User:Robin Patterson

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This user was born in
New Zealand.

This user lives in New Zealand.

This user is a participant in Wikiproject Genealogy.

Wikipedia:Babel

en

This user is a native speaker of the English language.

de-1

Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse.

fr-2

Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau intermédiaire en français.

la-2

Hic usor media latinitate contribuere potest.

mi-1

E tino hapa ana tēnei tangata ki te reo Māori.

This user is a member of the Kindness Campaign.

This user wants to be your friend.

This user is male.

This user is a participant in WikiProject Short descriptions.

My home (home also to my wife and occasional cats and - for some years - children) had for 44 years been in Plimmerton, Porirua City, Wellington Region, New Zealand. But it's too steep for septuagenarians to look after and was put on the market in March 2020. Now sold; we have moved to "Friendly Feilding", where we are much closer to three of our grandchildren and less than 15 minutes' walk from where they often play sports.

And, no, the land of the Kiwi is NOT part of Australia. It is Middle-earth, a country of a little more than 5 million people, home and/or birthplace of:

Sir Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings, King Kong, etc)
Michael Campbell (US golf open and world matchplay champion in 2005),
Sir Bob Charles (top left-handed golfer),
Lydia Ko, top female golfer
Helen Clark, UNDP administrator,
the Horseman of the [20th] Century,
Sarah Ulmer,
Dame Sophie Pascoe,
Dame Lisa Carrington,
the All Blacks, and
Sir Edmund Hillary, joint conqueror of Mount Everest

and the only country outside USA to have successfully defended its hold on America's Cup TWICE. It has reclaimed its "Guinness Book" title of having the world's steepest street.

It was the first country to introduce a minimum wage and to give women the vote.

Its superior food-growing efficiency negates food-miles. And it recently became the country that squashed its first Covid19 outbreak.

Hello, you out there!

My interests

Diverse. Genealogy, conservation, urban planning, world peace and human survival. Strategy games such as Freeciv and (the recently revived - thanks to FreeGameEmpires and a Fandom wiki devoted to the series) "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon". Big fan of the late mathematician Tom Lehrer, having memorised several of his songs since about 1960 and enjoyed his Dunedin concert.

What led me here

I joined Wikipedia on 30 January 2004 after seeing a few of its pages while I was trolling through some Zeal pages (as was my custom). My main contributions in the next few months may be the profiling of many more (than the current 3,000+) WikipediA pages on Zeal, where I'm currently the 18th-highest point-earner, under user-name robinp. See my profile there: http://www.zeal.com/users/profile.jhtml?uid=58269&view=public - with link to minibio for the really keen researcher. If you want YOUR favourite WikipediA pages (or any other non-commercial web page) to feature on Zeal, first check whether they are there already then ask me if not.

Wiki involvement

Scored about 27 on 30 Mar 2004 on the Wikiholic test. Maybe I'm not really trying.

Maori

I'm registered user number 11 (possibly among the ignorant minority, as far as knowledge of that official NZ language goes) on the Maori Wikipedia - Kiwis and others can have a look: last 1500 unminor contributions) 1 April 2004

12 Oct 2004 There are now 24 registered users of Wikipedia Maori, and I'm clearly in the minority that DOES know a bit about the Maori language; but desperately needing more interest from people who know more about it than I do (or even a bit less, if they have some enthusiasm for helping Maori culture flourish). Try the Community_Portal for an easy introduction largely in English.

220 articles by Feb 2005. 270 by May, with considerable help from Wellington's Antipodes in northern Spain. Another hundred or so by November, along with the welcoming of Member No 100.

Not big numbers when set against the fact that over 130,000 people are claimed to use the language on a daily basis; but proportionally not bad in comparison to the English-language Wikipedia, which has twenty thousand times as many speakers of its language to call on.

To reduce the dominance of my name on the Maori "Recent changes" list, I have stored and improved the occasional model, etc, on:

User:Robin Patterson/MaoriModelPlacesPages,
User:Robin Patterson/MaoriModelPeoplePages, and
User:Robin Patterson/MaoriModelYearPages (also month and day models).

However, I copied some of them to pages on "mi" that had "tauira" in their names.

By the end of 2006 I was "de trop" because there were at least two native or near-native speakers of the language active. The most active one even deleted material from my user space with no apparent discussion. Seems "mi" still has no equivalent of Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion. He or she complained that my errors had taken 10,000 edits to fix: pretty inefficient to take 10,000 edits to fix 500 articles??

That editor stopped editing round about 2011. I hope others are working on the site. I've copied a few articles to the New Zealand Wikia - wikia:newzealand - newzealand.fandom.com.

Wiktionary

5 May 2004 http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Usor:Robin_Patterson !!

Then a couple of others.

Wikibooks

17 May 2004 Wikibooks - hey, these progressions are getting too close together...

30 Sep 2004 Wrote a bit in http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Civ today; could write for weeks - but Wikia:Civilization now has thousands of articles and became officially recognized by the publishers of the game series

Fandom, formerly Wikia (originally called "Wikicities")

Genealogy and LOTR and cities and engineering and fisherymanagement and even australia...

It's no wonder I haven't had time to resit the Wikiholic test.

In 2016, Wikia started using the name "Fandom". All of its quarter-million hosted sites are created and maintained by fans of something. In 2019 most of them were rehoused on fandom.com with the serious factual ones moved to wikia.org for a while but later to fandom.com.

BluWiki

http://www.bluwiki.org/go/Robin_Patterson

Spam patrol

(may be done whenever I have time, which is several times most days)

Contact welcome

All of the world's spammers have my address, so anyone's welcome to email me. See the sidebar link or look at my WorldConnect file. But if it's about genealogy, the best place is my talk page on Familypedia: http://familypedia.fandom.com/wiki/User_talk:Robin_Patterson

Editing tips and tricks

Wikipedia:How to edit a page

Wikipedia:Redirect
{{disambig}}
{{expand_list}}
{{spoiler}}
{{stub}} (this works in many other languages)
{{stublist}}
{{vfd}}
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Using_tables
Wikipedia:WikiProject
Wikipedia:Changing_attribution_for_an_edit (don't bother - I've waited for about 3 years)
User:Robin Patterson/tables,etc
Wikipedia:Template_namespace

Others are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MediaWiki_custom_messages - that may answer Lukobe's question (below) and save me and someone else from needing to make a couple of jumps to find my direct answer on his talk page.

Notes from other users that seemed (to their authors) to be better here than on my talk page; I may add or edit headings; and you risk being not noticed

Message codes

Why thank you for the compliment! By the way, I've been wondering--is there a listing of all the

{{}}

codes somewhere? Thanks-- Lukobe

see above

Western Europe

Thanx for pointing at Pforzheim. I could in fact drop a line though I'm not very proficient to write about that city. I only teach there. I could check Cologne where I am from or Freiburg or Geneva where I studied, or Karlsruhe where I live, or at least Amsterdam which is my favorite city. Jost ammon 21:30, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Syndromes

As there are literally thousands of syndromes, I don't think you need to feel compelled to add a few more to a non-comprehensive list of a few examples. There are actually "dictionaries of syndromes" published that run to hundreds of pages or more. Perhaps we can add the ones we write articles about to the bottom of the syndrome page. Alteripse 10:33, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thanks; my suggestion of a WP search was deliberate - just so as to link to more of the existing WP articles on syndromes. 8-) Robin Patterson 01:10, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Email

Thanks for the note on the e-mail function, Robin. No, I hadn't notice it yet...! Quill 23:00, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

User:Lst27

Kind of you to vote in favour of my nomination. By the way, have you tried to get your "anonymous" edits personalised using Wikipedia:Changing_attribution_for_an_edit? Robin Patterson 01:00, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sorry. No. But I probably will do it later. Thanks, --Lst 27 01:05, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Bruce Beetham

Hi again, Robin. The section on your user page seems to have vanished, but maybe my tired eyes are missing something. Anyway, I've made a start - I've destubbed your article on Bruce Beetham. It's still very superficial, however. I'm glad to know you've got his biography; I look forward to seeing what the article looks like when you're finished with it. I'll stay tuned :-) David Cannon 01:34, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Benfergy

Hello Robin. Thanks for welcoming me to Wikipedia. I actually live far away from Eagan, in the northwestern portion of the state, but it's cool to know there's that Minnesota connection. Talk to you later,

--Benfergy 23:10, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)

Cargill's Castle

Thanks for the compliments - but, I could hardly miss it out... It's 800 metres from where I live (down by St Clair beach)! As to the other southerner, yes, I'd just decided that I'd got about as much on Otago georaphy as was needed, and then I notice TimGrin linking new pages to the ones I put in! It's good to see more work, but Otago looks in danger of swamping the rest of the country. Still, if he's adding new info, I'm not complaining (even if it does require a bit of tidying here and there). I've started adding Southland info now... then the West Coast...

Cheers, Grutness 05:15, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Re-reading your note to me, I realise you meant me as the other southerner making you more work... I'll try to remember to put things on the "new articles" page and the like... sorry! Grutness 07:16, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

(Robin soon told Grutness that he was NOT the one referred to; they are both now fully up with the play and doing splendid work.)

About ongaonga

Please. Could you take a photo of a ongaonga (nettle tree of NZ, urtica ferox) for wikipedia! :D It grows on east of the South island and in the North island. ongaonga photo Pixeltoo 00:47, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, no digital camera.

I agree to multi-license all my contributions to any U.S. state, county, or city article 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 Wikipedia's copyright terms 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.

Another styletip ...

Case and spelled-out abbreviations

Just because capitals are used in an abbreviation doesn't mean initial capitals should be used in the expanded version.

Incorrect (not a proper noun): We used Digital Scanning (DS) technology

Correct: We used digital scanning (DS) technology

Correct (a proper noun): The film was produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)