I just made my first contribution to Wikipedia today during a short study break. I discovered that on the page devoted to topics named after Carl Gauss, Gaussian blur (of Photoshop effect fame) was ommitted. So I added it to the list after doing a little research for accuracy confirmation, and the page was instantly updated. (Hopefully it’s not wrong! If it is, I can expect it to be deleted pretty quick.) My addition to the list did not include an actual entry for Gaussian blur; I’ll let someone more knowledgable do that. Hopefully the new blank entry will be brought to someone’s attention. I’ll check back in the future to see what has happened. Wikipedia is really amazing.

(All this was brought on by a discussion with Carl (Lorimer) about how I shared a birthday with Carl Gauss, and he’s such a famous mathematician that he even has his own (widely used) Photoshop effect.)

Giddy with my newfound influence over a global information resource, I went on to make a correction to a Wikipedia entry on Chinese character classification. Under “False friends” they had the character 麥 mistakenly glossed as “mái” so I changed it to the correct “mài.” (I’m now more familiar with this character than I used to be, since I have a friend named 麦卡, whose name uses the character 麥 in its simplified form 麦.)