User:ThaddeusB

Hello and welcome to my user page! First, a bit about me... My name is Thaddeus and I am from Columbus, Ohio. I am 29 years old, have a six-year-old son, and have been happily married for the last 8 years. I make my living by running an online bookstore. I consider myself to be a devout Christian and have a strong personal interest in apologetics. I am happy to discuss my faith with anyone, although that is certainly not my reason for being here. In addition to Christianity, a have a wide variety of interests ranging from classic video games to dinosaurs to The Olympics. In general, I find statistics on just about anything to be fascinating. However, my editing to date has had very little to do with my real-life interests. Some info about my editing... I have been editing Wikipedia for more than a year and a half now (and reading it longer), and have dabbled a little in many different areas. I have done some vandalism fighting, done a little New page patrol, offered a few third opinions, wikified some articles, de-orphaned a few pages, and participated in many AfDs. Of course, I have worked some on content creation and consensus building too. I have recently become very involved in the In the news section of the main page, and by consequence the current events portal. In most everything I have done, I have tried to "get it right" and handle the hard cases where help was most needed rather than just doing what was easier and quicker. Over time, I have found that the three areas I enjoy contributing the most are correcting spelling & grammar errors, patrolling proposed deletions to find article worth saving or transwiking, and writing bots to automate tedious tasks. On July 29, 2009 I was promoted to administrator by a 117-2-7 vote. I am truly honored and humbled by the outpouring of support and look forward to serving the community in my new role. On September 4, 2009, I received my first good article credit on an article (Household Hacker) for which I was the primary contributor. I have created two barnstars: the Swine Flu Barnstar and the Zoroastrianism Barnstar. I have made over 200 improvements to RegExTypoFix and have written four approved bots: DeadLinkBOT which updates external links that have "rotted" The Auto-categorizing Robot which is designed to intelligently add and/or adjust categories to which an article is assigned. WebCiteBOT which helps prevent link rot of citations by submitting most newly added links to Webcitation.org for permanent archival. WikiStatsBOT which keeps track of Wikipedia statistics requested by WikiProjects and such. An (outdated) log of my proposed deletion activity can be found at User:ThaddeusB/PROD Log. Hopefully, I'll update it some day. View my edit count Things I might be able to help you with... One of the greatest strengths of Wikipedia is its collaborative nature. Each editor is free to work on what they are best at/like the most, and leave the tasks they don't like to someone else. Maybe I can help by doing a task you don't want to do, but would like to see completed. One of my greatest strengths is writing "intelligent" bots. It is a major misconception that computer programs can't make good decisions. This misconception leads to 1) people only requesting bots to do very simple tasks and 2) fear of bots that propose to do more. I wish to fight this misconception and bring semi-intelligent bots to Wikipedia whenever I can. For me, it is far more interesting to create a bot that can (for example) determine what category an uncategorized article should be added to than to create a bot that simply adds {{uncategorized}}. So, if you have a large-scale task you want done feel free to ask me even if you think it may be difficult for a bot to do. I am not a professional graphic designer or anything, but I do like to dabble occasionally. If there is a barnstar or other simple graphic you'd like to see made, feel free to ask. I have access to over 100 premium content databases on a wide variety of subjects. I also have access to full text news articles via LexisNexis, and a large number of full text scientific journals not freely available on the web. As such, if there is an article or specific subject matter you are looking for, let me know. In many cases I can email you a copy of text you might otherwise not have access to. Feel free to contact me via email with anything you don't want on wiki for whatever reason.

About me: This user is a Christian. This user is married. This user is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. (verify) This user is a BotOp on the English Wikipedia. Perl This user is just another Perl hacker. This administrator will consider reasonable requests to provide copies of deleted articles. I've spent a lot of time on: tyop typo This user is a member of the Wikipedia Typo Team. This user is a proposed deletion patroller. This user is a recent changes patroller. This user edits and assesses articles in the Article Incubator. This user contributes to the In the news section of the main page. This user rescues articles for the Article Rescue Squadron. This user shares at the Resource Exchange. I would like to contribute to: (If I had more time) This user is a member of The Atari Task Force. This user is a member of the WikiProject Olympics This user is a member of WikiProject Ohio. This user is a member of WikiProject Christianity This user is a member of WikiProject College Basketball.

Useful Stuff

Editing Help/Guideline		Useful Tools
Manual of Style Weasel Words List of English words with disputed usage List of commonly misused English words List of common misspellings and typos Creating Tables		Recent changes patrol - warning templates Full list of stub types List of templates / Cleanup tags List of tasks in need of attention

Awards

User:ThaddeusB has been identified as an Awesome Wikipedian, and therefore, I've officially declared today as ThaddeusB's day! For being such a beautiful person and great Wikipedian, enjoy being the Star of the day, dear ThaddeusB! Peace, Rlevse 00:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC) A record of your Day will always be kept here.

The Minor Barnstar For your excellent work helping to keep wikipedia clean of typos! QueenCake (talk) 19:48, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

The da Vinci Barnstar For creating a bot that will single-handedly prevent a whole slew of dead reference links. Great job! Anomie⚔ 01:25, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

The Barnstar of Diligence For keeping a watchful eye on the 2009 swine flu related articles, and the even-keeled sensibility you bring to the hourly "emergencies" that arise at the article/template talk pages. Regards. Abecedare (talk) 00:50, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The Article Rescue Barnstar Thank you so, so much for providing the reliable sources that saved nigahiga from deletion and, in other words, one of the articles I most wanted to get created. I was tempted to give you a cookie but this barnstar is far more appropriate. (Sorry for not formatting this properly; I'm still a wiki formatting dunce.) Clem (talk) 04:43, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

The Original Barnstar I award this Barnstar to ThaddeusB for their great efforts in maintaining deletion quality standards and helping new users. --Hell In A Bucket (talk) 18:43, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

The Cool Barnstar Award I award you this Cool Barnstar. Your continued efforts to keep the encyclopedia growing, in the face of so many who act as if it is complete, is not always an easy task. When editors feel new articles should spring into existance already perfect, in contravention to Wikpedia's knowing that is not expected to be perfect, your efforts let newcomers know that their contributions are welcomed. MichaelQSchmidt (talk) 06:19, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

The Special Barnstar This is being presented in appreciation of the positive contributions that you bring to Wikipedia. Thank you! Pastor Theo (talk) 01:49, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

The Article Rescue Barnstar This barnstar is awarded to administrator ThaddeusB, for his continued service in making Wikipedia more encyclopedic and working to preserve other editors contributions. Thank you. Ikip (talk) 22:30, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

The Article Rescue Barnstar For your excellent prod work. Joe Chill (talk) 18:36, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Bot Builder Award For the impressive coding of The Auto-categorizing Robot, and the time you put into Wikipedia bots, I Kingpin13 (talk), present ThaddeusB with The Bot Builder Award. Keep it up :) - Kingpin13 (talk) 17:06, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

The da Vinci Barnstar For your exemplary work in creating and improving the WebCiteBOT.Blargh29 (talk) 05:20, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

The da Vinci Barnstar What Blargh29 said! --Elvey (talk) 22:12, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Valued Contributor Award You have been identified as a valued contributor and your efforts are appreciated. We are honored to present you with the Valued Contributor Award and we thank you for donating your time, expertise and effort to Wikipedia. Keep up the good work. Thanks. (more details) Welcome back, ThaddeusB. We missed you very dearly. It's true, we missed WebCiteBOT, but we missed you even more. You are a great Admin and have been very helpful to the project. We dearly missed all your contributions and input. Thank you so much for coming back and for all your help. We really value having you here. Thanks. - Hydroxonium (H3O+) 01:05, 23 February 2011 (UTC)