User:CliffC
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About me: compulsive proofreader and typo fixer. Here to feed those compulsions, share what I know or can find out about my favorite subjects, learn about new ones, and have some fun. Made my first edit on 11 September 2006.
My evolving list of interests has come to include South Park, famous military figures, art and artists (even some not very good ones), avoidable disasters, and a few of the more absurd celebrities and political figures of the New York City metropolitan area.
I am pleased when I stumble upon a long-standing commercial link, aka spam; more so than by spotting some subtle vandalism. I find I spend a lot of time cleaning these up and tracking down other spammings by the same perpetrator. When I'm bored I click on Random Article, and if what comes up looks weird, wrong or incomplete I may spend a few minutes or hours to clean it up or improve it.
Oh yeah, one other thing that bugs me, linking common English words. I don't make a career of it, but I do fix these, and will continue to do so in 2007 whenever I happen to edit a paragraph where they live.
By nature I am an observant and critical person, so below are my unsolicited observations and criticisms of Wikipedia, not to say that many of them will ever be fixed, or even can be fixed. But I intend to stick around anyway.
[edit] My observations and criticisms of Wikipedia, fondly and for what they're worth
Started 29 September 2006
- M. Swist's clever NYT paraphrase of Groucho Marx "I would not want to rely on an encyclopedia that would accept me as a contributor"
- Just about everything in the embarrassingly close-to-the-truth Onion article Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
- Several points made in this sarcastic Wired article
- Sorry, but the notion of allowing anonymous users to change the encyclopedia is insane. A halo of anonymous flies buzzes constantly around the most popular articles, depositing their tiny specks of ignorance. See Pablo Picasso or Andy Warhol for some examples. As a consequence the articles sit there vandalized – or worse, just plain wrong – for minutes or hours
- Volunteers have to catch vandalism both overt and subtle. They police the subjects they care about and might police some others on a casual basis, but the sheer number and persistence of vandals make it impossible to find and fix it all
- Vandalism to articles about unpopular subjects such as George Bush seems to escape detection for hours or days. A paragraph charging that young George had "knocked up" a girl named Rayette and arranged for her abortion sat unnoticed for six weeks
- The Bush family dogs Barney and Miss Beazley are also occasional subjects of undetected vandalism
- Volunteers with a passion for a subject write great articles, other articles are weak or incomplete; there is a huge backlog of articles where "improvement is requested"
- Articles touching on law [and some other subjects] are written to fit both the US and UK; consequently they are either dumbed down to generalizations or are difficult to follow whenever "the UK this but the US that" comes up
- Total lovefest articles like Jones Soda, whose Talk page shows that all us cool people are totally down with Jones Soda, so what's the problem?
- Lame articles written only to serve as hosts for commercial links to be added later
- Articles like Brian Doyle whose only reason for existence is to embarrass the current administration
- Why write or contribute to a great article if some jerk can just undo your work?
- Time spent doing forensic work to prove that the obvious spammer you pointed a finger at was exactly that, a spammer
- Political partisans and those with some cultural axe to grind slipping their POV into totally unrelated articles
- Deliberately obtuse people who "don't understand what the problem is"
- Lewd boys like 83.219.203.21 who link the word dick to the 'penis' article so we can all see a photo of what they crave
- People who revert without explanation
- People who revert without explanation and flag the change "minor"
- People who sneak in a change under color of a misleading edit summary
- Pimps like 68.184.116.173 who act as PR agents/spammers for a product (Absolut vodka, in his case), dropping the product name like a golden turd into as many articles as they can
- Editors like Xyzzyplugh, who seems to take his joy from "removing totally uninteresting trivia" from articles far and wide, and finding articles to propose for deletion. Quoting one visitor to his user page, "You are a very smug and arrogant person and are getting on my nerves."
- Silly shit like this
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This article is part of WikiProject Hip hop, an ongoing effort to improve articles related to hip hop culture and hip hop music. The goal of the project is to bring this article, along with all others to featured status. If you have any questions, concerns or wish to participate you can visit the main project page here. |
and the hosting of ongoing debates on who's the best rapper in such venues as Talk:Big Pun, where Pun's weight and date of birth are argued, but the section on rivalries has been removed
- Hitler haters
- Hitler lovers
- Such teenagery as the inclusion of the following {{human anatomical features}} template in the genuinely interesting Face article, so we can navigate in one click from the face of the Mona Lisa to a photograph of a hairy human asshole
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HEAD: Skull - Forehead – Eye – Ear – Nose – Mouth – Tongue – Teeth – Jaw – Face – Cheek – Chin NECK: Throat – Adam's apple - Larynx TORSO: Shoulders – Spine – Chest – Breast – Ribcage – Abdomen – Belly button LIMBS: Arm – Elbow – Forearm – Wrist – Hand – Finger (Thumb/Index/Middle/Ring/Little) – Leg – Lap – Thigh – Knee – Calf – Heel – Ankle – Foot – Toe (Hallux) |
But there's hope: The Wikipedia:Profanity guideline: "Words and images that might be considered offensive, profane, or obscene by other Wikipedia readers should be used if and only if their omission would cause the article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate, and no equally suitable alternatives are available."
- Indeed, "hell is other people"
-- to be continued
For review: Why Wikipedia is not so great & the many articles that link to it.
[edit] Other thoughts
- It's amusing to watch the town humorists have their quiet way with the Mannings Heath article.
- Young Wikipedians are really scared of the culture-baiting Jack Thompson (attorney).
- Jimmy Breslin has written that the most demeaning act a human being can perform is walking behind a dog and picking up its droppings. This has crossed my mind when cleaning up vandalisms to Barney and Miss Beazley.
