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Tom Limoncelli

American activist

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ7816589 ↗
Source-derived summary

Tom Limoncelli (born December 2, 1968) is an American system administrator, author, and speaker.

A system administrator and network engineer since 1987, he speaks at conferences around the world on topics ranging from firewall security to time management. He is the author of Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly; along with Christine Hogan, co-author of the book The Practice of System and Network Administration from Addison-Wesley, which won the 2005 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award, and in 2007 with Peter H. Salus he has published a compilation of the best April Fools jokes created by the IETF entitled The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs.

He has also published papers at conferences such as the Usenix LISA on a wide variety of topics including innovative firewall techniques, coordinating massive network changes, models for improving customer support, and the security issues related to firing a system administrator.

Biography

Limoncelli is the youngest of five children. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut and has lived in New Jersey since the age of four. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

He is a Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Exchange. Before that, he was a systems administrator in the New York City office of Google. He has previously been Director, IT Services for Cibernet Corporation, Director of Operations at Lumeta and also worked at Bell Labs / Lucent Technologies where he ran the Internet gateway and networks used by the scientists as well as consulted internally to various business units.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tom Limoncelli” is american activist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Limoncelli, American and activist, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1968, 1987, 2005, 2007—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1968-12-02. For this dossier, Limoncelli, American and activist is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american activist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7816589. VIAF identifies the subject as 11000366. The Library of Congress control number is n2001009993. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1987, 2005 and 2007.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Tom Limoncelli”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Tom Limoncelli primary sources, Tom Limoncelli archive and Limoncelli research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Tom Limoncelli” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.