Status - Apr 04, 2002:
Well, this little trip to India lasted a bit longer than expected... I'm still here (!) but I leave in a few hours to return to Sydney... (thank God). Seriously looking forward to getting back into the loop, love the new look and functionality of the place. - MB
Status - Jan 31, 2002:
Well I just got back from a fantastic holiday, but only to find that I have to go to India (for work) in 3 hours time. Hopefully I will extend my "countries edited from' record to 5. Failing that, I will write lots of articles offline and post them when I'm back in Australia (either Feb 19 or Feb 26, depending on some uncertain things). Hi to all. - MB
Status - Dec 20, 2001:
As it is summer here, I will be on vacation until around the end of January. I'll be monitoring Wikipedia-L but will not be around much apart from that. Wishes to all for a pleasant holiday season and I'll be back in full force by the start of February 2002. - MB
An Australian living in Sydney, and frequently travelling the world at large. Professionally I am a data architect - I design systems to handle data management within large corporations. My education is as a medical doctor. Prior to that I was a professional guitarist in the USA. You figure it out.
I discovered Wikipedia through an article in the International Herald Tribune. I looked up my home state of Tasmania, was appalled at the two-line entry and suddenly found myself writing away...
Records held - I unashamedly claim to hold the record for "The most number of countries a contributor has edited Wikipedia from". So far I have edited articles in six countries - Hong Kong (technically China I guess), India, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Singapore and (now) Australia. (I have no idea if this is actually true or not, but the gauntlet has been thrown down at least). To be fair - my editing in Hong Kong was done from a booth at the airport, and was a single sentence addition done for the sole sake of adding one more country to the list. But hey - it should still stand.
What MMGB stands for - as a couple of people have asked. The full story... having been born in the late 1960s to "creative and free thinking hippies who rejected the yoke of societal oppression and tradition" I got stuck with the unfortuante moniker "Manning", after a leftist professor of Australian History (although it turns out that wasn't his name after all..., my parents could have done a little more research, but no). Then the grandparents got involved and said I had to have an ancestal name... I was the 3rd child and likely to be the only male, so to keep peace between both sides, I got McPhee after my maternal grandfather and "Greig" after my paternal grandfather... well sort of. "Greig" some of you will note is a Norwegian name, and I have no Norwegian ancestry of any kind. It was meant to be the Irish "Grieg", but they misspelled it on my birth certificate. So as if fate wasn't cruel enough, I have to go through life as a spelling error.
email: manning_at_bartlett.net, if you feel the need to contact me offline. I'm also on Wikipedia-L, and I would recommend being on the list to all serious 'pedians. I also turn up under the (work) IP of 205.210.232.xxx at times.
Dec 5 01 - Oh happy day!! After months of writing, someone finally put something I wrote (Joshua A. Norton) on brilliant prose. It takes so little to keep me happy.
/Contributions
To Do
/WikiProject
Things which are not really words
ManningBartlett/Old comments
/More old comments
Manning Bartlett/Urban Legends and Hoaxes Guide
/Naughty people
I've received some flak for this page, as some people believe it only encourages trolls. This has not been my experience so far, and I find it useful as I can open recent changes, do a Ctrl-F and see if they have been active anywhere.
Pet links
Countries of the world
World capital cities
World capital cities by country
Page titles to be deleted
Joshua A. Norton