My full name is Jörgen Nixdorf, born 1948 (like Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne, go figure). I only do Wikipedia on my computer, you can think of this as my homepage. I used to work more on Susning.nu, then, following its closing on the Swedish Wikipedia but the large community and high quality focus of the English Wikipedia drew me here, so this is where I spend most of my time. I've been editing English Wikipedia articles since November 2002.
I am a Swedishcatholicchristian, though one of very troubled religious nature, that's why you will find me working a lot on pages like Gnosticism. Further I consider myself a liberal. Apart from that I'm a retired programmer, I used to spend a lot of time programming COBOL. Though I believe most people think of me as a rigid, narrow-minded, middle-class intellectual dry old engineer, I have been known to have a sense of humour.
I only use Linux though out of convenience, I know many people like Microsoft Windows but the Redmond product is too hard for me to understand. Linux is quite easy. I'm too old.
Verifiability is a big problem, i.e. know that the facts stated in articles are correct. There has been a lot of discussions on this issue, no real good solution in sight. Perhaps to freeze professionally peer-reviewed content so one knows that atleast that version is fairly accurate. Very hard.
Authors of "real" encyclopedias like to use pompous language: "the finest thinker of his time", "the best ..." and such value-charged authoritative statements. Wikipedia tries to avoid it, but that makes for quite boring reading without any commonplace opinions on the facts presented. The problem is: how do you define a commonplace opinion? Certainly, this used to be the opinion of people writing encyclopedias. It is definately not a democratic value: the idea of the populace is not founded in fact and often influenced by myth. So how do you avoid academic elitism, and flat prose produced using a lowest common denominator of value-free statements at the same time when writing articles? Very very hard.
Fun things I've done: one of my friends is a collector of books and owns an original copy of Libri tres de occulta philosophia by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in the printing from 1533. I photographed and scanned some images from this book to the entry for pentagram. Very beautiful images.
I also like drawing figures in Dia and adding to Wikipedia entries.
I aquired the permission from Brian Randell and Robert M. McClure to use their portraits of prominent software development pioneers in Wikipedia. Addition will begin shortly. The permission is here. They will be used in these articles for a start:
Fifth generation computer systems project is being supplied with an image. The webpage states that materials are in the public domain, but still I work to get a clear permission to use it.
Hello there sweet thing...
I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.
