User:Oshwah

About me

Oshwah is my username. I began contributing to Wikipedia in 2007. After a few years of vandal fighting, discussing articles for deletion nominations, patrolling new pages, and assisting new editors, I took an extended leave of absence in 2011 to focus on my education (you'll notice a large gap in my contributions - software engineering and applied mathematics isn't easy). After graduating from college in 2013 and becoming established in my Software Engineering career, I returned to Wikipedia to resume where I left off. I began dedicating nearly all of my time toward recent changes patrolling and the remediation of disruptive editing (including vandalism, harassment, sockpuppetry, and long-term abuse)... so much so that I was told by a WMF staff member in May 2016 that I was #1 on the top list of Huggle users.

From there, my contributions expanded to investigating open sockpuppet investigations reports as a full clerk, as well as responding to discussions on noticeboards that handle reports of disruption (namely, WP:ANI). In 2016, I was successful in my RFA application and became an administrator, which expanded the tasks and responsibilities that I was allowed to perform. Instead of piling a bunch of reports onto the various noticeboards for someone else, I now had the ability to respond to and handle instances of disruption and abuse directly. I was appointed by the arbitration committee as an oversighter in 2018, and again as a checkuser in 2020. This again expanded my areas of participation in remediating abuse, as I now had the ability to keep Wikipedia and its users safe by investigating on both the front lines as well as behind-the-scenes, and - alongside my participation in many other projects and areas - is where I continue to operate on Wikipedia to this day.

If you're not on IRC or Discord, you'll typically run into me on Wikipedia through Huggle, most of the administrative noticeboards, or in various places where vandalism, disruption, or abuse is taking place. My time and experience with disruption mitigation (patrolling logs, identifying and removing disruption, and investigating abuse) goes back as far as 2007, when I first started contributing here. Back then, there were very little to no automated tools available to assist with patrolling and removing vandalism; if you look at my earliest contributions, you'll see where I was performing every revert and leaving each warning message for disruptive users completely manually. I then progressed to using Twinkle and Lupin's tool to make the process of locating bad faith edits and reverting them much easier. After the rollback user right became unbundled from the admin toolset in 2008, I became one of the first groups of editors to have the permissions granted. Oh, how so much has changed on Wikipedia since then...

People often ask me why I spend so much time on Wikipedia. The answer is simple: I enjoy it. Everyone on Wikipedia should be volunteering in places and projects that they enjoy, and volunteering their time and energy on Wikipedia because they enjoy doing so. Otherwise, what's the point? :-)

Geek stuff

I started using a computer when I was 5 years old - a Compaq computer with a 200MHz Intel Pentium processor, 48MB of SDRAM, and two USB ports on the back. It may seem standard to today's average computer user, but the fact that the computer provided SDRAM, USB output, and the fact that it included a sound card and an internal 56K modem set my parents back ~$2500 at the time. I used it to play the many old computer games that it came with, such as Star Wars: Rebel Assault II, Star Wars: Dark Forces, StarCraft, and Jurassic Park: Chaos Island. At age 7, I was proficient enough to teach my parents (mostly my dad) how to install programs, write documents, print, access the internet, and fix the many stupid things that he would do to break his Operating System. I built my first computer at 10 years old: a Slot 1 Pentium II Processor at 400 MHz, 128 MB of SDRAM, a Voodoo3 2000 GPU, and an ABIT (BH6 Model, I think?) motherboard given to me by my uncle. It wasn't the hottest computer on the planet, but building it myself was a huge achievement. I was a computer tech assistant for two years at my Middle School and for four years at my High School. I learned to handle helpdesk tasks, work with switches and networking equipment, address network and IP Addressing issues, perform server administration tasks (domain controllers and active directory), and I did a lot of computer repair. I put enough time into learning all things computer-related, that I was mostly self-taught in many Information Technology skills and concepts by the time I entered college.

Quotes that speak for me

"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge." - Thomas Carlyle

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination" - Albert Einstein

"To say that you have no choice is a failure of imagination" - Jean-Luc Picard

"Raise your words, not your voice. It is the rain that grows flowers, not thunder." - Rumi

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings." - Salvador Dali

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact." - William James

"I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see." - John Burroughs

"What care I how time advances? I am drinking ale today." - Edgar Allan Poe

"Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough." - Mark Twain

Article creation and expansion

Wikipedia essay creation

Wiki pages

My subpages

• CSD log - a list of articles I've tagged for CSD (using TW). (Kept for historical reasons)
• PROD log - a list of articles I've tagged for PROD (using TW). (Kept for historical reasons)
• AFD stats - A list of the last 500 votes I've added to AFD discussions, along with their resulting close.
• Admin stats - Stat listing of admin actions.
• My alternate accounts - The list of alternate accounts that I've claimed or that I use.