enabled by default.

Why Wikipedia is driving me insane

Further information: WP:Why Wikipedia is not so great and WP:Reasons for leaving Wikipedia

Participation among Wikipedia's editors has been declining steadily since 2007.

Wikipedia describes itself as a project to gather "the sum of all human knowledge". Unfortunately, more than 1000 pages are deleted from Wikipedia every day, and only administrators are allowed to view these articles

Some articles that have been unnecessarily deleted:

Unfortunately, these articles are invisible to almost all of Wikipedia's readers.

• CobolScript, a COBOL-to-JavaScript compiler. The article was deleted via the proposed deletion process.

The article was undeleted, but it was nominated for deletion again and deleted a second time.

• TAKE ACTION games, a game studio which produced a game called Darfur is Dying
• Many articles about esoteric programming languages have been deleted from the English Wikipedia.
• getElementById, a widely used JavaScript function
• sEnglish, a natural language programming language
• Jslibs, a JavaScript library
• EjScript, a JavaScript implementation
• JxExtension

My current Wikipedia to-do list

Unreliable sources that need to be fixed/improved:

• Articles that use Wikipedia as a source
• Articles that use Yahoo! Answers as a source
• Articles that cite Urban Dictionary as a source
• Articles that cite WikiAnswers as a source
• Articles that cite experienceproject.com as a source

About me

I am an occasional Wikipedia editor. I sometimes correct spelling and grammar mistakes on the English Wikipedia. I also try to find pages that need to be merged, and tag them for merging as necessary.

My interests/hobbies/etc.

Java-2	This user is an intermediate Java programmer.

js-2	This user is an intermediate JavaScript programmer.

C++-1	This user is a beginning C++ programmer.

py-2	This user is an intermediate Python programmer.

	This user supports renewable energy.

	This editor is a WikiGnome.

List of redundant and tedious tasks that should be performed by Wikipedia bots

• Identifying unreferenced sections
• Automatically re-creating Google Books citations using the Google Books Citation Tool
• Automatically tagging articles that have no references or sources
• Automatically tagging articles that use bare URLs for citations
• Finding duplicate references within the same article
• Finding redundant links within the same article
• Identifying large paragraphs that have been copied and pasted from one article to another