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User:Jeffmedkeff

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I am Jeff Medkeff, and I'm here for idealistic reasons: I believe in making knowledge available to others who seek it.


Bio and Narcissism

I currently reside in Alaska where I work as a technical and commercial photographer. I used to be a contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine and still contribute to their pages from time to time. I am also an occasional contributor to Astronomy magazine. I'm known (and occasionally considered notorious) for my contributions to robotic telescope technology in the late 1990's and have been an amateur astronomer since the late 1970's. My primary interests are epistemology, the scientific method, the visual arts, and science - particularly astronomical sciences - and communicating these things to the lay public. You can learn more about me at my home page.


My Photographers Project

I've started working on a project to add an article about each photographer who has a photo published in my library of photographic art. I'm starting by creating the article stub with the information that is immediately available in the place of publication. Once I'm done, I'll go back through and flesh out the stubs where possible. Note the timeline for expansion could be unbounded; I expect things to go very slowly, as I have to grab bits of time from other commitments to do this.

In reality, I'm likely to generate a lot of stubs and then fail to find any biographical information about the photographers in my own library. So I'm pretty much counting on others to expand as many of the articles as possible.


List of photographers that I've added during this project:


List of uncreated articles I've linked to during this project (bad wikipedian!):


Stuff I've Contributed

I've created the following articles here (in addition to the stubs above):


I've contributed significant material to:

  • Pilates - I originated the "criticisms" section; we'll see if it sticks. I am not actually in sympathy with many of the criticisms nor do I find those that I find compelling to be terribly important; but the Pilates article has been terribly one-sided in the past. (Update: it didn't stick. A revert war started, then ended; there's now a discussion of the issues on Talk:Pilates. Currently the article is the subject of an NPOV dispute.)


I've contributed the following images:


As well as started the following stubs and brief articles (on the theory that some information on these topics was better than none):


I've cleaned up:

  • Yousuf Karsh
  • Buckingham Palace, sort of. This is an excellent article which had a number of minor spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors that I worked on.
  • Wikipedia had an article called Perspective distortion caused by lens focal length which described a photographic and cinematographic phenomenon not caused by lens focal length, but by camera to subject distance. The article attributed the phenomenon to focal length. The term "perspective distortion" is probably colloquial and not mathematically rigorous, but it is an important photographic topic frequently known under the term "perspective distortion." I corrected the factual inaccuracies in the article, and added a category. Then I made a small edit to increase clarity. After a while, I got a little queasy about leaving the article with the old title, since the title itself was factually incorrect. Since the article hadn't been updated in ages (if it had been, I would have started a discussion about the move first), I decided to move the article to Perspective distortion (caused by camera to subject distance), and I updated all the wiki links from the old article to the new article. Then I looked at what linked to the redirect page and updated all the specifically photographic articles that linked there to the new page, if they were referencing that phenomenon. Obviously, the best way to link to the article is like this: [[Perspective distortion (caused by camera to subject distance)|perspective distortion]], which renders as perspective distortion.
  • Panchromatic was a little messed up, so I addressed that.


I've also participated in disambiguation of the following:

  • Leo I - in addition to being a pope, emperor, and computer, Leo I is also the designation of a dwarf galaxy, and the name of a small cluster of galaxies which (confusingly) does not contain the aforementioned dwarf galaxy. I sorted out the latter issues.
  • The Rock Abrasion Tool on the MER-A (Spirit) and MER-B (Opportunity) Mars landers was undocumented on Wikipedia. There was a link from the MER-B article to RAT which goes to a disambiguation page on which Rock Abrasion Tool was not listed. I added it, fixed links in the MER-A and MER-B articles, and wrote a Rock Abrasion Tool stub. I hope someone comes along to expand it, because I'm no expert. MER-A and MER-B instrumentation is briefly described in the Mars Exploration Rover article, but that article is very long. MER experts should probably decide whether to tear down my Rock Abrasion Tool article and link to Mars Exploration Rover, or start to offload some MER material into separate articles.

Otherwise, my contributions take the form of spelling and grammar corrections, flagging things as needing cleanup or increased clarity, and otherwise hitting the random page link and looking for problems.


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