Userboxes This user is a donor to the Wikimedia Foundation. You can be one, too. This user tries to do the right thing. If he makes a mistake, please let him know. This user is a hacker, or identifies with and promotes the hacker ethic. ${\displaystyle e^{i\pi \ ))$ This user is a mathematician. This user enjoys rock climbing This user enjoys sailing for sport. This user is a Go player.

My name is Shawn Ligocki. This page is mostly used by me to organize some things that I do or am interested in, but feel free to explore if you like or leave me a message on my talk page.

Wikipedia is great for simple editing, but once you want to do some more complicated work, the tools are often hidden. Here are some tools I've found:

• WP:Statistics - List of statistics information about Wikipedia
  • Article traffic statistics (by User:Henrik) - Tells you the number of visits on every day (Note: not number of unique visitors, does not sum over redirects)
• WikiBlame (by User:Flominator) - Let's you find who added or removed something from a page

• WP:WikiProject User scripts (/monobook.js) - Javascript scripts that can affect many things about Wikipedia interaction.
  • WP:AutoEd (by User:Drilnoth and User:Plastikspork) - Runs some boilerplate checks and autofixes them then shows diff

• Wikipedia API: MW:API or http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php - Access to the raw API (Unfortunately really convoluted data types are returned)
  • WP:Creating a bot - Info on creating a bot and using the API, etc.
  • python wikitools (by User:Mr.Z-man) - Python interface to work with API calls (Unfortunately it only has helpers for some things, ex. not for getting lists of revisions)

• Links to disambig pages (by User:JaGa) - Lists disambig pages by number of links to them (more = bad, this helps people disambiguate the internal links)
• Count number of backlinks (by User:Dispenser) - Counts number of things which "link here" for a given page (It's not exactly clear what it's counting, does it include redirects, transclusions, etc.) source

Things that smart people have said (or the young trade of programming has produced), that might be worth considering

• Hacker ethic
• Unix philosophy
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/)
• Worse is better (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)
  • Duct tape programmer
• Bikeshedding (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING)
• "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." —Knuth, Structured Programming with go to Statements

Also:

• Goto statement considered harmful

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

Amusing things about Wikipedia shamelessly stolen from User:The Thing That Should Not Be:

• And now we know why nobody uses the sandbox
• Definitely needs a citation

• /Beating Graham's number - A work in progress
• /Notation for very large numbers
• /up-arrow properties
• /Green's numbers
• /Goodstein sequences

• /UBX/KenKen

• /AutoEd.js
• /hatnotes.js
• /unlinkdates.js