Wiki-famous friends

[dougo]

One concrete measure of fame is whether a person has a page in Wikipedia. This is a somewhat arbitrary measure; the Notability criteria guideline and the deletion policy determine when someone is not famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there might be famous people who don't have a page yet because no one has bothered to make one. Still, it's interesting to count how many wiki-famous acquaintances I have. In descending order of familiarity:

Andrew Plotkin, aka zarf. I met him through cthulhia and prog, and I hang out with him often, generally at board game gatherings or other social functions. Probably the only wiki-famous person who I can comfortably call a friend, though I've really only known him for about a year.
Karl Lieberherr, my PhD advisor.
Matthias Felleisen was on my thesis proposal committee.
Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Pure Software and Netflix. He hired me at Pure (I was employee #18) and I worked there for 3 years. I haven't seen him in 11 years and I'm not sure he'd remember me now.
Phil McMullen, creator of the Ptolemaic Terrascope music fanzine and the Terrastock music festivals. We've interacted on various email forums and have hung out at Terrastocks.
Francis Heaney, aka lunchboy. I've corresponded with him via email and IM, but we haven't actually met in person, so he's more of a friend-of-friends. (There are 4 LiveJournal users who are mutual friends with both him and me.)
Mark Jason Dominus, aka markdominus. Solidly into "fan" territory here, but we've corresponded via email a few times.
James Urbaniak, aka urbaniak. He's, you know, commented on comments I've posted. OK, this is a stretch.

Other people I know who are probably qualified to have a Wikipedia page: prog (he meets the "published author" requirement!), Jon Bernhardt (WMBR DJ since 1984, and founder of The Lothars), Greg Lam (game designer and publisher), Mitch Wand, Will Clinger, Brian Harvey. I'm probably forgetting some.

Edit: I should just make a real page for this list, but for now I'll just add people to this post: Jonathan Blow, Ned Raggett, Richard Fateman, William Kahan, Randy Katz, Robert Solovay

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

Los Bros Moskowitz once had a disagreement in my presence regarding my own encylopedicity. That was entertaining.

You have also met Darwin Kastle. When I first met him this topic came up and I half-joked at him that I was tweaked that he's considered encyclopedic and I'm not, but he countered that it's not his game design that got him in there but his Magic play.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Aha, thanks, I wouldn't have guessed him to be wiki-famous. I'm not actually sure he knows me, though; I chatted with him at the store a couple times, but that was as a customer/clerk relationship (and a few years ago). He didn't remember me when we were briefly introduced at the party last weekend, and I wouldn't blame him if he still doesn't remember me.

[dkuznick.livejournal.com]

I played poker with him once. :-)

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I can't even remember what side of that I was on.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

I'm a little surprised at how small the Urbaniak Wikipedia entry is.

[urbaniak.livejournal.com]

That's what she said.

[nosrialleon.livejournal.com]

[nosrednayduj]

Well, I don't have an entry, but I'm mentioned in the article about MOO...

[petdance.livejournal.com]

You know MJD? Swell! MJD is a great feller.

[yrlnry.livejournal.com]

I don't really know Doug, but I'd like to. Like he says, we've emailed a few times. Doug, don't believe Andy. I'm actually a big jerk.

I keep thinking that maybe I'll write a blog article about famous people I've met (mostly mathematicians), but I can never convince myself that it's of general interest.

I met Paul Erdős once. I told him about my favorite graph theory problem, and he agreed that it was interesting. Then I went to dinner with him after his talk, but anyone who has ever done that knows what happened next: he fell asleep at the table.

I've met J.H. Conway three times. At least twice I made a fanboyish ass of myself.

I once had lunch with Sir Roger Penrose.

I've met Luca Cardelli and Phil Wadler. Every time a functional programming luminary comes to visit Penn, some Penn CS professor has to introduce him to me: "This is Mark Dominus! He wrote a book about functional programming in Perl!" "He wrote a book about WHAT?"

That's the sort of person who's on the list.

Oh, and I know Larry Wall. And his wife.

[yrlnry.livejournal.com]

I also know Pavel Curtis, who knows Judy up there.
But I don't know Judy myself.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I lived in Silicon Valley for a few years in the early '90s, and I hung out a lot on LambdaMOO, but somehow I never met Pavel. I never even interacted with him much on LambdaMOO. But I've met most of the other wizards (including Judy, who I worked with for three years).

Speaking of CS people, I've also met Gregor Kiczales, Guy Steele, Dan Friedman, and Jim Hugunin. And, uh, once I stood near John McCarthy at a bookstore talk by some anti-AI guy. He was not impressed (and neither was I).

[yrlnry.livejournal.com]

Oh, and duh, I know Kibo.

Also Dave "Tale" Lawrence, who was the moderator of news.announce.newgroups, and so was the nearest thing to a Central Authority that Usenet had in 1990 when it was the largest online community in the world. But he's not in Wikipedia.

In college I was the roommate of Andy Ihnatko, who's now a noted computer He *is* in Wikipedia.

I've been friends with James Kushner for most of my life, and he's in Wikipedia, but I put him in myself, so I'm not sure how much it counts.

There's probably a whole bunch of Perl losers that I know who are in Wikipedia. And there are a bunch of people I wouldn't have considered particularly notable, but who are in Wikipedia anyway, like Chris DiBona.

Probably the most interesting name I can drop is that in 1985 I was the roommate of Daniel J. (qmail) Bernstein, at math camp. When I mentioned this to a sysadmin I worked with, he said, apparently surprised "You went to *math camp*?"

I was boggled. "You are surprised by this?"