User:Ikluft/pagebuilding

Page Building

Pages where I've done significant editing

These are the pages where I have my highest numbers of edits per page.

Projects

Sometimes my editing has been along cleaning up and/or building a theme. Here are the highlights, including what led me to pursue them.

Bay Area airports: The idea to help with this came easily because I'm a commercial pilot and single-engine flight instructor. I cleaned up List of airports in the San Francisco Bay Area, created navbox {{Airports in the San Francisco Bay Area}}, created a couple missing articles, and added the navbox to all the articles. (Credit to fellow Bay Area aviation enthusiast Stepheng3 for creating the corresponding category.) This was my first effort in a synergistic trio of list article, category and navbox (see WP:CLN) - it seems to have worked very well. completed: April 2008
Silicon Valley visitor attractions: The idea to help with this was inspired when family and friends have visited the area and I wasn't familiar with our own local attractions here in Silicon Valley. Well, people anywhere often don't know what the local attractions are! ;-) But I started to notice Wikipedia had lots of disconnected articles which answered this question. That resulted in creating Category:Tourist attractions in Silicon Valley (originally "Visitor attractions..." for consistency with existing pages but someone decided that was inconsistent and renamed it), List of attractions in Silicon Valley and {{San Jose and Silicon Valley attractions}}. So now I have an answer for guests about what there is to see in the area. completed: early July 2008
Black Rock Desert: I've maintained a web page with info about the Black Rock Desert since 1999, including important safety stuff. (It was a subpage on my personal web site from 1999-2009, and is now its own web site at http://BlackRockNevada.Info/ .) I saw for years before I became an editor on Wikipedia that it had a then-neglected page about the Black Rock Desert. Besides helping build up the article so that it's a review or two short of becoming a B-class article, I also created the {{Black Rock Desert}} navbox and pages for the federal wilderness areas and mountain ranges in the area. completed: late July 2008
Mountain Ranges of Nevada: The 30 mountain ranges in the Black Rock Desert region were enough tedium that after doing one manually I wrote a Perl script to generate mountain range stub article text directly from USGS GNIS data, does some automated categorization by county, and cites its source! With some small changes, the script could work for anywhere in Nevada. I started adding some more mountain ranges in Nevada based on red links in List of mountain ranges of Nevada. It took months to get the momentum up - but 215 new articles later, there weren't any redlinks left. I also added the mountain range {{geobox}} to the other mountain ranges which didn't already have them, for consistent presentation. completed: early December 2008
Mountain Ranges of California: By the time I had finished 215 new articles for Nevada, I had tweaked the script so it could handle California. The routine and the automation helped this go much more quickly. Another 216 new articles and List of mountain ranges of California also had no redlinks. (It's a coincidence that there were nearly equal numbers of new articles. California had more existing articles before this started - that's just how many articles there were to create, not the number of mountain ranges in each.) I got my first barnstar for that. The script can continue to be used for other states in the future. completed: late December 2008 (I got a barnstar for this)
Impact craters on Earth: This has become an interest since early 2007 when I began leading a group researching a suspected impact crater site at the Black Rock Desert. (See the project's web page.) For years on camping trips I had puzzled over the look of the rocks as "the strangest volcano I've ever seen" - nothing made sense. After climbing the steep learning curve for the science of recognizing impact craters, the scenery at Black Rock has made much more sense. We're still working on that research. But that same learning curve led me to notice Wikipedia has articles for most of the world's confirmed craters, either split among inconsistent sets of categories or just uncategorized. I found the articles for all 176 confirmed impact sites (and created 3 to complete the set). I categorized them all in categories I created: Category:Earth Impact Database and citation template {{Cite Earth Impact DB}} for confirmed craters listed in EID, or Category:Possible impact craters on Earth for suspected/unproven craters or confirmed craters awaiting EID listing. I created the navbox {{Impact cratering on Earth}} to cover the past, present and notable plans for the future of the subject, which spans from geology to astronomy. I think Eugene Shoemaker would have liked this. completed: August 2009
Mountain Ranges of Oregon: A small set compared to California and Nevada, it only took 30 new articles to fill out the list for Oregon. completed August 2009 (I got a barnstar for this)
Method for consensus building: I posted Wikipedia:Method for consensus building and 30 related templates in March 2010 as a proposal for updating the consensus building discussion procedure on Wikipedia. There's a serious premise behind it - Wikipedia is losing volunteers in droves over dissatisfaction from incivility in discussions. I think we can hold on to hope that most of these people want to be civil, and can benefit from some direction in how to reach a consensus with people they start out disagreeing with. This has just begun and will probably be a long effort. (I got a barnstar for this) ... but others brutally deleting this effort to help develop methods for conflict resolution led to the end of my active participation in Wikipedia. If they're going to destroy that, then what's the point?

Along the way, some admin gave me WP:Autoreviewer privileges. Thank you, whoever you are...