Dsimic

Hello there! My name in real life is Dragan Simic, just in case you've wondered where my Wikipedia username comes from. :) In more detail, I wanted an all-lowercase username, but having one unfortunately wasn't (and still isn't) possible due to certain technical restrictions of Wikipedia that impose different naming constraints. I also have an account on Wikimedia Commons with the same username, which belongs to my unified login having English Wikipedia as the home wiki.

I'm pretty much a person who ordinary people would call a computer geek, and I'm proud of that. My obsession with computers started with a Commodore 64 in my early childhood, and turned later into a professional devotion to various areas of computing and computer science, including different Unix variants (with the primary focus on Linux), low-level and high-level programming, compilers, algorithms and data structures, networking hardware and protocols, load balancing (had an old paper published), computer security, databases, computer hardware in general, microcontrollers, and embedded devices. In addition, a few userboxes listed below provide more of my background information. :)

I've joined English Wikipedia back in February 2008, remaining pretty much inactive until September 2013 when I started to do some real work (a different breakdown is also available,^[a] and here's another one that pretty much combines the former two). My work^[b] on the English Wikipedia mainly consists of contributing new content and doing various improvements to already existing computing-related articles, together with creating or starting (so far, a few dozens of) new articles from the same field; traffic statistics and related useful links for those new articles are available in a section below. Furthermore, so far I've created hundreds of new redirects for various purposes, and uploaded a bunch of images to Wikimedia Commons and a few of them locally – as we know, a picture is worth at least a few kilobytes. :)

As a contribution different from developing articles, I've also written a computer program that helps in assessing how much traffic a group of articles receives; more details about it are available in a section below. Heck, I've additionally discovered and reported a somewhat significant bug in MediaWiki (tracked as T64268), which was fixed very quickly.

In my humble opinion, Wikipedia is a really great thing because pretty much anyone can improve both themselves and the whole world by contributing to it and working together with the other editors. Where else‍—‌short of contributing source code to a high-profile open-source software project, of course‍—‌can you have your work reviewed and improved by hundreds of good people for free, while contributing to a very popular encyclopedia that's (hopefully) going to remain publicly accessible indefinitely? Moreover, why would you take your private paper (or text file) notes, when you can instead do that on Wikipedia for everyone's long-term benefit? :)

Beside opening paths to various improvements in one's real-world knowledge, Wikipedia is a great destination for non-native English speakers looking to improve their written English – over time, hundreds of eyeballs will look over one's contributions and point out various grammar and writing style weaknesses. Of course, learning English that way takes a lot of time, but you can hardly get similar quality of teaching through copy editing for free anywhere else. At the same time, please don't miss to have a look at the Wikipedia's Manual of Style, which is pretty much an invaluable free resource.

Did you know that the entire content of Wikipedia is easily downloadable, including complete revision histories? Or maybe you'd just like to see the SQL schema of the Wikipedia's database backend? Not a problem, that's also easily accessible. At the same time, various database reports are available, broken down by numerous categories; for example, you can see which pages have the most revisions, the number of pages in each namespace, most-watched pages by namespace, or the WikiLove usage statistics.

Below is a selection of userboxes that provide more of my background information, including my computer programming and language skills. There are also a couple of quotations related to software development, which I find amusing and pretty much right to the point – I'm sure those will bring a smile to your face if you've spent any substantial amount of time in that industry. :)

The box below lists the articles I've created or started, in the reverse chronological order of their creation so the newest article is on top of the list; the article titles are linked to their 90-day traffic statistics charts.

As of July 1, 2016^[update], there are about 5,350 total daily page views for all these articles, based on their traffic statistics for one month into past; see also my PHP program that calculates the monthly statistics. This summary statistics value doesn't include spider- or bot-generated traffic, and doesn't include accesses to articles via various redirect pages, which also applies to the traffic statistics charts linked below and the monthly breakdown provided above. The described redirect-related behavior can be verified by comparing the statistics of an article that has been renamed: here are the article statistics, redirect statistics, and statistics search.^[d]