User:DavidMCEddy

I'm an engineer with a PhD in Statistics and the initiator of the Category:Documenting crony capitalism initiative on Wikiversity and elsewhere. The goal of this initiative is to crowdsource research and investigative journalism on the inner workings of crony capitalism in government, and thereby help ordinary humans represent their interests more effectively in the halls of power.

In this effort I could use help with some technical problems:


 * 1) Can the Creative commons attribution NONCOMMERCIAL share-alike (CC by nc sa) license be used on for selected portions of pages?  I ask, because the Center for Responsive Politics distributes their data under the "CC by nc sa" license, which is incompatible with the standard Wikimedia "CC by sa" license.  It would make this work much easier if we could have procedures for applying the noncommercial restriction to portions of pages containing analyses derived from data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
 * 2) How can different articles in this initiative be constructed (tagged?) to facilitate the compilation of various kinds summaries?  I'm aware of Wikidata but have yet to learn enough about it to determine whether and how it might be used to support this -- or if I should be looking at something different.
 * 3) What's the best way to document sources of data used in Wikimedia articles and how a particular analysis can be updated?  Currently, I add a sample data set and / or functions with instructions on how to obtain and use them to the 'Ecdat' package for R, available on  R-Forge and the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).  However, I suspect there might be a better way to do this.
 * 4) Is there some table facility for Wikimedia projects that is more WYSIWYG?  The existing table facilities for the MediaWiki software seem fairly clumsy to me.

I'm pursuing the Documenting crony capitalism initiative in collaboration Lawrence Lessig's Rootstrikers, but I hope to extend this collaboration to other organizations that either provide relevant data or would be interested in using the results. To this end, I'm scheduled to attend the 2013 National Conference for Media Reform, April 4-7, and the {http://www.rootstrikers.org/conference Conference to Restore the Republic}, April 20. I hope there to recruit more people to contribute to this initiative and use the results of it.

I officially created an account on Wikipedia on March 26, 2010. Since then I've made 920 edits in 15 different Wikimedia projects. Most of those are in the English-language Wikipedia, Wikinews, and Wikiversity plus Wikimedia Commons. However, I have some fluency in Spanish, French and German, and I've made a few edits in Wikipedia and Wikinews in those languages. Beyond that, I fixed a syntax error in the Wikipedia page for Catherine the Great in Ladino. I don't know Ladino, but the syntax error was obvious and the fix was not difficult. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 23:57, 21 March 2013 (UTC)