User:Mjb

Mike J. Brown (mjb), an autodidact and former Web technology consultant, has been contributing to Wikipedia since August 2002.

Since 1992, Mike has been co-administrator of Hyperreal, a home for informational and community resources related to electronic music, rave culture, and altered states of consciousness. From 1994 to 2000, he was also co-administrator of apache.org.

Some of Mike's music reviews appeared in URB magazine in 1997. His profile of the experimental pop group The Art of Noise was published in the first edition of Musichound R&B (1998; ISBN 1-57859-026-4) and the second edition of Musichound Rock (1999; ISBN 1-57859-061-2), both of which are encyclopedic album guides. Mike also served as technical editor for the Addison-Wesley book XQuery: The XML Query Language by Michael Brundage (2004; ISBN 0-321-16581-0), and contributed to the second edition of the O'Reilly Python Cookbook (2005; ISBN 0-596-00797-3).

Since 2001, Mike has been one of the core developers of 4Suite, a toolkit for XML and RDF processing in the Python programming language. He also self-publishes articles and resources related to XML, XSLT, URIs, and character encoding on his own web site. In 2005, he was inducted into The XML Guild, an association of some of the best independent XML consultants in the world.

On Discogs, Mike was (until such roles were eliminated in early 2008) an editor and a moderator of electronic music submissions. On DMOZ, he was (briefly) an editor in the Roller Derby category.

Contributions

On Wikipedia, Mike created, rewrote, or otherwise made significant contributions to many articles in his areas of expertise, including

• topics related to Uniform Resource Identifiers, HTML, and the World Wide Web
• topics related to character encoding, typefaces, and fonts
• topics related to electronic music and the music industry
• topics related to roller derby

…and many other topics of personal, sometimes passing, interest.

A complete list of Mike's contributions is available here.

Navigation popups

Mike uses Navigation popups, a script which makes it easy to revert changes to articles and which creates preview windows when one mouses over links to articles or diff pages. There are several versions of the script in existence:

• Lupin's version (info | FAQ | discussion | code | more discussion)

This is the original code. In order to use it, you have to edit your monobook.js, adding special code to load it.

Lupin seems to have abandoned Wikipedia, and no one knows how to contact him. His code isn't maintained anymore and it has some minor bugs, such as incorrect popups for footnotes. It also relies on older API that will be going away "soon".

• Gadgets version (code | discussion)

This is a more up-to-date version. In order to use it, you go to your preferences, and on the Gadgets tab, select Navigation Popups. It's the same as Lupin's version,^{[citation needed]} but has bug fixes and doesn't rely on an old API.

• TheDJ's version (code | discussion)

This is TheDJ's modified version of Lupin's code. It has bug fixes and uses the newer API. It also has some new features and code refactoring that could be buggy.

• Mjb's version (code | announcement & discussion)

This is exactly the same as TheDJ's version, but has support for "noPopupElements", an array of user-specified HTML element IDs indicating where, besides in the TOC, popups should be suppressed. You can see how it's used on User:Mjb/monobook.js.

• Lupin's development version (code)

This was code Lupin was testing. It has new features and may be buggy. It relies on the older API.

Misc

Mike has a presence on Wikisource.

Mike has some advice for Wikipedians (just some copy editing tips).

Mike lives in the beautiful state of Colorado, USA.

See also: this comic strip