This is a Wikipediauser page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Redrose64.
Redrose64 is a Wikipedian who has found that whilst there are many excellent articles, there are still some which could do with improvement. Not all are accurate or reliably sourced: this anon gets the idea. Thus, I decided to become an editor. My primary concerns are coverage of the British railway system, and certain records and their labels; hence the userboxes at right.[bad style - changes from third to first person in same paragraph] Every so often something annoys me and I become something of a gnome. My platypoid tendencies occasionally manifest themselves in other ways (abcd).
I am a computer programmer by profession, with diverse interests in many apparently unrelated areas. I've tried to show that by means of userboxes; unfortunately, if formatted as a single column, it turned out to be rather long but was still not exhaustive. Since it got a bit silly, I've shunted most of them into a siding. A few have been retained, placed alongside relevant paragraphs as illustration.
My programming skills are mainly in DataFlex and PFXplus (also known as Powerflex). I also have experience in HTML.
This page might look messy; just as I worked out how HTML is done, I find Wikipedia with its strange ways of doing lists, tables etc. - and I can't always find the template that I like. However, hopefully my contributions are much neater.
You won't find me on TubeFace or SpaceBook; I don't tweet, blog, share files or anything else like that. I know that some people have great fun doing such things, but it's not my bag.
Not so long ago it was state of the art. But no longer. I can't keep on buying new kit just because some silly software salesman in Seattle says that their stuff needs it. So, by doing nothing, I move backwards.
Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.
... they were running hand in hand, and the [Red] Queen went so fast that it was all she [Alice] could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying 'Faster! Faster!' but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had no breath left to say so.
The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything.
... till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a little now.'
Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'
'Of course it is,' said the Queen. ... 'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice found there
The red rose is the badge of the Duchy of Lancaster and my family mostly come from Lancashire. My favourite football team has a red rose in its badge; my favourite cricket county has a red rose on their cap; and (coincidentally) I have friends in the Welsh village of Rhos-goch. Sometimes, it's because of Burns Night.
I was born in 1964, and the number 64 seems to come up in my life more often than the law of averages might suggest. It is also an exact power of 2, and therefore significant to a computer programmer.
Nearest cycle route: National Cycle Route 5, five minutes ride away. Which (if I follow it for 37 miles (60 km)) takes me within one minute's ride of my mother's house.
Earthquakes felt consciously: 1990 Bishop's Castle earthquake, 2 April 1990, felt at a distance of 82.8 miles (133.2 km); also the Warwick Earthquake of 23 September 2000, felt at a distance of 48.35 miles (77.81 km).
Loudest noise heard: Buncefield explosion, 11 December 2005 (the shockwave woke me up, then I heard it) at a distance of 37.38 miles (60.15 km)
I have been to other countries (always as a tourist), see box at top of section. It's chronological, so sorry to Scots everywhere. I have visited every traditional county in England, the last to be crossed off being Sussex in about 1999. However, I've not yet been to some of the new-fangled counties/unitary authorities such as Cleveland.
Well, since most of us edit Wikipedia under pseudonyms, I can't be certain who anybody is, but I'm pretty sure that Mermade worked with me for some 15 years. Hello!
There have been others. Sorry, I can't remember everybody's handles. I may have met Harej (talk·contribs) but can't be sure. I have met some people who have edited under IP addresses - these have been omitted deliberately.
On January 29, 2010, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article James Cudworth (engineer), which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how, quick check ) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.
for your efforts in fixing the soon-to-be serious problem with the templates that I had left unoticed. Where would we be without you? Jaguar (talk) 21:17, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
There are several scattered about this page, partly as illustration of the paragraph alongside, but mainly to brighten the place up a bit. There are well over 100 that I wanted to incorporate, but if formatted as a single column they took up too much space, so most of the rest have been moved to a userboxes sub-page. Some were removed because the Great Renaming Plan of April 2015 turned them into redlinks.
In the UK there are several political parties; I have supported some of them, but not all. In the United States they have two parties, let's hear what one politician from each party has said:
And tonight I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madam Speaker.
Virtually all my edits have been on either English Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. Whether good or (hopefully not) bad, all edits that I have done are recorded as by Redrose64, with the following exceptions:
213.232.79.146 14:59, 21 October 2009 - c:User talk:Redrose64 (diff); I didn't realise that the browser I was using didn't pass on all cookies that it should have
However, no other edits of any page from those IP addresses or accounts were mine. When editing from home, my normal IP address is dynamic, and begins 87; but the other three groups vary on a daily basis.
My alleged misdemeanours, such as they are, are recorded here. Despite these, I seem to have been given some extra rights on 14 June 2010. It's not all been bad.
Most of my editing has been amendments to existing articles. I also fix vandalism as and when I encounter it. However, I do claim to be the creator of:
See here for verification. The list produced by this link shows four pages (LNER electric units, 2 January 2011; Alexandra Park railway station, 12 January 2011; Edmund Ward, 1 August 2011; Mid-Kent Railway, 9 December 2011) in addition to the above. These were created as redirects by me but have been expanded either to full articles (Mid-Kent Railway) or to disambiguation pages (others) by other people.
For some reason, in some edit counters, articles which are purely redirects also count towards the total, so to resolve the discrepancy, I admit to being responsible for setting up over 150 redirects, some of which were as a result of page moves. See here for verification.
I've created several all-capitals shortcots in Project namespace. Here they are: WP:CITEBEGIN (December 2011); WP:CFR/S (May 2016); WP:EDITORIALISING (November 2013); WP:LISTGAP (July 2011); WP:MFDHOW (August 2021); WP:MFDHOWTO (August 2021); WP:MONTAGE (May 2011); WP:NC (UK stations) (November 2013); WP:NOTSALES (October 2013); WP:OPCOORD (February 2011); WP:RFCBEFORE (March 2018); WP:RFCBRIEF (March 2019); WP:RFCNOT (June 2019); and WP:TFM (August 2013). I'm rather surprised at just how many I'd forgotten creating, even though I've used most of them several times recently - I'd assumed that they had been created by others. Of those I do recall creating, it's gratifying to see so many in widespread usage.
Dear readers, feel free to glue any of these into other Wikipedia articles provided that they are relevant; I don't expect to see a picture of Port Meadow Halt in an article on quark–gluon plasma.
Note however that the following, being WP:NONFREE, are excluded from the above
Rewrite UK-relevant portions of Right- and left-hand traffic#Trains to describe gradual change from RHD to LHD, particularly in case of large boiler and left-hand signals. Mention Milton 1955. Mention also that some rlys were RH running, such as M&B. Mention early GWR rule about direction on each line. In Bidirectional traffic#Railways, see what can be done for referencing, particularly UK.
[[File:xxx RJD yyy.jpg|thumb|left|A year [[Railway Clearing House]] Junction Diagram showing (sub-map pos) railways in the vicinity of station (station pos)]]
<br /><small>Line and station closed</small>
<br /><small>Line closed, station open</small>
<br /><small>Line open, station closed</small>
<br /><small>Line and station open</small>
use final name of station per [[Template:Butt-Stations|Butt 1995]] p.xxx and [[WP:NC (UK stations)]]
To find links to a page that don't go through a navbox, use the query linksto:"Foo railway station" insource:/\[\[Foo railway station/ - of course that fails to find those that go through {{stnlnk}} and similar.
Why do these two villages - which have three articles between them - warrant so much less total coverage than neighbouring South Newington? I've nothing against the latter place - I just feel that the Barfords could get a bit more. St. John has more than St. Michael - and it's tiny by comparison.
Idea for that: go to field (the old cricket field) in Barford St. John, stand on N bank of river near the water pipe or the weir, and take photo showing bridge, and if poss, include Woodworm Studios in the shot. Put it on the Barford St. John and St. Michael page. Caption it Bridge over the River Swere connecting Barford St. John to Barford St. Michael. Add comment stating that the bridge is a multiple hazard to motoring; the road narrows at this point, turns through a sharp bend, and the bridge is hump-backed. Both parapets show signs of frequent repair as motorists misjudge the road. In winter, the road often floods across its whole width for some distance either side of the bridge. If poss, also note that the Woodworm Studios is on the left of the picture.
Get something about the river from Peter Sheasby's book. Also on the two churches from that book "Churches of the Banbury Area". Is there something on St. Mary's, Cropredy in that? Is there any "Field Names Survey" stuff left (Bond, J. and others).