Things about me
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Hi there! I'm Gaurav Vaidya. I potter around Wikipedia occasionally, fixing bits and pieces when it strikes my interest.
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I'm a Semantic Web technologist at the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I've been since October 21, 2019 (4 years, 5 months and 14 days so far!). I figure out how best to validate, publish and reuse biomedical data using Semantic Web standards such as RDF, OWL, ShEx and SHACL.
As somebody who doesn't edit Wikipedia as much as I'd like (or, perhaps, have the patience for), my favourite Wikipedia activity is taking an article which is coming apart at the seams and tidying it up. In particular, popular articles have a lot of people adding facts, photographs or sentences anywhere vaguely appropriate; as these changes accrue, the article can get pretty messy.
Which is where I like to come in: taking an existing article, I'll merge the accumulated cruft, reorganize the facts so they flow smoothly, pinch out coherent sections and otherwise try to polish the article off. This works great with my available time, too: apart from discussions and vandalism reverts, the only time I spend on Wikipedia is three-four hour binges where I try to get one of these articles polished off. I'm quite proud of my work on Pune, the Deccan plateau and the Battle of Pratapgad.
As I've been on Wikipedia for quite a while (since 2002!), there's articles I'm proud of just because I started them. I'm pleased that Indian independence movement still retains the name I gave it; I also created the original stub for The Catcher in the Rye and Artemis Fowl (series). One of the most exciting things about Wikipedia is starting off an article that you'd like to read yourself, waiting a few years, and voila, Wikipedians have fleshed it out to a level you couldn't imagine. I started Order of the Phoenix (organisation) and fleshed out a very early article on Lord Voldemort ([1]) with this intention, and it succeeded brilliantly. And, one lazy afternoon, while listening to a short documentary on Peter Handford on BBC Radio 7, I visited Wikipedia to find out more. Horrors! No entry! The article I wrote in a rush is still around, has been polished up by others, and is a reasonably decent introduction to the man if anybody were to look him up in this encyclopedia.
In 2012, I worked with the Biodiversity Heritage Library in developing a schema to store and retrieve information from the Wikimedia Commons, and I've been thinking about extracting metadata out of the Commons ever since.
When I was a kid, I watched The Adventures of Milo and Otis a lot.
 | This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for 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 whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gaurav. |
I sometimes back up content which is being deleted elsewhere in the Wikipedia (inclusionist, remember?) to my user pages. You can look through this content with this handy link.
But really, I'm just the guy at http://www.ggvaidya.com/ - that'll hopefully be an easy way to find me for ages to come.
| 2017 | Sep 2 |
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| 2012 | Mar 31 |
| 2011 | May 2 |
| 2010 | June 17 |
Authority control databases – Gaurav Vaidya | |
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| Academics | |
WP:TWA 65.101.235.163 (talk) 05:09, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
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