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User:Splash

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My doppelganger — beware!

Me

I'm a PhD student at the University of Bristol. I mainly edit Wikipedia in the afternoons, evenings, nights and early mornings. Definitely not in that period of the day more conventionally considered the morning. I'm a student, after all. They'd fail me if they thought I did mornings.

My main interests on Wikipedia are in the technical articles, mainly those related to electrical engineering and especially telecommunications. Things like the articles on MIMO and fading catch my attention for their clear need for proper expansion. {{sofixit}}. I also look around the Higher Education articles (the British ones, anyway) to see if there are POV things inserted, and to make sure the pages dealing with things like top-up fees don't get confused.

I also spend a fair amount of time in AfD, CfD and TfD and I do RC-patrol when my so-called broadband connection is up to the job (and NP patrol when it's not). I read policy discussions quite a bit, and participate where I can. I even make proposals occasionally. I went through a phase of doing work on WP:WS but, like all the most important tasks, that's boring. Paradoxically, I seem to enjoy doing clean-up on the various deletion process — there's plenty to do!

For interwiki purposes, I am also meta:User:Splash, commons:User:Splash, wikibooks:User:Splash, wikiquote:User:Splash, wikisource:User:Splash, wiktionary:User:Splash, wikitravel:User:Splash (not a Wikimedia or a GFDL project), Openfacts:User:Splash and IRC user splash_wp. The Wikimedia projects apart from Meta and Commons are principally for transwiki purposes.

Cogito ergo sum

I think I am an immediato-eventualist. This makes me a slightly deletionist soul who is nevertheless prepared to keep a weak article that can be demonstrated to be rescuable in either the short or medium term. I think Wikipedia is a bit like walking round the local shops; you only get a new customer if you can convince them quickly.

Splash, splish or splosh? (Probably a splish.)

You look in a shop window and you see something you like — "that's great, I'll go in that shop" — so in you go and around you look and money you spend. You walk on and look in another shop window that's full of deeply unimpressive things — like silly low prices or claims that they are the most famous thing since sliced bread (even though you know they opened up last week). You walk on by, and tell your friends not to go there. You walk on, and look in the window of the 'budget' store. It's a bit cheap-and-cheerful, but you can see that it's got what you want. You go in, you look around, you probably buy something.

And then, if it's a wikishop, you stay around and improve it.

All the dross that floods into Wikipedia (the vanity, the nonsense, the teenage bands, the ego-boosting forum ads and the last-night's sociology essays) does it damage. It destroys its credibility in the eye of the beholder. You come here looking for an authoritative source, and the second page you look at (because you liked the first) says "Danny kicks ass". Or it claims that so-and-so is doing such-and-such and that's bad. All of a sudden, you can't rely on the authority of the first article; its content is worthless if you can't be sure you can believe it. So you just go pick up Britannica instead, because you know that its pages are near-Gospel, even if it's missing a few interesting things at the moment.

I wouldn't want this place to be as staid and coffee-table like as Britannica, though. We can move at the speed of fingertips and nobody anywhere can match us. The great stuff that floods into Wikpedia (the keeping it up-to-the-minute, the human way the articles are written, the wikilinks, the extraordinary depth and breadth and the fact that you can edit it) make it like no other reference source on Earth. Britannica could never hope to survive if it were possible to replicate in print what we do here online. Maybe we will be able to when humans are cyborgs. We'd better make sure we've got VfD under control by then!

In short then, I'm not afraid of a little deletion, and I argue to delete more than I argue to keep. If we remove an article, perhaps even speedily (but within process), that, later research shows, ought to have stayed or that had another possible use, someone will recreate it. And soon. Wikipedia is one of the most popular Internet sites in existence and there are many people out there who know many things and want to tell others. They'll remake the article you wish was kept if you give them some time — maybe they'll even be enticed to make their first edit because of its absence. I'm not advocating extreme deletionism — see the walk into the 'budget' shop above — I think that the ability to have stubs of emergent concepts is a powerful feature. But having stubs about every high-school drum-kit and guitar is taking it too far: those (sensible) newbies are expecting to find an encyclopedia, not a free-for-all.

Anyway, that kind of diatribe will have set the inclusionists fingers ablaze. Please contain your outrage to my talk page.

What I did

I thought about including diffs here, but I go back and improve things too much for that to be particularly useful. That's what the history's for.

New articles and major rewrites

Significant contributions to...

Made a difference to...

Some of these include the addition of just a paragraph to e.g. a stub.

Along with minor copy-edits, stub-sorts etc. to various things.

Images

I've uploaded a few rather dull, technical images. I release all my own images under the GFDL because the choices of everything else are too bewildering. If you'd like a technical image made, I can probably make it given a little time:

What I want to do

Write these articles properly (in no particular order):

Work out whether frequency spectrum is really talking about the discrete Fourier transform and if some arrangement can be reached between those two and spectral density.

Get involved in some non-technical articles. I think I might be able to do some useful copy-editing of articles related to British politics and political systems.

Awards

Nice things nice people gave to me:

  • Here's a barnstar for constant participation in VfD's (i.e. the Joder dicdef, my idea, ha ha) and in RfA's. You are an outstanding Wikipedian. D. J. Bracey (talk) 07:34, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
    Here's a barnstar for constant participation in VfD's (i.e. the Joder dicdef, my idea, ha ha) and in RfA's. You are an outstanding Wikipedian. D. J. Bracey (talk) 07:34, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
  • I...present you with this Cool as a cucumber award for staying cool in discussion of a recent incident in which you were involved. moink 14:04, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
    I...present you with this Cool as a cucumber award for staying cool in discussion of a recent incident in which you were involved. moink 14:04, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
  • I, Redwolf24, award you this Public Domain astronaut for your work with Copyvios. --Redwolf24 (talk) 05:22, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
    I, Redwolf24, award you this Public Domain astronaut for your work with Copyvios. --Redwolf24 (talk) 05:22, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
  • I tried for quite a while to write a citation that would do you justice. But it was always too long for the page. I award you this simplest of barnstars for the simplest of reasons. You're the best goddamn admin I know. encephalon 23:22, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
    I tried for quite a while to write a citation that would do you justice. But it was always too long for the page. I award you this simplest of barnstars for the simplest of reasons. You're the best goddamn admin I know. encephalon 23:22, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
  • Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? For courageous defence of process against admin abuse (and because a hard-hat might come in useful) I Doc (?) make this award (24/10/05).
    Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? For courageous defence of process against admin abuse (and because a hard-hat might come in useful) I Doc (?) make this award (24/10/05).
  • I, Xoloz, award this Working Man's Barnstar to Splash for his tireless defense of the spirit of consensus in many wiki-forums. Xoloz 11:07, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
    I, Xoloz, award this Working Man's Barnstar to Splash for his tireless defense of the spirit of consensus in many wiki-forums. Xoloz 11:07, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
  • For your actions on behalf of the wiki in the face of advancing Wikistress, a Barnstar of Diligence. -- nae'blis (talk) 21:27, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
    For your actions on behalf of the wiki in the face of advancing Wikistress, a Barnstar of Diligence. -- nae'blis (talk) 21:27, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
  • The Original Barnstar for fixing the utc template thing and speeding up current events in the process. Saved me the job of having to dig into nested template hell. GraemeL (talk) 16:26, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
    The Original Barnstar for fixing the utc template thing and speeding up current events in the process. Saved me the job of having to dig into nested template hell. GraemeL (talk) 16:26, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
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