User:Church of emacs

Hi, I am Church of emacs.

I'm mainly active in the German Wikipedia, where I fight vandalism and do support/meta stuff (among other things). I am also a dewiki sysop, oversight and an OTRS-member.

If you want to leave me a message, you can do so at my talk page, but I will probably be able to answer more quickly on my De-Wikipedia-Talkpage.

mediawiki & me

I'm interested in 'how stuff works' and therefor explored mediawiki quickly after I began to contribute to Wikipedia. Over the time, I learned much about how the software behaves (what are important url parameters, special pages, and so on), but I never learned much about the action behind the scenes – how the software actually does work.

Being a sysop on dewiki, I approached mediawiki development by having some ideas about feature request, so I reported them at bugzilla. I wasn't really into php at that time and often my bugs and feature requests would stay at status "NEW". So, (after learning some basics with the Wikibook on PHP) I had a look into the code and tried to figure out how to fix the bug. It took me over two hours, and the result was that I changed only one (!) line. Yeah, it takes time to get into the code...

This far, I have written a few patches. My first extension is Extension:FlagPage. w:en:User:Werdna/dev is perhaps something related. (But even if my extension is redundant or will not be accepted, it's still a good way for me to learn something about MediaWiki. You know, I'm interested in 'how stuff works'.) Since August 2009 I have SVN commit access and I'm also a sysop here.

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See Extension:GroupsSidebar for a more current and popular extension written by myself.