User:Cenarium

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cenarium (talk | contribs) at 01:44, 30 September 2021 (update, with note on inactivity). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


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This user has been on Wikipedia for 16 years, 5 months and 18 days.
25,000+This user has made more than 25,000 contributions to Wikipedia.

Hello, I am Cenarium, a user and former administrator from the English Wikipedia. Since 2017, I am no longer active as an editor, due to different interests and priorities in my life. Here, I liked most to participate in policy discussions and proposals, as well as some technical aspects.

Most notably, I pioneered the concept of using the FlaggedRevs extension as a form of conditional page protection similar to semi-protection. Technically, I proposed that edits by all autoconfirmed users, and not only by reviewers as in classic FlaggedRevs, be automatically accepted when the previous revision was already accepted ; while in terms of policy, I proposed that the use be targeted to demonstrably problematic pages as with semi-protection, instead of a large-scale preventive use as in classic FlaggedRevs proposals. This shifted the paradigm and I think was the main reason that the then perennially rejected FlaggedRevs gained acceptance on the English Wikipedia. I first proposed it for a trial (it was then called flagged protection) and after some adventures, it ended up being implemented on a permanent basis, and is now termed pending changes (see background).[1]

The original trial proposal also contained the related patrolled revisions, a passive technical aid for patrolling changes, but it was never implemented, although I worked on a partial implementation of this concept. My main interest at the end of my time here was Wikipedia:Deferred changes, a system by which automated processes like bots and the edit filter can defer for review edits assessed as suspicious, either actively (by delaying their visibility) or passively (by merely adding the page to a queue). I was also interested in change tags, various software changes and other proposals.

I also proposed the BLP editintro which is a policy notification displayed when editing BLPs, helped to draft the policy for the BLP PROD (following this dispute), was among the originators of the idea lab, suggested the creation of specific namespaces for drafts to better regulate them, and worked to improve the categorization and signalization of protected pages. I also originated, with others, the concept of a list of cascade-protected items. In addition, I did a fair amount of anti-vandalism work during my first years on Wikipedia.

I used to also be a mediawiki hacker! I worked mostly on recent changes, change tagging, logging, patrolling and flagged revs. One such contribution was making possible to patrol files. I worked on a project to provide a limited form of RC patrol that would allow to detect and deal with tagged changes much more efficiently than with the current system. I was also planing on integrating this system with FlaggedRevs, in order to implement WP:Deferred changes. I've also added references preview in section previews, and worked on allowing preview of refs defined outside the section being edited. In addition, I made the commit that allowed filtering of logs by type (e.g. page deletion vs revision deletion).

  1. ^ Note that my proposal was wholly unrelated to the "very premature proposal" that Jimbo was "shopping around" after the WMF rejected his call to implement FlaggedRevs, of which we never heard any news. It was also against my will that the original trial wasn't terminated after its agreed upon two month duration. I'm thankful to several users, particularly Beeblebrox, who helped to reach consensus for permanent implementation at a moment where I had no time to do so myself.
Unified login: Cenarium is the unique login of this user for all public Wikimedia projects.