User:Archimedix
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I'm Archimedix — Piergiorgio Borgogno. I registered on the Italian Wikipedia on 31 October 2006, and I've been coming and going ever since: months of silence, then weeks spent on a single article.
I work as a software architect and educator. Teaching has made me value clear explanations, patient collaboration, and sources that other people can check. That is also why I edit Wikipedia: not to have the last word, but to help make an article more accurate and useful.
I divide my time between the Turin area, northern Tuscany, and northern Thailand. I care about the hyperlocal: small, specific places that few others will document.
What I write about
[edit source]I have no editorial plan. I have places. Most of my work is on the Italian Wikipedia, so the links below point there.
- Castevoli and Lunigiana — a small hamlet in the province of Massa-Carrara, where my mother was born and where I spent childhood summers. History, sources, bibliography, photographs: that is where this user page began.
- Lanzo Torinese and its Devil's Bridge — the Lanzo Valleys are home. I was born and work there; a fourteenth-century bridge with a legend attached deserves careful coverage.
- India and northern Thailand — Varanasi, the ghats, the Ganges, prana, the Lan Na kingdom, temples and local subjects. In 2010–2011 I spent a year between an ashram in India and a Buddhist monastery in Thailand; today I spend part of each year in Nan. Where folklore can outrun evidence, I keep my edits dry and sourced, and upload photographs to Commons when I can.
- Technology — my main passion, and the subject I edit least: it moves too fast for an encyclopedia. I step in only once something has settled beyond the news cycle.
I make mostly small contributions: a source, a wrong date, an expansion, a photograph. I prefer a few well-tended articles to many barely touched.
How I work here
[edit source]I'm not interested in being right. I'm interested in the article being right, in the end.
- Source first, sentence second. If I can't cite it, I don't write it.
- Where I'm most useful is the local: small villages and their monuments are poorly covered, and there one referenced line counts for more than on an article already worked over by a thousand hands.
- I'm not attached to my own versions. If I'm wrong, correct me without ceremony.
- Wikipedia is the closest thing to a digital commons we've managed to build. It's worth treating it as such.
Disclosure
[edit source]- I worked for years with CNOS-FAP and I've edited its article: I stuck to facts verifiable from public sources, and on matters of judgement I gladly leave the last word to others.
- I own a house in Castevoli: an affective interest, not an economic one — but it's only fair to say so.
- I spend several months with my family in Na Noi, northern Thailand, where out of affection for the monk Kruba Noi Yanwichai and his temple Wat Tham Chetawan I maintain non-commercial, devotional websites about them: it's my way to give back what I receive from them — a personal tie, not an economic one, but it's only fair to say so.
Elsewhere
[edit source]archimedix.net — my own corner of the web, where I write in a register that would be out of place here.
My home wiki is the Italian one: my full user page lives at it.wikipedia. If something's wrong in an article I've touched, write to me there or on my talk page on this wiki — I answer in my own time, but I answer.