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The Ant The ant has made himself illustrious Through constant industry industrious. So what? Would you be calm and placid If you were full of formic acid? -- Ogden Nash
Me

Seth Ilys (leave a message at the sound of the tone) is

• a Wikipediholic (user #35314, since 20 December 2003) and a Wikipedia administrator (since 19 March 2004). If you like my work on Wikipedia, you can donate to me directly using Paypal.
• not a bot himself, but operates the Sethbot. (since May 2003)
• one of the serial bloggers (Social Anomaly since November 9, 2004).
• an alumnus and employee of North Carolina State University (B.A., chemistry, minor in music theory, 2003), soon-to-be graduate student in physical chemistry and chemistry education at Colorado State University.
• a resident of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, having previously lived in Cary, Carrboro, Raleigh, and Apex (my real hometown), born in Durham.
• a genuine living, breathing human being (since 26 November 1982)

• "...just another guy with weird philisophical objections... which I cannot profess to understand." - Fennec
• in agreement with Jengod in saying "Semicolons are my favoritest punctuation..."
• one of the "oddly freakish people who are exceptional." - User:Menchi
• the "lifeblood of a substandard graffitopedia." - User:Blair P. Houghton
• "prefer[s] to work behind the scenes. The reward is nearly as great, and the risk far, far less." - Londo Mollari, in Babylon 5: "The Coming of Shadows," written by J. Michael Straczynski

You can reach me by posting a message on my Wikipedia talk page, sending an email to seth (dot) ilys (at) gmail (dot) com, catching me on IM (AOL, MSN, Yahoo) as JehanneDaix, or finding me in the wikipedia IRC chatroom on Freenode,

Copyrights: I release of all of my text contributions to Wikipedia pages in the article namespace into the public domain in all jurisdictions worldwide. Unless elsewhere released into the public domain by me, I retain copyright to all of my contributions to this user page, contributions to all talk or meta pages, and all original images, although those materials are licensed for use under your choice of the the GFDL (and I do not release sublicensees from their obligations under section 4B) or the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Wikipedia Meets Real Life

• I was profiled in Daniel Teridman's 8 March 2005 Wired News article "Wiki Becomes a Way of Life" and was one of the Raleigh Independent Weekly's Our Favorite Geeks on 6 April 2004 (article scan).
• I was at the I.T. Littleton Seminar at NCSU on April 13, where Blaise Cronin will speak on “Who Dunnit? Agency, Attribution, and Authority in an Age of Hyperauthorship.” I had a nice little chat with him afterwards, too. See my rough notes and a blog post on the lecture.
• I intend to make it to the May 2005 D.C. Meetup and the August 2005 Wikimania conference in Frankfurt, but plans may change (airfare for Europe being the major hurdle at the moment, as prices keep rising).

Works in Progress

• User:Seth Ilys/Seth's Massive List of South Dakota Things

Tables and Lists to Maintain

Death Penalty

• Statistics on the table in Capital punishment in the United States
• Lists of individuals executed in Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming.

North Carolina Politics

• North Carolina gubernatorial election, 2004
• North Carolina Council of State election, 2004

Space Exploration

• List of human spaceflights, 1961-1986
• List of human spaceflights, 1987-1999
• List of human spaceflights, 2000-present

Major Projects

The Dot Project

My great Wikipedia project: creating maps to show the location of US cities and towns for the Rambot-generated articles. This may take a while. A long while.

Update: But perhaps not forever! We're three-quarters done! Remaining states: Montana, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. There's a light at the end of the tunnel!

Status:

• North Carolina: begun 19 March 2004, finished 26 March 2004
• Alabama: begun 26 March 2004, finished 30 March 2004
• Oklahoma: begun 5 May 2004, finished 7 May 2004
• Hawaii: begun 10 May 2004, finished 11 May 2004
• Iowa: begun 31 March 2004, finished 15 May 2004
• Alaska: begun 7 May 2004, finished 13 May 2004
• Maryland: begun 15 May 2004, finished 18 May 2004
• Utah: begun 19 May 2004, finished 20 May 2004
• New Mexico: begun 26 May 2004, finished 3 June 2004
• West Virginia: begun 25 May 2004, finished 4 June 2004
• Tennessee: begun 8 June 2004, finished 12 June 2004
• Texas: begun 12 June 2004, finished 27 August 2004
• North Dakota: begun 19 June 2004, finished 21 June 2004
• South Dakota: begun 21 June 2004, finished 26 June 2004
• Kentucky: begun 30 August 2004, finished 8 September 2004
• Wyoming: begun 8 September 2004, finished 15 September 2004
• Florida: begun 15 September 2004, finished 22 October 2004
• Idaho: begun 25 October 2004, finished 27 October 2004
• South Carolina: begun 30 October 2004, finished 18 December 2004
• Michigan: begun 1 January 2005, finished 10 February 2005
• Southern California: begun 10 February 2005.
• Colorado: begun 26 March 2005, finished 6 April 2005
• Georgia: begun 8 April 2005

And other folks are joining in on the fun, too!

• Vermont: completed March 2004 by User:Redjar
• Connecticut: begun May 2004 by User:Plutor
• Washington: completed May 2004 by User:Bumm13
• Nevada: completed May 2004 by User:Bumm13
• Missouri: completed June 2004 by User:Catbar
• Delaware: completed May 2004 by User:Bumm13
• Arizona: completed July 2004 by User:Catbar
• Ohio: completed August 2004 by User:Catbar
• Louisiana: completed October 2004 by User:Catbar
• Oregon: completed November 2004 by User:Bumm13
• Wisconsin: completed January 2005 by User:Bumm13
• Kansas: completed January 2005 by User:Catbar
• Arkansas: completed February 2005 by User:Catbar
• Northern California: completed February 2005 by User:Bumm13
• Minnesota: begun March 2005 by User:Catbar
• Rhode Island: being done by User:SPUI, along with road maps for Rhode Island State Highways - all incorporated cities and towns done, will do more detailed maps of each, including dots for villages, later

Towns missing articles:

Seth during his life as a Wikipedian, circa 6:38 p.m., 23 June 2004.

If you come across a town from a state or county I've completed above which needs a map, just list it below, and I'll make it at the first available opportunity.

• Tolsona, Alaska
• Atomic City, Idaho
• Berwick, Iowa
• Elkhart, Iowa (see also discussion page)
• Garden City, Iowa
• Hamlin, Iowa
• Ira, Iowa
• Gunlock, Utah
• Deadwood, South Dakota
• Ipswitch, South Dakota
• Mission, South Dakota
• New Witten, South Dakota
• Pierre, South Dakota
• Sioux Falls, South Dakota
• Vermillion, South Dakota
• Whitehorse, South Dakota
• White Horse, South Dakota

Past Completed Projects

Nobody has given you a BarnStar! Insane. Do I need to even give a reason? This says it all really. Thanks! Tom- 23:13, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Aside from the above, this page is a Barnstar-free zone. - Seth Ilys 12:21, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• U.S. Executions since 1976: list of all executed prisoners in the U.S. since 1976, by state. (completed, December 2003)
• North Carolina General Assembly: stub bios of all current NCGA members, with pics. (completed, early February 2004)
• U.S. County Redirects: created redirects and disambiguation pages from "Name County" to "Name County, State," for all U.S. counties. (completed, late March 2004)

Catalysis

One of the things that Wikipedia demonstrates amazingly well, as people have noted, is the power of collaborative journalism; our articles on breaking news events tend to become very good, very quickly. As something of a news junkie, I like to think that I've helped pushed a few of these articles along in their infancy and that the community has made them great. Some of the articles I'm proudest of that I had a hand in catalyzing at their creation:

• Boniface Alexandre
• Michael Badnarik
• Nick Berg
• Mydoom
• William Hung
• Mike Melvill
• 2004 Osama bin Laden video
• Alberto R. Gonzales
• 2005 Sumatran earthquake

Articles that I'm also proud of that weren't breaking news:

• Sharbat Gula
• The Blue Marble
• United States Congressional Apportionment
• Caroline Island

Wikipedia Signal-to-Noise Statistics

As I (used to) spend a good deal of time at Special:Newpages patrolling new article additions, I thought I'd generate some statistics as to how much what content is being added (at least, in brand-new articles). The results of my completely unscientific study are summarized in the table below and are surprisingly encouraging. I'll continue to add to the data over time, so hopefully the ratios will steady-out eventually.

Another interesting statistic regards who creates new articles. From a casual glance at Newpages, there are three broad classes of users: anyonymous users (shown as IP addresses), logged in users without userpages (usually relatively new Wikipedians), and logged in users with userpages (usually more experienced Wikipedians. Page creation breakdowns run roughly thus: