User:Stevietheman

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Get Firefox!Don't feed Microsoft!
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Get Firefox!
Don't feed Microsoft!
Steve Magruder is a dork-savant, good-natured subversive, hacktivist and obsessed follower of the splendiferous power couple Filliam H. Muffman seeking to reformat American culture to bow to the needs of the commons and an open, smart society.

Stevietheman is Steve Magruder from Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Stevie is a freelance web programmer specializing in PHP and MySQL.

[edit] Philosophy of participation

Dedicating one's time to the development of anything positively useful by humankind is the highest moral act, especially because these kind of contributions tend to keep on giving past one's existence.

Stevie participates in the Wikipedia to:

  • Ensure that people understand what they need to know about subjects he cares deeply about. This especially applies to Louisville-related things.
  • Give the people of the world the power to control all knowledge and keep it out of the hands of the elite, greedy and power-hungry.
  • Enrich the commons and bolster openness and the public domain.
  • Give something back in appreciation to all those who have taught Stevie something in this thing called life. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
  • Show everyone he's a smart dude.  :)
  • Put Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopædia Britannica out of business. Who needs 'em?

[edit] Authorship

Stevie made his first contribution to the Wikipedia on March 20, 2004, adding a self-promotional link to direct democracy (note: he realized not much later that this wasn't appropriate). Ultimately, though, he actually added worthwhile content to this and many other articles related to the subject of democracy.

Stevie contributes to many articles and discussions, especially related to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, as well as politics and computer science. Stevie has to date completed more than 19,000 edits, over 12,000 of which are directly to articles! See his full list of contributions.

[edit] Approach to editing

Stevie believes in making positive changes to articles in a very bold manner, but whenever a change dramatically alters the content of a well-established article, he tries to seek consensus first from other contributors to the article.

When it comes to editing articles, Stevie addresses obvious spelling, grammar and structural issues. But that's not all. As an editor, Stevie always takes a strong look at:

  • Blatant advertising, esp. of unrelated products/sites, but also of related entities that could eventually get out of hand (e.g., under Internet forum, listing all forums on the web).
  • Non-neutral or imbalanced points of view and subjectivity in general.
  • Lack of encyclopedic relevance — For the subject of an article to have encyclopedic relevance, there must be provable common knowledge and reverence of the article's subject within the subject's expected natural sphere of influence. Further, all references provided for proof should rest outside the direct influence of the subject itself as well as intricately linked parties or organizations. Neither the volume of Google hits nor a subject's ranking in Alexa (if it's a website) provide sufficient evidence for these purposes.
  • Egos of contributors in their promotion of original research and pet ideas that don't belong here.
  • Elitism — Stevie supports a very non-elitist Wikipedia and thus takes a dim view of stuffy, highfalutin wording as well as self-appointed experts who claim dominion over a particular article.
  • Quick radical rewrites — Oftentimes when a long-established article (esp. one related to politics) is virtually redrafted in a short period of time without any discussion beforehand, it is a victim of POV-pushing. As a rule, Stevie reverts these radical rewrites and asks the author of those rewrites to explain their changes and get consensus approval before making them.
  • Whitewashing — Sometimes a contributor loyal to the subject of an article or a discussion within an article will remove inconvenient facts that they believe make their subject look bad.
  • Lack of edit summary — When content is changed significantly and especially if content is removed, the edit needs to have a summary. If it doesn't, I will normally revert.
  • Unwikified unfactored text dumps — On occasion contributors take free content from other sources and dump it into existing articles without wikifying it or factoring it into the article so that the article flows as well as it did before. These contributors seemingly expect others to clean up their shit. This is unacceptable and I challenge these text dumps.

[edit] Policies and guidelines

Stevie adheres to the idea that policies are law in the Wikipedia and should be strictly followed. However, he believes that guidelines are just that, guidelines, and are not sacrosanct. Guidelines should only be used to guide in one's contributions and to serve as weighted points in the determination of the correctness of content or its structuring. In some cases, strict adherence to guidelines over common sense or usability has been a bad thing for the Wikipedia. Further, while most guidelines are sensible and well-considered, Stevie every now and then comes across a guideline and thinks "Who wrote this shit?".

[edit] Conflict

When it comes to disagreements over the content in articles, Stevie is a strong adherent to seeking honorable compromises that maintain factuality above all else. However, there are times when some other contributors descend into game playing, personal attacks, muddying tangential discussion or repeated circular argumentation rather than faithfully discussing content disputes and answering straight questions (usually, "Do you have evidence or sources for your position?"). These folks are usually dealt with via consensus of the other involved contributors.

[edit] Contributions

Stevie has contributed significant content to the following articles:

[edit] My home area: Louisville and Kentucky

[edit] Politics and political science

[edit] Computer science

[edit] Entertainment

[edit] Sociology

[edit] Wikipedia-centric

* Article, template or project created by Stevie.
† Article or portal created from content to which Stevie had contributed significantly.

[edit] WikiProject membership

Stevie is a member of WikiProject Louisville.

[edit] Biography

Stevie's hometown — Louisville, Kentucky
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Stevie's hometown — Louisville, Kentucky

Stevie was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Stevie attended public school at Auburndale Elementary, Parkland Elementary, Lassiter Middle, Butler High and Fairdale High.

In 1984, he began attending J. B. Speed School of Engineering (formerly Speed Scientific School) at the University of Louisville, majoring in Engineering Math and Computer Science (concentrating in Computer Science), and received his B.S. in Engineering Science in 1989. Subsequently, he has worked alternately as a permanent employee and contractor with various firms and organizations (including two Fortune 500 companies) as a software developer. Since graduating from college, he has lived in Endicott, New York, Atlanta, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina and Fremont, California.

Stevie is now working on freelance web programming projects, while occasionally writing as a hobby.

[edit] Other interests

Adult Swim, American Idol, Astronomy, Board games, Bowling, Caving, Classic rock, Coffee, The Colbert Report, Comedy, Cooking, Cycling, Family Guy, Fitness, Hiking, Movies, Roller coasters, Romance/Sensuality, Scrabble, SimCity, Slashdot, Theatre, Travel, Wine, Writing, Yard sales

[edit] Favorite Wikipedia/Wikimedia shortcuts

Village Pump
Village pump
News (post)
Policy (post)
Technical (post)
Proposals (post)
Assistance (post)
Miscellaneous (post)

[edit] Wikipedia

[edit] MetaWiki

[edit] Wikibooks

[edit] External links

[edit] Stevie's stuff

[edit] Wikipedia-related

[edit] Non-Wikimedia wikis

[edit] How-to's

  • WannaWiki! — "What do you wanna do?"
  • wikiHow — "The How-To Manual That Anyone Can Write or Edit"
  • WikiHowto — "open, free provider of independent solutions, do it yourself guides, tutorials, and know-how on all subjects."

[edit] Law

  • Jurispedia — "The shared law"
  • Wex — "collaboratively built, freely available legal dictionary and encyclopedia"
  • Wiki-Law — "The Legal Resource Anyone Can Edit"
  • WikiLaw — "the free law library that anyone can edit"

[edit] Contact Stevie

Stevie welcomes suggestions, criticisms, etc. on his talk page (unless it's repetitive or insolent). You may also e-mail Stevie.

[edit] Userboxes

This user is from Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Kentucky Derby.
This user is from the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
This user is a member of WikiProject Louisville.
en This user is a native speaker of English.
This user is of Scottish ancestry.
This user identifies as gay.
TCR This user obsesses with the splendiferous power couple Filliam H. Muffman
TCR This user has balls, and isn't afraid to use them.
TCR This user wants you to know that you're on notice.
Firefox This user contributes using Mozilla Firefox.
php-4 This user is an expert PHP programmer.
This user supports equal rights for queer people.
15 000 This user has over 15 000 edits on the English Wikipedia.
sql-4 This user is an expert SQL programmer.
This user has a boyfriend.
The English Wikipedia has 1,529,812 articles and 646,755 files.
xhtml-4 This user is an expert XHTML user.
This user supports gender equality.
This user is opposed to online censorship.
xml This user can write XML.
This user is interested in politics.
This user believes in the separation of church and state.
mysql This user writes programs that access MySQL.
ind This user is politically independent.
ath This user is interested in atheism.
css This user can write Cascading Style Sheets.
This user is a committed advocate of democracy.
This user enjoys rock music.
lib This user is a liberal.
This user enjoys skygazing and astronomy.
X This user is a member of Generation X.
This user is a skeptic.
This user enjoys cooking.
GIMP This user contributes using The GIMP.
This user supports racial equality.
This user enjoys bicycling.
This user contributes using Adobe Photoshop.
This user does not trust electronic voting machines.
This user believes it is every citizen's duty to vote.
S1 This user is a Scrabble player.
This user tries to do the right thing. If they make a mistake, please let him or her know.
This user believes that process is important on Wikipedia and is opposed to its circumvention.
SC4 This user's city is much better than Defacto's.
This user has a zero tolerance policy on vandalism.
This user is bold, but not reckless, in updating pages.
exclu This user is a Wikipedia exclusionist.
This user has a ton of edits.
This user wastes far too much time editing Wikipedia.
This user has a profile on MySpace as stevietheman.
This user has a website, which can be found here.
@ This user can be reached by email at steve@stevemagruder.com.
This user's AOL Instant Messenger screenname is wonkawoobie.
YIM This user's Yahoo! Messenger screename is stevietheman66.


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