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• Barnstars, etc. • DYKs • My user page on Commons • Personal site • Bienvenidos / Bine aţi venit / Wilkommen / Benvinguts / Bienvenue / Benvenuti / Bem-vindo. Welcome to the Wikipedia home page of Joe Mabel. By the way, if anyone has a Seattle-based opening for director or VP of software development, or a project / program manager in an interesting company, or even a damn good software architect, have a look at my resume.
[edit] Wikipedia and meI was one of the mainstays of Wikipedia for about three and a half years. I backed off from such a major role in April 2007, though I am still a moderately active participant here, and quite an active participant in The Commons. My reduction in involvement was largely because:
Sadly, Wikipedia recently is simply not a supportive enough environment or enough fun for me to spend the equivalent of a second full-time job here. I still think Wikipedia is a great project, but I don't like the atmosphere as much as I used to. Currently, I'm focused above all on photography (mostly on The Commons), also writing the occasional article, and doing other things on a "hit-and-run" basis. Someone else can hash out policy, start WikiProjects, try to mediate disputes, etc. - Jmabel | Talk 16:21, 22 October 2009 (UTC) [edit] Mini-CV Originally from Freeport, New York went to college at Wesleyan University, and did graduate work in Computer Science at the University of Washington have lived most of my adult life in Seattle; also stints in London, Barcelona, and Bucharest. I've been in the software industry since 1980, about equally divided between hands-on programming, project/program management and management roles; from 2001 through 2007 I was contracting and consulting, I recently had a full-time "permanent" role as a software development manager for 14 months ending in February 2009; the downturn in the economy rendered it less "permanent". My resume is at http://www.speakeasy.org/~jmabel/resume.html; I am currently seeking an appropriate opportunity in Seattle, Washington, and would consider an interesting short-term contract elsewhere. [edit] My DYKsQuite a few of my articles have been DYK'd. See User:Jmabel/DYK. [edit] Some non-wiki writings by Joe Mabel
[edit] InterestsHistory, art, travel, film, books, bicycling, language and linguistics, politics (mostly the non-electoral sort), the game of go. [edit] Favorite Music
[edit] Favorite Books
[edit] Favorite Movies
[edit] Wikipedia: Major areas of workThe following is by no means comprehensive, but if you like, here's comprehensive, at least for the English language Wikipedia. I've also made extensive contributions to The Commons: see Commons:User:Jmabel. [edit] EthnicityIn January 2004, I started Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups. A lot has been done—I think Wikipedia is no longer flummoxed by the very notion of ethnicity, as it was—but more work on the project is certainly needed. - Jmabel | Talk 07:18, 27 November 2007 (UTC) [edit] Related to Romania Most of these I've written myself, a few I've translated. If you are aware of Romanian-language articles that could use translation, please notify me on my talk page.
[edit] Romanian bands
[edit] Yiddish theaterIn early 2005, I wrote a bunch of articles on the early years of Yiddish theater (and related topics like badchonim and Brodersänger). You can find a lot of them at Category:Jewish film and theatre. I also did some articles on the State Jewish Theater (Romania) and related topics. More to come at some unspecified future date. Tough area: not a lot on line (I think in many cases, we're the first to post even birth and death dates for some rather important figures); I managed to borrow a copy of Israil Bercovici's Romanian-language book on the history of Yiddish theater in Romania, which was useful for research, as were actor Jacob Adler's memoir and scholar Sol Liptzin's works. Really interesting stuff. Check out especially Abraham Goldfaden. This has been a weird one to research, because while I understand a bit of spoken Yiddish, I never learned to read it, so I'm not able to go to the primary sources. [edit] Related to Seattle
[edit] Related to Jorge Luis Borges and Argentina
[edit] Related to the French Revolution
I've also carried the article on the French Revolution solidly through about September 1792, and have spun out more detailed historical articles (incorporating, also, a few solid pieces that were already there), but haven't gotten around to continuing it past that point. I'd be genuinely happy if someone else would carry this forward. [edit] Related to Catalunya and the Catalan worldI've translated:
...and a few others, mostly to do with Catalan monarchs and with Mallorca BTW, pet peeve: Wikipedia chooses the spellings "Catalonia" and "Majorca". I also wrote Ramon Casas i Carbó, drawing heavily on the excellent Casas Carbo Web site. I'd be interested in hearing about other decent sources to flesh this out further. [edit] Brown v. Board of EducationIn honor of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, I've written several short articles, including ones on the three other cases combined into Brown (Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, and Gebhart v. Belton) and on the Fifth Circuit Four. [edit] Other
[edit] On systemic biasSeveral people have chosen to rework Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias to remove, restore, and seriously alter my short essay on systemic bias. Rather than fight over its presence or precise content on that page, I am reproducing more or less my original essay here. Probably other people made some small edits to this (you'd have to check the history of that page to see), but this is essentially my writing, and I have deliberately worked from an early version here (dating from October 4, 2004) rather than the more collective version of November 28, 2004 when it was removed. Since this is now on my own page, I have also taken the liberty to revert some other people's edits with which I did not entirely agree. For what it's worth, I find some of the present essay on WP:CSB rather snide. Wikipedia has a number of systemic biases, mostly deriving from the demographics of our participant base, the heavy bias towards online research, and the (generally commendable) tendency to "write what you know". Systemic bias is not to be confused with systematic bias. The latter just means "thoroughgoing bias". Systemic bias means that there are structural reasons why Wikipedia gives certain topics much better coverage than others. As of this writing, Wikipedia is disproportionately white and male; disproportionately American; disproportionately written by people from white collar backgrounds. We do not think this is a result of a conspiracy — it is largely a result of self-selection — but it has effects not all of which are beneficial, and which need to be looked at and (in some cases) countered. Wikipedia is biased toward over-inclusion of certain material pertaining to (for example) science fiction, contemporary youth culture, contemporary U.S. and UK culture in general, and anything already well covered in the English-langauge portion of the Internet. These excessive inclusions are relatively harmless: at worst, people look at some of these articles and say "this is silly, why is it in an encyclopedia?" Of far greater (and more detrimental) consequence, these same biases lead to minimal or non-existent treatment of topics of great importance. One example is that, as of this writing, the Congo Civil War [eventually written about at Second Congo War], possibly the largest war since World War II has claimed over 3 million lives, but one would be hard pressed to learn much about it from Wikipedia. In fact, there is more information An example list of poor treatment due to this bias would include (in no particular order):
Systemic biases are not easily addressed. We will need a variety of strategies. Among those are:
Wikipedia is an evolving project. While some of its biases — e.g. a preference for online sources — are probably inherent, others — generally the demographic ones — need not be. However, they will not be overcome by wishful thinking. We need to devote active effort to these matters, rather than keep doing the same thing and expect different results. To this I would like to add (November 29, 2004): I believe that the most important of these correctives would be infrastructure for recruitment and support of contributors outside the present Wikipedia mainstream. I also think it is the one we are doing least to address. We need to deepen our understanding of why women and certain ethnic minorities in the English-speaking world do not find this project as appealing as white men and we need to work out what we can do about it. We need to work out how to successfully recruit contributors from a broader human base. Please write any comments on my talk page, not here. -- Jmabel | Talk [edit] Ethical Public Relations in WikipediaMy own take on this is at User:Jmabel/PR. I'm not at all happy with the current "just say no" approach. Other relevant discussion can be found at User talk:MyWikiBiz, Wikipedia talk:Conflicts of interest, User:LinaMishima/PaidEditing. [edit] Perpetual problem articlesI've noticed that a few of our articles are perpetual problem articles, constantly drawing a high ratio of pseudo-scholarship rather than actual scholarship. I'm going to start maintaining a small list here. If others wish to contribute suggestions, please make your remarks on my talk page rather that here on my user page. …and some perpetual battlegrounds: There are, of course, numerous other articles that will be perpetual battlegrounds. Wikipedia's wide-open editing is simply not conducive to building consensus on topics such as liberalism where there is a strong minority (basically, American libertarians in this case) who feel passionately about an interpretation of history that does not concur with the majority of scholarship. Similarly on fascism. - Jmabel | Talk 19:47, 2 September 2008 (UTC) [edit] Cite.php trickTo get cite.php references into two columns: {{reflist|2}}. Categories: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Dual License | Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Dual License | Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License | User en | User en-N | User es | User es-3 | Translators es-en | User ro | User ro-2 | Translators ro-en | User de | User de-1 | User ca | User ca-1 | User it | User it-1 | User pt | User pt-1 | User fr | User fr-1 | User Cyrl | User Cyrl-1 | Wikipedia administrators | Wikipedians with BA degrees | Wikipedians with MS degrees | Wikipedian computer scientists | Wikipedians in Washington | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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