User:The Earwig
The Earwig (talk · contribs · deletions · blocks · protections · page moves · rights)
Nice to meet you! I'm Ben. I've been editing Wikipedia for about 16 years, and I'm an administrator (RfA · recall), bot approver (RfBAG), and OTRS volunteer.
Much of my work these days is technical in nature. I run EarwigBot, handle bot approvals, maintain a few tools on Wikimedia Labs (including a copyright violation detector), and develop some user scripts. There's a bit of 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 dabble in a lot of general maintenance areas, like speedy deletion.
My content interests mostly center around biology, particularly entomology (hence the insect username) and a bit of microbiology and taxonomy. I helped make Earwig a good article, and I have two Did you know? credits. 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.earwig
gmail.com) or on IRC (nickname Earwig, hostname wikipedia/The-Earwig).