User:RadicalBender
My To-Do List
My List of Articles
My Sandbox
My Talk Page
Unit 22, My "Bot"
Wikipedian Since: September 24, 2003
Administrator Since: March 3, 2004
Today is: August 11, 2024
| USen | This user is just your typical dumb, monolingual American. |
| Article Edits |
17,000+ |
| Total Edits1 |
20,500+ |
| Pages Watched |
1,300+ |
USA Israel |
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Personal Site | Personal blog | Work Site
Contact me through my talk page or send an e-mail or Jabber to: My User Name -at- Gmail -dot- com
I do mostly minor edits. I'm also something of an italicizing Nazi. (Remember, kids: television shows, movies, plays, books, album titles (but not songs or bands), video games, newspapers, magazines, ship names (but not prefixes like "USS") are ALL italicized - not underlined or quoted.) Basically, I do this to avoid stress. If you have the bravery, patience, mental fortitude, etc. to deal with controversial articles, more power to you, but that's not me. I'd much rather toil in obscurity than be on the front lines of controversy and burn out.
That said, let's go ahead and get the controversial opinions out of the way:
- Larry Sanger is absolutely right - we MUST stop accomodating and enabling trolls through process. Slash and burn might turn away a few contributors, but none of the ones we should want. ANYTHING is better than CONTINUING to lose some of our best contributors.
WE CANNOT CONTINUE TO OPERATE LIKE THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. - NPOV is a pipe dream. All we're doing is arming trolls.
- The majority of edits on large topics are decreasing the quality of those articles. This is because, for most people, the quality of the article as a whole is taking a back seat to the desire everyone seemingly has to have their imprint on articles. This is turning many articles into long lists of disparate trivia instead of naturally-flowing, high-quality encyclopedia articles. Efforts to stem this and make the encyclopedia more encyclopedic are criticized as counter to the spirit of "openness."
- Barnstars are stupid.
- Vandals should be shot on sight and their heads should be placed on pikes as a warning to others.
- Most tables and infoboxes are created by people who have no business doing so.
- Categories are doing a lousy job of clustering information together. Nesting is either too deep and scatters articles out too far or is too shallow and clumps everything together too closely. Lists work markedly better in most cases. Automation for clustered articles is a good idea, but poorly implemented.
In addition, I'm always working to make the way information on Wikipedia is presented better and more consistently so that more people will look to Wikipedia as a "first source" of information (as opposed to Amazon, IMDb, AMG or even Google). I do a lot of work with usability and information presentation, so this is a natural extension of that.
Block User | Boilerplate request for permission | Image copyright tags | IP Block List | Kana cheat sheet | Logs | List of Wikipedians by number of edits | MoS (biographies) | MoS (Japan-related) | Naming conventions (articles) | New pages | Stub templates | Wikipedia as a press source |
1 This is just the number from Kate's editcount tool. This doesn't include the thousands of edits like page deletions (for speedy deletion or copyvios), VFD/copyvio notifications on pages that are usually deleted and lots of interwiki links (because I don't bother to register at the other Wikipedia languages).