This user prefers to use the serial commaonly when its omission can be confusing.
’s
Thi's user know's that not every word that end's with s need's an apostrophe and will remove misused apostrophe's from Wikipedia with extreme prejudice.
This user (hereafter "User"), and all subsidiaries, agents, et al. acting on his/her/their/its behalf, herein manifest possession of, and are henceforth estopped from disclaiming, an advanced knowledge of Legalese, or access to such knowledge as to suffice as a reasonable substitute.
(A comment posted at WP:COUNCIL/P, on a proposal for a "WikiProject Life on Mars"; if you don't get why this is hysterically funny, just move on - it's a SciFi geek thing.)
(Someone upset about grammar flames that were wasting people's time and being a distraction posts a distracting time-waste in the form of a longwinded and meticulously-researched grammar flame about it (plus a second shorter one!), all in support of the grammar flaming of the starter of the grammar flame; in the process, re-opening debate to yet more grammar flaming in the pointless sub-thread being complained about (dormant for over a day), and to which the poster was not even a party to begin with. I couldn't make this stuff up!)
(An edit summary in response to "no, don't delete the barnstars!" panic replies to a TfD on a useless template simply relating to barnstars. I awarded Gracenotes a Barnstar Point for that one.)
(I'm not sure Wikipedia's account-creation CAPTCHA database should include every word... >;-)
Smartest things I've seen lately on Wikipedia
"Anyone who adds material to an article, but cannot be bothered to cite any sources, is being discourteous to the other editors who later have to try to find reliable sources."
"If one grinds an axe long and hard enough, there is no axe any longer, just a useless old stick."
(A pseudo-Taoist response to cranky complaints that relate to incidents so long ago no one should care any more; concise version: "Grind axe too long: no axe.")
Wikiproject Cue sports — for coordinating the creation and maintenance of articles on cue sports, including pool, snooker, carom billiards, and obscure billiards-related games such as bagatelle and bumper pool. The goals of the project are to establish a clean organization of all relevant articles, foster article improvement, promote standardized terminology (within articles), and expand the number of articles available, to cover presently under-represented topics (organizations, tournaments, professional player biographies, history of the sports, etc.)
Wikipedia:Notability — I've been deeply involved in the debate over the future and form of this Guideline, especially from Nov. 2006 through Feb. 2007. I'm surprised I didn't get nicknamed "Snapping Turtle" McCandlish over there, but progress was certainly made. Tenacity + compromise pay off.
Three-ball — article about the poorly-documented modern pocket billiards folk game, about 95% my material. I've sourced it as best as it can be sourced with the materials discoverable so far; seeking assistance!
Five-pins — article about the carom billiards game popular in Italy and parts of South America. Seeking assistance! Almost all material about this game is in Italian, and I am not fluent in Italian, so some game details remain hazy. Someone posted a non-article that was a gibberish machine translation of W:It:Italiana 5 birilli; I redid it from scratch and believe that the en.wikipedia version is now superior to the native Italian one.
Albinism — was already a good-ish article when I got there, but I work on it a lot, especially sourcing the science, and defend it from constant vandalism.
List of redundant expressions — Just what it sounds like. Article existed for a while but was in very bad shape before I cleaned it up; citation efforts for the examples are ongoing, and help is welcome. Update: I have actually abandoned this article, as the WP:NOR requirements have become more stringent over time, and I do not believe this list can survive a concerted "original research" (specifically "novel synthesis") attack in AfD; I don't believe that the material truly is OR, but the policy wording is vague and overbroad enough at this point that prove it isn't is essentially impossible.
Folgerphone — an experimental musical instrument. Created this article. Someone's disputed a major fact, on the Talk page. If anyone knows anything at all about Folgerphones, please help sort it out!
Some of the images I've contributed under GFDL/CC (and sometimes PD) are displayed as thumbnails in my Gallery Page.
What I'm thinking (feedback requested!)
Cue sports spelling conventions — Proposed guideline on standarized terminology for referring to cue sports (billiards, pool, snooker) games, and their balls and stats. The present lack of standards is resulting in very confusing articles.
Cue sports notability — Proposed guideline on notability with regard to cue sports (billiards, pool, snooker) games, including bios, games, companies, etc. These notability criteria are based on WP:DEL#Problem articles where deletion may be needed, which is Policy, instead of WP:N which remains problematic.
Making substantial contributions to existing articles (and sometimes creating new ones) on topics I know a lot about
Shepherding the growth and health of some particular articles that need it (and, in some but not all cases, about which I care a lot)
Correcting typos, grammar errors and readability problems
Weeding out unverifiable, or incredible and unsourced, claims
Adding missing salient information
Moving articles that violate the WP article naming conventions
Correcting outright factual errors
Improving cross-references, categorization, etc.
Improving consistency of formatting
Removing redundant wikilinks
Removing pointless (Wikipedia is not a dictionary!) wikilinks — everyone already knows what "eye" and "the sun" mean, in most contexts in which they appear
Removing minor, childish quasi-vandalism (smart-aleck remarks in articles, etc.) — I like to document these in the Talk pages, since they often are actually funny
Reverting and repairing intentionally destructive vandalism, especially that by religious or other zealots, slanderers, the foul-mouthed, and the discriminatory
Tagging outright vandals' talk pages with countdown-to-blocking warnings
Repairing semi-vandalism edits in the form of deletions of long-standing passages without explanation, or the inexplicable addition of large chunks of questionably relevant or unsourced alleged facts, especially attacks against living article subjects, fanwanking and crackpotism.
Copyediting Encylopedize and formalize juvenile, colloquial, non-neutral or poorly thought out language in articles
Fixing miscellaneous "bad stuff" - vanity/marketing language, crystalballing, etc.
Proposing (and sometimes performing) merges of redundant articles
Adding obvious missing redirects and making sure they go to useful places
Educating misinformed arguments (per logic or Wikipedia policy) on Talk pages
Trying to resolve circular disputes on Talk pages
Defending articles from AfD when the reasoning for the deletion is specious, expecially "NN per nom" me-tooism.
Nominating truly atrocious crap for AfD (or for SD, or just prod'ing them)
Learning a lot concerning things I didn't know about, on all sorts of topics!
On the non-"political" side, I am largely an exopedianist with little interest in the socializing aspects - I get that from other aspects of my life. I'm largely a [[W::WP:GNOME|WikiGnome]], though I have taken part in some fairly extensive policy debates.
Editing
When editing, I virtually always try to improve existing material rather than remove it - with regard to paragraphs, subsections, etc.; but when it comes to redundant wording, I'm pretty merciless.
If you really want to know my WikiPolitics: I'm in the inclusionist (to an extent) andimmediatist camps, which I guess isn't a very common combination. But I also recognize the validity of the eventualist strategy (though it is rapidly becoming moot), even if I prefer to get there via immediatist tactics. Worse yet for pigeonholers, I'm also a mergistand a structurist to a strong degree. If all that sounds contradictory, you're just picking the wrong aspects; I have no trouble syncretizing all these concepts into what for me is a consistent and intuitive approach to the issue. At any rate, I'm generally not a deletionist or exclusionist except when it comes to gibberish, spam, vandalism, falsification, copyright violation, non-neutral glurging or flaming, and egregious violations of WP:NFT, WP:NOT and WP:COI.
When it comes to facts in articles, I generally err on the side of leaving them in (provided they actually do pertain to the topic of the article and are not a rambling aside) but tagged with {{Fact}} or a related inline template). I'm a rambler and aside-maker myself on Talk pages and such, but I typically have a much more focused view of what form an article should take and what direction it should go in; my Talk verbosity will not at all be found in my article prose; they are different worlds in my realitytunnel. I think articles should be genuinely educational, not just vaguely curiosity-satisfying. That said, I am in wholehearted support of the idea that large, complex articles should be shortened by splitting the article up into smaller ones and using {{Main}} to cross-reference them under now-summarized subsections. But I also feel that super-short wannabe articles ought to be folded into their overarching topics a level higher.
Notability and deletion (2.0) — A WP:ESSAY of sorts
Note: My views on this topic have changed radically in the last 6 months. This version is a substantial overhaul of the 2006 edition.
Wikipedia's capacity to catalogue everything we collectively know is effectively unlimited, so the more extreme "exclusivist"/"exclusionist" and "deletionist" views don't make much sense to me. I can't even guess how many times I've see some person or place or thing or concept mentioned in an article, wanted to know more on that topic, and found that not only was there no wikilink on the term, there wasn't any article to point one at, and then later found out that there had been one, but that it got AfD'd on highly suspect "non-notable" grounds, often with so-called consensus of 2-5 editors. The situation is improving a little, but AfD has basically turned into an obsessive bloodsport for many (try this: observe the 10 or so most-active AfD participants over some significant span of time, such as a week. Next check this list of editors' edit contributions.)
Cleaning up the mess
I had historically been very skeptical and vocally critical of "notabilty" concepts of various sorts in Wikipedia, period, because of how poorly they were constructed, especially as to their level of personal-preference interpretability. What alarmed me about the NN ("not notable") meme, aside from the fact that it did not actually represent the consensus its proponents claimed until its vast improvements in late 2006 onward, was and to an extent still remains the frequency with which NN is misunderstood and [ab]used, often without any other rationale (and fervently but incorrectly believed to be Wikipedia Policy when it is actually just a guideline and related subject-specific guidelines), in the AfD process of deleting articles.
Wikipedia:Notability (WP:N) was very nearly "owned" when I arrived, had been blatantly editwarred into alleged guideline status, was subject to sudden archiving of still-active dicussions, was dominated by a small handful of boosters of the then-current version of the document language, and was otherwise simply not very reflective of Wikiculture at all.
Through a lot of stress and just dogged insistence, my flagging of WP:N as a {{Disputedpolicy}} and my unwavering arguments with regard to its flaws and problems at that time, in Wikipedia talk:Notability, mostly in November and December 2006, have had a marked impact on improving WP:N. The guideline (no longer disputed that I'm aware of) has come a long way toward being objective, clear and far less prone to subjective abuse. Notably (no pun intended) these improvements did not start happening until the Disputedpolicy tag attracted notice and drew more people into the debate. Suddenly WP:N could not be be micromanaged any longer, ongoing debates could not be swept under the rug, and the document was radically overhauled very quickly. I think a major lesson can be learned from this.
Yet AfD abuse remains
However, despite December 2006 - February 2007 improvements in the guideline's wording, scope, intent and raison d'etre, problems with WP:N's application in AfD remain, largely stemming from the imprecise, subjective and radically changing nature of the "notability" concept in Wikipedia from 2004-2006. The idea veered wildly from "importance" to "fame" to "actionability" (huh?!) and various other concepts before settling down to the more objective criteria we now have (as of early 2007), namely that an article subject needs to be attestable by multiple, independent, reliable sources (the primary notability criterion, or PNC). Meanwhile many Wikipedians had already latched on to one or more of the older, flawed conceptions of notability, and are still using them in AfD as we speak, blissfully unaware that the PNC exists at all, much less that it has replaced the old "famousness", "popularity", and "importance" kinds of notability concepts.
I agree that most (though by no means all) of the articles successfully AfD'd probably did need to be either removed or improved drastically (and I nominate articles for deletion myself, and have lost an article to that process, without putting up a fight about it since the article did in fact have a lot of problems). But it ought to be for valid reasons! There are some useful essays out there about the nature of notability and what not to say in AfD, but they simply don't go far enough.
A proposed solution
I think it is going to take a concerted campaign, perhaps with some inline warning templates for use in response to malformed "NN" "!votes" in AfD, to change this: Tag them with a warning that they will not be counted as anything but neutral comments (however "Strong" or "Speedy" they may be), unless an actionable reason is given. And the initial proponent of the AfD can also proactively warn against misuse of NN, when creating the AfD. Additional templates could also be used to gently correct other abuses; most !voters using "speedy" don't seem to know what it actually means in the Deletion Policy context, and many also make highly PoV "I've never heard of this" arguments and the like, even when not citing WP:N, and yet others demand actions that defy piles of precedent, such as deleting school articles instead of merging them with school district ones. AfD chatter could probably be greatly reduced by use of standardized "broken argument" tags in lieu of re-re-re-explaining the same issues time and again in long-winded "Comment" posts.
AfD has other problems, though
Invalid "me too, but I don't really understand policy at all" !votes are not the only AfD issue. A serious one is admins closing debates as delete when there is a "consensus" of only a tiny handful of editors. I see this all the time, and have successfully returned articles to AfD via the Deletion Review process in a couple of egregious cases. Three !votes after a week that say "Delete", or even "Strong, speedy delete" for that matter (which is silly; if the AfD really belonged in SD an admin would most likley have already moved it there) does not make a consensus on Wikipedia. Grossly insufficient input like that is evidentiary simply of the fact that the article either has no active editors or that they are on wikibreak or something. This doesn't even start to get into a broader issue, that of deleting articles that should instead be fixed (e.g., by the addition of another reference or two to satisfy the PNC; NPOV edits to fix a bias problem, etc.) That's a different discussion for a different time, as is puntive or simply careless deletions (e.g. the (sometimes premature) closing of an AfD as delete immediately after it has been merge-tagged, such that the merge is thwarted, and admin begging or Deletion Review has to be invoked to get at the salvageable content. Admins: Look at articles again before deleting them, please.
Loose ends, and a way out
Another lingering problem is that WP:N is as much a guideline on what makes an article worth keeping as it is a deletion tool, but the subject-specific notability criteria enumerated at WP:DEL (which by their incorporation into WP:DEL actually have the force of Policy, a nasty loophole!) and the larger collection of such guidelines and would-be guidelines that WP:DEL does not mention at all, are almost uniformly both largely exclusionary ("delete-me" guides) and highly subjectively prescriptive as to details, regardless of the PNC. Thus, the topical notability guidelines (many of which greatly predate WP:N) are mostly in direct conflict with WP:N. Wording twiddles have been made to WP:N to try to skirt this problem, but they are really simply hiding the issue rather than solving it (as of February 9, 2007; future edits may be more productive).
I am personally in the process of trying to create a subject-specific notability guideline, WP:CUENOT, for cue sports, that does not have such a conflict. We'll see how that experiment goes. It relies (to the extent that it has been properly constructed so far) entirely on WP:N and long-standing policies/guidelines, and then gives some non-AfD-actionable advice to editors about what sorts of articles are and are not likely to survive AfD on WP:N, WP:V, etc. grounds. I.e., the fact that it says that local tournament players are not likely to be notable cannot be used as an AfD argument in favor of deletion; if editors of the player's article can satisfy WP:N's PNC, then the player is self-evidently notable. An almost silly example, since it is highly unlikely that any local league player could in fact satisfy the PNC, but if it happens then it does in fact happen, and extreme deletionist whining in contravention of WP:N should be ignored with extreme prejudice by AfD-closing admins. I hope that this guideline-to-be can serve as a model for what to do with the rest of the subject-specific notability criteria, when it is better-developed.
There are also other loose ends. For example, there is also a content guideline against use of neologisms, which is a de facto notability guideline of sorts. WP:NOT and WP:NFT are also basically variants of notability guidelines in certain ways, and their interplay needs to be factored in and smoothed out.
"List of ..." articles
On the "lists" controversy - should "List of [x]" articles appear in Wikipedia at all? - I say "yes, for now". I'm the principal maintainer of such a list here, and it has narrowly survived an AfD once already. The opinion on it is very polarized; you either love it and work on it a lot, or hate it and want it to disappear. I've seen similar polarization on other "List" articles. This is leading me to three conclusions:
The lists are genuinely useful, and arguably encyclopedic, or hardly anyone would fight to keep them, and they do fight hard.
There is no consenus in sight on the issue of whether this article type really is "encyclopedic" enough to retain. It's pretty close to a 50/50 split and seems likely to remain that way.
The best solution is probably the creation of a new WikiLists project with its own criteria, guidelines and policies, and the eventual moving of most lists in Wikipedia to WikiLists (the only ones that would remain would be those of cold, hard facts, like monarchs of Britain or dates of US space flights or whatever.)
Usability peeves
My gripes with the software/system/community from a utilitarian & ergonomic perspective:
I really detest the bottom-posting convention on Talk pages. It is a severe usability problem (of "user-hateful" level) and is silly and counter-intuitive. It also conflicts with the instructions at most XfD processes, which usually (but not always - is there no end to the inconsistency?) want new nominations to be top-posted.
I also think Wiki* need easier-to-use documentation. One should not have to search the encyclopedia for something like "Wikipedia:Editing" or manually wade through nested link after nested link in the left menu's "Help" browser. Every page should have a context-sensistive "Help" feature, and there should be a help search function here, that only searches materials categorized as help documents, Wiki*-meta information and the like. I'm not the first to make such an obvservation, of course.
Wikilosophy userboxes
This user thinks that registration should be required to edit articles.
Est omnino difficile iudicare inclusionis meritum cuiusdam rei in encyclopædia cum ratio sciendi quid populi referat incerta sit, sed nihilominus aliquid encyclopædiam dedecet
It is generally difficult to judge the worthiness of a particular topic for inclusion in an encyclopedia considering that there is no certain way to know what interests people, but some topics nevertheless are not fit for an encyclopedia.
This motto reflects the desire of these Wikipedians to be reluctant, but not entirely unwilling, to remove articles from Wikipedia.
Note: SMcCandlish's comments on Wikipedia are a work in progress, subject to the thread-mode disclaimer.
Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation
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