User:Dnw/Dnw-bios

My full name is David Noel Wilson

• Born: 1955
• I live in Melbourne, Australia.
• I have a BA Honours in Politics and Sociology, a graduate Diploma in Data Processing, a MA in History.
• Lead/Co-Lead for Bibliographic Project (with Bruce D’Arcus).
• Hobbies: History, Wine, reading Science Fiction and much else, camping, bush walking.

My early education was in the Arts and I studied Politics and Sociology, but moved on to Information Technology to get employment. I worked for 20 years in a large corporation in many areas of IT – capacity planning, software planning and purchasing (software salesman ARE nice people), and software consultancy. I have done some application and database design, but very little programming, as I am a very slow and bad programmer.

When you reach the point when the Dilbert cartoons seem exactly to capture your daily experience in corporate life, it is time to move. So I left the Corporation and went back to University to study history.

My involvement with open-source software started about the time I began my history assignments. Having THAT software trash my essays got too much and I moved to Linux (no files lost since) and StarOffice, then to OpenOffice.org. I quickly found that OpenOffice.org did not support the citation method that my history department demanded - Chicago Style footnote citations. Having thought about what was required to fix these deficiencies I sent in a large number of enhancement requests to cover the limitations I found. The response to this barrage of suggestions was that I was invited to set up an project to develop the enhancement suggestions into a comprehensive redesign proposal. I accepted and the Bibliographic Project is in the process of doing that.