User:A bit iffy

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[edit] About me

I live in Brighton, England. I don't want to say what my name is, how old I am, what I do, where I'm originally from etc. If you're really, really clever, you can work most of this out by looking for patterns in my edits.

[edit] International travels

Spent years:
Months:
Days:
Hours:
To go some day:
Idea and layout half-inched from User:Calton, who filched it from User:Salsb, who stole it from User:Guettarda, who borrowed it from User:Coolcat

[edit] Declarations

(i.e. disclosure)

  • A bit iffy is my second Wikipedia account. I used to use Finbarr Saunders, but came to dislike the name.
  • I'm a white, middle class male in born in the late 1950s.
  • Politically, I'm left wing, generally voting Green.
  • I'm an atheist.

[edit] Interests

Henry Moore sculpture
Henry Moore sculpture

[edit] My approach to Wikipedia

  • Why do I really contribute to Wikipedia? I can't stand seeing defective writing anywhere and I have a (worryingly compulsive) need to fix things. Often, these faults are just minor ones, so I suppose I should class myself as a WikiGnome. I wonder if I'm spending too much time doing this: when I see faulty web page outside Wikipedia I go to the top of the page to try to click on the "edit" link...
  • I suppose I'm a deletionist, but with intermittent doubts. Fancruft just plain irritates me, but as it's almost always about subjects I have no interest in like games and science fiction TV series that I've never heard of, I rarely dare touch them. (Hmmm...having just written that, I wonder if I'm being unfair: do I think "fancruft" = "anything I'm not interested in"?) Anyway, I've deletionist tendencies because I don't like to see the goal of the Wikipedia project undermined by being composed of 95% poorly-written junk which is what will happen if non-notable subjects and excessive detail is allowed to flourish.
  • Wikipedia is just an encyclopaedia - a tool for learning stuff. It's not a religion.

[edit] Things I really hate about Wikipedia

Lítla Dímun, the only uninhabited island of the Faroes
Lítla Dímun, the only uninhabited island of the Faroes
Scène de Juillet 1830 (also: Les Drapeaux) by Léon Cogniet
Scène de Juillet 1830 (also: Les Drapeaux) by Léon Cogniet

.

  • It's slow. I don't know whether the servers are slow, or there aren't enough of them, or there isn't enough bandwidth from WikiMedia's service provider, or the database indexes and/or SQL need attention. This slowness is the one thing that puts me off contributing more. I just want something done about it, and I'd be willing to put my hand in my pocket to help. It's now a lot faster — excellent work, whoever's responsible.
  • Instruction creep. The overly long instruction pages actually put me off from following accepted conventions. It just takes so long sometimes to find out how to do things correctly. Even though you sometimes see references to m:Instruction creep in those pages, they still keep growing. The results are that either (a) I go against the rules, or (b) I just don't bother fixing things that I know are wrong.
  • Vandalism. To be honest, I used to find it fun to hunt for and squash vandalism. It's great that the intelligent design of this project means it's usually as easy to undo vandalism as it is to do it in the first place. (If only physical vandalism in real life were as easy to rectify.) However, vandalism is now really annoying me; it's absurd that a large part of people's editing time is taken up with countering it. As maybe 99% of vandalism is from anonymous IP addresses, I now believe all posting should be from registered users. I think some of the proposals in anonymous users should not be allowed to edit are extreme: such proposals undermine the whole point of the project. Allowing people to remain anonymous behind a nickname is fine - in fact, absolutely necessary as many people may not wish to be publicly identified (I certainly don't). Generally I do like the approach of User:Anastrophe-wikipedia, though I don't see the necessity for even requiring an e-mail address. The basic principles should be:
    • New users must have a relatively pain-free experience—both in signing up, and in making initial postings.
    • A campaign of vandalism must be a painful experience for the vandal.
This user is a member of the
Counter-Vandalism Unit.
  • Edit conflicts. These drive me up the wall as I am a slow thinker and typist. It's so annoying when updating a rapidly-changing page to find my changes didn't go through, and then having to work out what the other person did before I can try again. It's especially annoying when I get an edit conflict with a vandal. However, I do understand there are valid reasons to have some sort of locking mechanism in place, and it looks like Wikipedia have some workarounds: Help:Edit conflict.

[edit] Things about Wikipedia that irritate me

Windbeeches in the Black Forest
Windbeeches in the Black Forest
  • Excessive linking. OK, I do a fair amount myself, but is it really necessary to disrupt the legibility by linking every other word? Links should only be made to things that are directly relevant to the article concerned. Probably there's a policy or guideline somewhere that says this, but I can't be arsed to hunt for it. And what's with this thing about making links of dates? OK, it's reasonable to Wikify a date such as 1 January so that it gets formatted to the user's preferred style, but why does it have to end up as a link? Couldn't some other mechanism be devised? And with years, e.g. 1956, I see very little point in making links of those. I think it's unlikely that users, on reading that someone was born in 1956, would then want to go to the 1956 article.
    • Further to this, I find this morning 15 October 2005 that links are no longer underlined. Did I inadvertently change something in my preferences? Or has someone decided to make the change for all users? Whichever, it's excellent. Things are a whole lot more readable now.
  • Overflowing boxes. If an image is taller than the section it's in, it often flows down to the next section, either obscuring or realigning text. Similar things happen with infoboxes. I've not figured out exactly what's going on, so I'm not sure whether it's a fault of the contributors to the page, or whether there's something more basic wrong with the way Wiki software is rendering Wiki mark-up into HTML.
  • Non-use of edit summaries. Users that don't provide edit summaries are especially irritating when I'm trying to track down who made a particular edit some time ago. And users that don't give a reason in the edit summary are also annoying: it's not enough to say WHAT you've done; you should say WHY you've done it. So saying "Removed link" in an edit summary is little better than saying nothing at all. Far better to say "Removed irrelevant link," and we would all know why you've done it.

[edit] "Concerns indicator": an idea for a new feature

I'm seriously thinking of suggesting this as a new feature, but I'm just noting things down here for now to help me think and build my case. (And if you can help me here, do please chip in!) (NB: I'm still writing this bit.)

  1. How it could work: / Another user says: I have an alternative idea: check this text in edit view
    1. A user sees something wrong about an article, and wants someone else to look at it.
    2. The user clicks the "Indicate concern" button and enters a brief explanation in a pop-up window.
    3. The text of the explanation is then stored on an extra "Concerns" page for the article, or maybe on the talk page (I'm not quite sure which is better).
    4. A thin red line is then displayed alongside the article (or section thereof). It should only be very thin one so that it does not disturb the readibility of the article.
    5. Concerns from all articles would be also automatically listed on a special concerns page.
    6. Another user with more expertise or resources that happens upon the article will notice the thin red line, and hopefully resolve it there and then.
    7. The resolving user would indicate the concern as "resolved" (a checkbox, maybe).
    8. Other users might want to
    9. If there are multiple concerns, there should only be one thin red line for the article or section. More than that would make the page too "busy".
  2. What's it for?
    1. If the user suspects the article is wrong in some way, but is not sure how to verify this, he/she can more effectively alert others by raising it as a concern than by leaving it to vegetate on the talk page. From my own experience, concerns I put on a talk page often just sit there and die.
    2. If user simply doesn't have the time or means to research the suspected error. From my own experience, I've come across cases where something sounds iffy, but I know it would take a lot of time for a non-expert to resolve.
    3. If the user simply can't work out how to fix the problem because he/she finds the instruction creep has made Wikipedia's instructions too onerous to follow. I found this myself when encountering my first "copyvio".
    4. If the user doesn't have the necessary self-confidence or technical skills to fix the problem himself or herself. It is noticeable that PhD students of physics or computing greatly outnumber hairdressers here.
  3. Objections:
    1. The obvious objection to this is that one is supposed to use the talk page. However, I suspect a lot of people don't use the talk page, and so concerns just never get noticed.
    2. Another objection is that the talk page's "Discussion" link is blue if there are items on it. However, all sorts of things can be on the talk page, and there is no clear indication of an outstanding concern.
    3. Maybe there would be technical difficulties. I have no idea.

[edit] About talk pages

Traquair House
Traquair House

Talk pages aren't articles, but are discussions about articles. Hence, in my opinion, they should use tools better suited to dialogues such as the PHP bulletin board software widely used elsewhere on the internet. (I am borrowing this idea from some other Wikipedia user, but I can't remember who it was.) Using the tools intended for articles results in discussions that can be difficult to follow. Also, I have recently seen a case where a talk page had been edited to undermine other contributors' positions.

[edit] Favourite articles

People collecting remains of the West Pier in Brighton soon after it had largely collapsed. I love this picture (by Briantist): it gives a real sense of what it was like on the beach at the time (even though I picked up my souvenir the following morning).
People collecting remains of the West Pier in Brighton soon after it had largely collapsed.
I love this picture (by Briantist): it gives a real sense of what it was like on the beach at the time (even though I picked up my souvenir the following morning).

Not articles that I've contributed to, but ones that I've found that delightful, informative or a surprise in some way.

[edit] Articles I've created

Monastery of St. Nilov c.1910, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
Monastery of St. Nilov c.1910, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

I'm not much of a writer, plus I get bored with things quickly—hence the stubbiness of most!

[edit] To do

Russian peasant women c.1910, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
Russian peasant women c.1910, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

[edit] Ten random articles

Taking my lead from User:Rebecca's The 10 Random Pages Test, I decided to click the Random article link ten times to get ten random articles. I'll keep an eye on them, and try to maintain them. This is intended to be a personal experiment to capture my thought processes during article maintenance.

The articles are Salisbury Cathedral, Mioko Fujiwara, Legend of the Five Rings, Carlstadt Public Schools, Gressenhall, Adam Holloway, Foreign relations of Azerbaijan, Oranienburger Strasse, Mazatec shamans, and Bo Bo's Chicken.

My reactions and progress are in this sub-page.

[edit] Tools

Philippe de Champaigne—Still-Life with a Skull
Philippe de Champaigne—Still-Life with a Skull

[edit] /Sandbox

A sandbox
A sandbox
This user is a member of the League of Copyeditors.

[edit] Licensing etc.

I agree to multi-license all my text contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Image:CC_SomeRightsReserved.png Multi-licensed with any Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License Image:CC_SomeRightsReserved.png
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license draft version 1.0 and version 2.0 and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.
Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation
I grant non-exclusive permission for the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to relicense my text contributions 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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Picture of the day
St. Isaac's Square

A photochrom of St Isaac's Square in St Petersburg, Russia from the 1890s, as seen from the dome of St Isaac's Cathedral towards Marie Palace. Behind the palace, the capital of the Russian Empire is seen all they way to the Trinity Cathedral. The square is dominated by the equestrian Monument to Nicholas I.

Image from: Detroit Publishing Co. (1905 catalogue)
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