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The dictionary exists to describe the language of people like this user. |
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This user uses either who or whom in the object case. |
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This user prefers to use the serial comma only when its omission can be confusing. |
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Thi's user know's that not every word that end's with s need's an apostrophe and will remove misused apostrophe's from Wikipedia with extreme prejudice. [sic] |
| law-3 |
This user (the "User"), his/her/its heirs, assigns, related companies, agents and managers, has or has previously had an advanced understanding of Legalese, as defined in Schedule A-4 hereto (the "Non-Existent Schedule"). |
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[edit] Personal
I am Stanton McCandlish, a web developer (among other things), and an avid Wikipedian. For more about me, see my Personal subpage.
[edit] Wikitivities
| ESU |
100% for major edits and 99% for minor edits. – Last update: Dec. 9, 2006. |
[edit] Articles/projects I'm largely responsible for or heavily involved in
- Wikiproject Cue sports — for coordinating the creation and maintenance of articles on cue sports, including pool, snooker, carom billiards, and obscure billiards-related games such as bagatelle and bumper pool. The goals of the project are to establish a clean organization of all relevant articles, foster article improvement, promote standardized terminology (within articles), and expand the number of articles available, to cover presently under-represented topics (organizations, tournaments, professional player biographies, history of the sports, etc.)
- Wikipedia:Notability — I'm deeply involved in the debate over the future and form of this (presently disputed, as of Dec. 9, 2006) Guideline. I'm surprised I haven't been nicknamed "Snapping Turtle" McCandlish by now, but progress is actually starting to be made. Tenacity+compromise pay off.
- Three-ball — article about the poorly-documented modern pocket billiards folk game, about 95% my material. I've sourced it as best as it can be sourced with the materials available to me; seeking assistance!
- Albinism — was already a good-ish article when I got there, but I work on it a lot and defend it from constant vandalism.
- Pleonasm — article on redundancy in language. About 70% or so of that text is mine.
- List of redundant expressions — Just what it sounds like. Article existed for a while but was in very bad shape before I cleaned it up; citation efforts for the examples are ongoing, and help is welcome.
- Folgerphone — an experimental musical instrument. Created this article. Someone's disputed a major fact, on the Talk page. If anyone knows anything at all about Folgerphones, please help!
- Sandbox (software development) — a coding safety process. Created this article. I crack up when someone mistakes it for the Wikipedia:Sandbox.
[edit] What I'm thinking (feedback requested!)
- Wikipedia:Notability is messed up; while willing to work on improving it, I remain unconvinced that the Deletion Policy section on notability and the Policy-based consensus process of expanding it aren't adequate without this floundering guideline. I think it can be salvaged, but it's going to take a lot of work on a lot of people's part...
- Cue sports spelling conventions — Proposed guideline on standarized terminology for referring to cue sports (billiards, pool, snooker) games, and their balls and stats. The present lack of standards is resulting in very confusing articles.
- Cue sports notability — Proposed guideline on notability with regard to cue sports (billiards, pool, snooker) games, including bios, games, companies, etc. These notability criteria are based on WP:DEL#Problem articles where deletion may be needed, which is Policy, instead of WP:N which is remains problematic.
[edit] Wikiawards
[edit] What I'm up to in general on Wikipedia
On Wikipedia, I mostly do the following in lieu of large-scale article authorship (though I do have some major ones planned and one under my belt):
- Setting up a WikiProject and making it work
- Making substantial contributions to existing articles (and sometimes creating new ones) on topics I know a lot about
- Shepherding the growth and health of some particular articles that need it (and, in some but not all cases, about which I care a lot)
- Correcting typos, grammar errors and readability problems
- Weeding out unverifiable, or incredible and unsourced, claims
- Adding missing salient information
- Moving articles that violate the WP article naming conventions
- Correcting outright factual errors
- Improving cross-references, categorization, etc.
- Improving consistency of formatting
- Removing redundant wikilinks
- Removing pointless (Wikipedia is not a dictionary!) wikilinks —, everyone already knows what "eye", "England" and "the sun" mean, in most contexts in which they appear
- Removing minor, childish quasi-vandalism (smart-aleck remarks in articles, etc.) — I like to document these in the Talk pages, since they often are actually funny
- Reverting and repairing intentionally destructive vandalism, especially that by religious or other zealots, slanderers, the foul-mouthed, and the discriminatory
- Tagging outright vandals' talk pages with countdown-to-blocking warnings
- Repairing semi-vandalism edits in the form of deletions of long-standing passages without explanation, or the inexplicable addition of large chunks of questionably relevant or unsourced alleged facts, especially fanwanking and crackpotism.
- Encylopedizing and formalizing juvenile, colloquial, non-neutral or poorly thought out language in articles
- Fixing miscellaneous "bad stuff" - vanity/marketing language, crystalballing, etc.
- Proposing (and sometimes performing) merges of redundant articles
- Adding obvious missing redirects and making sure they go to useful places
- Educating misinformed arguments (per logic or Wikipedia policy) on Talk pages
- Trying to resolve circular disputes on Talk pages
- Defending articles from AfD when the reasoning for the deletion is specious, expecially "NN per nom" me-tooism.
- Nominating truly atrocious crap for AfD (or for SD, or just prod'ing them)
- Learning a lot concerning things I didn't know about, on all sorts of topics!
- Having a good time!
[edit] Wikitivities userboxes
linkspam |
This user despises linkspam, and will terminate it on sight, as well as any other spam by the contributor. |
[edit] Topical WikiProjects userboxes
On the non-"political" side, I am largely an exopedianist with little interest in the socializing aspects - I get that from other aspects of my life. I'm largely a WikiGnome, though I have taken part in some fairly extensive policy debates.
[edit] Editing
When editing, I virtually always try to improve existing material rather than remove it - with regard to paragraphs, subsections, etc.; but when it comes to redundant wording, I'm pretty merciless.
If you really want to know my WikiPolitics: I'm in the inclusionist (to an extent) and immediatist camps, which I guess isn't a very common combination. But I also recognize the validity of the eventualist strategy (though it is rapidly becoming moot), even if I prefer to get there via immediatist tactics. Worse yet for pigeonholers, I'm also a mergist and a structurist to a strong degree. If all that sounds contradictory, you're just picking the wrong aspects; I have no trouble syncretizing all these concepts into what for me is a consistent and intuitive approach to the issue. At any rate, I'm generally not a deletionist or exclusionist except when it comes to gibberish, spam, vandalism, falsification, copyright violation, non-neutral glurging or flaming, and egregious violations of WP:NFT and WP:COI.
When it comes to facts in articles, I generally err on the side of leaving them in (provided they actually do pertain to the topic of the article and are not a rambling aside, and tagged with {{citation needed}} as needing citations if they do). I'm a rambler and aside-maker myself on Talk pages and such, but I typically have a much more focused view of what form an article should take and what direction it should go in. I think articles should be genuinely educational, not just vaguely curiosity-satisfying. That said, I am in wholehearted support of the idea that large, complex articles should be shortened by splitting the article up into smaller ones and using "Main article: [[foo]]" links to cross-reference them under now-summarized subsections. But I also feel that super-short wanna-be articles ought to be folded into their overarching topics a level higher.
[edit] Deletion and so-called notability
Wikipedia's capacity to catalogue everything we collectively know is effectively unlimited, so the more extreme "exclusivist"/"deletionist" views don't make much sense to me. I can't tell you how many times I've see some person or place or thing or concept mentioned in an article, wanted to know more on that topic, and found that not only was there no wikilink on the word[s] there wasn't any article to point one at.
I am both very skeptical and increasingly critical of the so-called notability "requirement". What alarms me about the NN ("not notable") meme, aside from the fact that it does not actually represent the consensus its proponents claim, is the frequency with which NN is [ab]used, often without any other rationale, and fervently but incorrectly believed to be Wikipedia Policy, in the AfD process of deleting articles. NN comes from a simple essay that is not an official Wikipedia Policy or Guideline. [Update: It's been promoted to a Guideline, but is hotly disputed as of Nov. 2006] Oops, actually there are two conflicting essays! But wait, there's also a counter-essay to both of them! So, where's the so-called consensus? [Update: I still stand by the question - it is the most contentious Guideline on all of Wikipedia!]
I agree that most of the articles successfully AfD'd probably did need to be either removed or improved drastically (and I nominate articles for deletion myself, and have lost an article to that process, without putting up a fight about it since the article did in fact have a lot of problems). But it ought to be for valid reasons! Notability concerns are emphatically not actionable criteria for article deletion, unless covered by one of the handful of narrow categories that actualy do have official Guidelines for notability in those topics (to date these consist of, and only of, the folowing subjects: biographies, musicians & composers more specifically, fictional characters, companies & corporations, websites and web content, and Numbers; there is also a Content Guideline against use of neologisms, which is a de facto notability guideline of sorts.) A putsch to make "Notability" an official general Policy or Guideline failed. Twice. [Update: I still stand by the contention that WP:NN is not a valid Guideline because it is disputed, ergo NN is not an actionable deletion criterion under Policy.] unless the article falls under the rubric of one of the recognized subject-specific notability criteria enumerated at WP:DEL.
"Votes" to delete that are cast in an AfD that only mention NN, and which are not covered by one of the topics with an official topic-specific NN Guideline, should be tagged with a warning that they will not be counted as neutral unless an actionable reason is given (or the initial proponent of the AfD can simply warn about this when creating the AfD).
[edit] "List of ..." articles
On the "lists" controversy - should "List of [x]" articles appear in Wikipedia at all? - I say "yes, for now". I'm the principal maintainer of such a list here, and it has narrowly survived an AfD once already. The opinion on it is very polarized; you either love it and work on it a lot, or hate it and want it to disappear. I've seen similar polarization on other "List" articles. This is leading me to three conclusions:
- The lists are genuinely useful, or no one would fight to keep them, and they do fight hard.
- There is no consenus in sight on the issue of whether this article type is "encyclopedic" enough to retain. It's pretty close to a 50/50 split and seems likely to remain that way.
- The best solution is probably the creation of a new WikiLists project with its own criteria, guidelines and policies, and the eventual moving of most lists in Wikipedia to WikiLists (the only ones that would remain would be those of cold, hard facts, like monarchs of Britain or dates of US space flights or whatever.)
[edit] Usability peeves
My gripes with the software/system/community from a utilitarian & ergonomic perspective:
I really detest the bottom-posting convention on Talk pages. It is a severe usability problem (of "user-hateful" level) and is silly and counter-intuitive.
I also think Wiki* need easier-to-use documentation. One should not have to search the encyclopedia for something like "Wikipedia:Editing" or manually wade through nested link after nested link in the left menu's "Help" browser. Every page should have a context-sensistive "Help" feature, and there should be a help search function here, that only searches materials categorized as help documents, Wiki*-meta information and the like.
[edit] Wikilosophy userboxes
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This user is not a Wikipedia administrator but would like to be one someday. |
| Flexible |
This user deals with edits, deletion, and creation of pages individually instead of unilaterally and encourages others to do so. |
| admin- |
This user feels that criteria for adminship are generally too low |
| AfD-2 |
I have had 2 pages put up for deletion. Most of the time, they were deleted. |
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This user is bold, but not reckless, in updating pages. |
Note: SMcCandlish's comments on Wikipedia are a work in progress subject to the Thread-mode Disclaimer.
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| Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation |
| I grant non-exclusive permission for the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to relicense my text and media contributions, including any images, audio clips, or video clips, under any copyleft license that it chooses, provided it maintains the free and open spirit of the GFDL. This permission acknowledges that future licensing needs of the Wikimedia projects may need adapting in unforeseen fashions to facilitate other uses, formats, and locations. It is given for as long as this banner remains. |
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[edit] Where I am in Wikispace
[edit] Bonus: nifty Wikipedia tools
Kind of hard to find unless you already know about them:
- — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ
| This is a Wikipedia user page.
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