This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ikluft.
I'm a commercial pilot and certified flight instructor. Since June 2010, I'm a member of the San Jose International Airport Commission, appointed by the San Jose City Council. However, this is just a volunteer advisory position, part of the public input process - I am not employed by the airport or the city, and am not obligated to tow any party line.
I'm a Perl programmer. My CPAN ID is ikluft, just like on Wikipedia.
I first got started editing at Wikipedia sort of by accident. SEWilco started a Wikinews story about a web page that I posted in Feb 2007. His news article was started on Mar 8 and published Mar 9, "Rocketeers find possible impact crater in Nevada". His approach was to start the article and then tell our discussion mail list about it and invite updates. To me, that was something out of the this-never-happens department, being invited to look over and edit a news story before it goes out. So I participated in the story as invited. It was a thinly-veiled but apparently effective attempt to recruit more Wikipedia volunteers. :-) I was actively involved until early 2010, when I took a break for a year and a half. Though I have resumed some editing, my participation remains minimal.
The research into the suspected impact crater at Black Rock has kept going. I have a web page about the the research project. This project was listed in the December 2008 issue of Discover Magazine in an article about amateur scientists' research in 2008. In January 2009, I finally found the heavily-eroded outline on the map - the current estimate is 54 miles (87 km) in diameter. At some point after we collect enough evidence there should be a paper about it.
I do hereby award this barnstar to Ikluft for his assumption and completion of the otherwise thankless task of creating a stub for each of the mountain ranges in California—over 200 in total. Great job! Unschool 09:07, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Sometimes my editing has been along cleaning up and/or building a theme. Here are the highlights, including what led me to pursue them.
Bay Area airports: The idea to help with this came easily because I'm a commercial pilot and single-engine flight instructor. I cleaned up List of airports in the San Francisco Bay Area, created navbox {{Airports in the San Francisco Bay Area}}, created a couple missing articles, and added the navbox to all the articles. (Credit to fellow Bay Area aviation enthusiast Stepheng3 for creating the corresponding category.) This was my first effort in a synergistic trio of list article, category and navbox (see WP:CLN) - it seems to have worked very well. completed: April 2008
Silicon Valley visitor attractions: The idea to help with this was inspired when family and friends have visited the area and I wasn't familiar with our own local attractions here in Silicon Valley. Well, people anywhere often don't know what the local attractions are! ;-) But I started to notice Wikipedia had lots of disconnected articles which answered this question. That resulted in creating Category:Tourist attractions in Silicon Valley (originally "Visitor attractions..." for consistency with existing pages but someone decided that was inconsistent and renamed it), List of attractions in Silicon Valley and {{San Jose and Silicon Valley attractions}}. So now I have an answer for guests about what there is to see in the area. completed: early July 2008
Black Rock Desert: I've maintained a web page with info about the Black Rock Desert since 1999, including important safety stuff. (It was a subpage on my personal web site from 1999-2009, and is now its own web site at http://BlackRockNevada.Info/ .) I saw for years before I became an editor on Wikipedia that it had a then-neglected page about the Black Rock Desert. Besides helping build up the article so that it's a review or two short of becoming a B-class article, I also created the {{Black Rock Desert}} navbox and pages for the federal wilderness areas and mountain ranges in the area. completed: late July 2008
Mountain Ranges of Nevada: The 30 mountain ranges in the Black Rock Desert region were enough tedium that after doing one manually I wrote a Perl script to generate mountain range stub article text directly from USGS GNIS data, does some automated categorization by county, and cites its source! With some small changes, the script could work for anywhere in Nevada. I started adding some more mountain ranges in Nevada based on red links in List of mountain ranges of Nevada. It took months to get the momentum up - but 215 new articles later, there weren't any redlinks left. I also added the mountain range {{geobox}} to the other mountain ranges which didn't already have them, for consistent presentation. completed: early December 2008
Mountain Ranges of California: By the time I had finished 215 new articles for Nevada, I had tweaked the script so it could handle California. The routine and the automation helped this go much more quickly. Another 216 new articles and List of mountain ranges of California also had no redlinks. (It's a coincidence that there were nearly equal numbers of new articles. California had more existing articles before this started - that's just how many articles there were to create, not the number of mountain ranges in each.) I got my first barnstar for that. The script can continue to be used for other states in the future. completed: late December 2008 (I got a barnstar for this)
Impact craters on Earth: This has become an interest since early 2007 when I began leading a group researching a suspected impact crater site at the Black Rock Desert. (See the project's web page.) For years on camping trips I had puzzled over the look of the rocks as "the strangest volcano I've ever seen" - nothing made sense. After climbing the steep learning curve for the science of recognizing impact craters, the scenery at Black Rock has made much more sense. We're still working on that research. But that same learning curve led me to notice Wikipedia has articles for most of the world's confirmed craters, either split among inconsistent sets of categories or just uncategorized. I found the articles for all 176 confirmed impact sites (and created 3 to complete the set). I categorized them all in categories I created: Category:Earth Impact Database and citation template {{Cite Earth Impact DB}} for confirmed craters listed in EID, or Category:Possible impact craters on Earth for suspected/unproven craters or confirmed craters awaiting EID listing. I created the navbox {{Impact cratering on Earth}} to cover the past, present and notable plans for the future of the subject, which spans from geology to astronomy. I think Eugene Shoemaker would have liked this. completed: August 2009
Mountain Ranges of Oregon: A small set compared to California and Nevada, it only took 30 new articles to fill out the list for Oregon. completed August 2009 (I got a barnstar for this)
Method for consensus building: I posted Wikipedia:Method for consensus building and 30 related templates in March 2010 as a proposal for updating the consensus building discussion procedure on Wikipedia. There's a serious premise behind it - Wikipedia is losing volunteers in droves over dissatisfaction from incivility in discussions. I think we can hold on to hope that most of these people want to be civil, and can benefit from some direction in how to reach a consensus with people they start out disagreeing with. This has just begun and will probably be a long effort. (I got a barnstar for this) ... but others brutally deleting this effort to help develop methods for conflict resolution led to the end of my active participation in Wikipedia. If they're going to destroy that, then what's the point?
Along the way, some admin gave me WP:Autoreviewer privileges. Thank you, whoever you are...
These are photos I've uploaded and contributed to Wikipedia (via Wikimedia Commons) of which I'm the photographer. These are listed in chronological order of the time taken.
Two high-power rockets lift off at Nevada's Black Rock Desert carrying university research projects from Japan on Sep 24, 2004
night view of Lick Observatory on Mt Hamilton from Grant County Park showing open dome with telescope, stars track across sky in long exposure, Jun 25, 2005
Black Rock Desert in the late afternoon before a wind storm on Aug 6, 2005
These are other images I created and contributed to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. So far these are all maps that use public-domain federal map imagery in the background and overlay topic-specific details which I added.
Done All the entries from USGS GNIS for Nevada mountain ranges now have at least stub articles using that data as a reference. (215 stub articles created)
This originally started to fill in stub articles for the mountains around the Black Rock Desert. But the perl script I wrote to generate the text of a mountain range stub article from GNIS also works for other locations.
After completing the Nevada ranges, I created the list article, List of mountain ranges of California and got started on mountain range stub articles for California.
By the point the Nevada articles were done, the script that generates them had gotten enough incremental changes to generalize it to handle any state. Except that the time zone is still hard-coded for Pacific Time - so the script will still need a little more work before it's ready for Prime Time.
Done All the entries from USGS GNIS for Cal;ifornia mountain ranges now have at least stub articles using that data as a reference. (216 stub articles created)
Done All the entries from USGS GNIS for Nevada mountain ranges now have at least stub articles using that data as a reference. (215 stub articles created)
