User:The Earwig

Rhombodera basalis showing its pseudopupils

The Earwig (talk · contribs · logs · deletions · blocks · protections · page moves · rights)

• // articles
• showcase
• bot
• copyvios
• scripts
• sandbox (subpages)
• misc

Nice to meet you! I'm Ben. I've been editing Wikipedia for about 16 years, and I'm an administrator (RfA · recall) and bot approver (RfBAG).

Much of my work these days is technical in nature. I run EarwigBot, handle bot approvals, maintain a few tools on Toolforge (including a copyright violation detector), and develop user scripts. There is some Wikipedia-related code on my GitHub, including a Python parser for wikicode called mwparserfromhell that has gotten a bit of attention. As an admin, I help out in a lot of general maintenance areas, like speedy deletion.

My content interests mostly center around biology, particularly entomology (hence the insect username). This is purely a layman interest; I am a software developer by profession.

Helping new users feel comfortable here is one of the most important things we can do as experienced contributors. This is a guiding philosophy of mine, as a longtime participant of WikiProject Articles for creation and #wikipedia-en-help.

My talk page is always open. For private matters, you can contact me by email (wikipedia.earwiggmail.com) or on IRC (nickname earwig, hostname wikipedia/The-Earwig).

— Given the level of dysfunction that has come to prevail on Wikipedia, the most appropriate course is for all editors to work together to fix it. ^† —

Committed identity: 75c2cfb208f4669aa919a5e90c511b1c2a8eeafeca6f51b3f842565666ec7d7377e69fdddf5da86b08aaf083fffa1817e81bf42af446d03c231fe497bc330f6f is an SHA-512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.