User:Dantman/About Me

I guess I should at least explain my age and career path for those who are curious or wondering who it is they are having administrate a wikia they edit.

I'm currently 18, and living in British Columbia, Canada. I've been programming, teaching myself various languages for over 3 years now. I started with BASIC and QBASIC, learned a bit of HTML markup and Javascript. I learned how to structure a basic game with the help of GameMaker's GML. Later on I got into PHP and SQL. After PHP I got into Java and did fairly well with the language. I extended much of my knowledge with HTML and XHTML and before XHTML learned CSS. I've also worked with XML firstly parsing it with PHP but also styling it with XSLT. And I've used the pretty simple syntax for RSS. Administrating Wikia here also showed me a bit of python for using with the pywikipediabot framework.

My main career focus is in Game Design. Happily since I'm just near getting out of High School I've gotten into the Art Institute of Vancouver's Visual and Game Programming course.

If you're wondering about my mentality to how I work here; I've always liked coding in various ways, and WikiText is an absolute perfect blend of Simplicity and Complexity. One of the things I always liked about PHP also. I try to relax as much as I can, but I suppose even when I try and pry myself away from the recentchanges to watch an episode I still end up coming back every time. On discussable topics I usually consider the points from all the views I can and usually take a middle stance taking in the good points from all of them. This means I'll probably end up arguing against all the extreme points, but it also means that whatever side I pick usually has the most valid reasoned stance. I know that administrative powers on a community wiki aren't a way of control but a way to help out. So when dealing with things I usually openly state all the reasons for doing something and usually end up with community support because of it. So I usually get a community to understand the reasons behind something rather than just using other methods to make a community go along with something.

I'll openly state it because I live with it. It's only minor but I have Tourette Syndrome. Currently that leads to a few things such as uncontrollable palm scratching(T_T I have groves in my palms), and a compulsion that has something to do with keeping things even on both sides (Burn one hand, burn the other. Something moves past one eye, I half to even that out.) But other than that the various symptoms have most likely lead me to the fact that my skin can be pretty sensitive, and I'd say that there are some psychological things that derive from the part of keeping things even. If you're wondering what all this has to do with here; Because of this I have a strong attachment to capitalizing things, mostly titles. Because of this I have much preference to Manual of Style over Manual of style and Community Portal over Community portal. I also have a strong urge to keeping things neat and standard. This means deciding on either using == Heading == or ==Heading== (I have a strong like for the latter) on a wiki, and on whether to sort things in main sections using * or ' ' (I still use * on The Gaiapedia, but elsewhere I have a stance towards the space). Also, in some cases I'll prefer to place a space after the * or # used to create lists, and sometimes I won't (Depending on the content of the list; Though I seam to have a normal like of it with the space). Though I try not to do these things strait-forward by editing things like that right into the page uselessly. Instead I usually end up doing that kind of change at the same time as I do a proper normal content edit. Either that or I'll do it without cluttering up the recentchanges on a wiki with a little more of it's own other disorganization.

''My work is based on interest. The more people use something and are interested by it, the more I focus my attention there. If you like my work; comment on it, and if you want to see me make more edits, make a small edit on one of the Wikia I administrate, and I'll probably look over the edit, then do what I can to make the article edited even better than before.''