David Richfield

I am David Richfield, a German chemical engineer / biochemist born in South Africa. I'm also a founder member and former director of Wikimedia South Africa, the South African Wikimedia Chapter. I also created the parliament diagram tool, which is widely used to create diagrams for political articles on Wikipedia.

My username comes from IRC: "/me" is a shortcut which inserts your username.

I enjoy learning languages, graphic design, 3D modeling with Blender, cartography on OpenStreetMap, computer programming, playing Go and promoting free software. In 2016, I started juggling.

Here's a Limerick:

Activity

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Parliament diagram tool

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You can make diagrams using this online tool!

I started work a while back on a tool to render svg diagrams for legislatures - I started out with a tool that spits out a rectangular diagram with a title and a legend. In May 2010, I saw some very nice arch-shaped diagrams drawn with User:Habbit's ADSvote program requested for conversion to SVG on WP:GL/I. Instead of doing manual SVG conversion, I programmed a similar algorithm, which I now host on Wikimedia's Toolserver (link above). The source code is hosted at GitHub - Bug reports, feature requests and patches are welcome!

The arch tool is quite popular for election results on Wikipedia, but the Westminster-style tool is still under development: a standard style has not yet been clarified, so if you use it, expect criticism and/or correction. If the output is not as you expect, consider editing with Inkscape and saving the result as a "plain SVG".

You can also upload the diagrams directly from the tool. You can see the most recent uploads here.

There have been significant contributions to the tool by Ambady Anand S, Ranjith Siji, and Rade-Mathis.

Pages I started

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Don't start what you can't finish.

Translations

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Some pictures and animations I've contributed

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Here are some selected files. For a more complete list, with many more pictures, see my Commons uploads (or if you have javascript enabled, you can see them in a gallery view)

Tools

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Camera

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I bought a Canon PowerShot A630 in April 2007, and have since started contributing photos to Wikipedia. In 2008, due to an insurance payout after a stupid accident involving seawater, it was upgraded to an A650IS, quite a nice camera, and it runs chdk quite nicely, thanks! That camera was eventually stolen in 2013, and I have replaced it with an SX270HS, which has the new Digic 6 processor. There is a development CHDK version for this model, but I have not tested it yet: it is still alpha software as of November 2014. I've also since bought a Canon EOS 600D. It's a very nice camera! I have had good success with macro photography using extension tubes with the stock lens, but I later also bought a combination macro/telephoto lens.

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Go, Baduk, Weiqi

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Footnotes

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