User:CliffC

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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.

My evolving list of interests has come to include South Park, military figures, art and artists (even some not very good ones), avoidable disasters, law, and a few of the more absurd celebrities and political figures of the New York City metropolitan area. When I am 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. While doing so, if I stumble upon some long-overlooked subtle vandalism, I look for others by the same perpetrator.

One 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] Observations and criticisms of Wikipedia, fondly and for what they're worth

List started 29 September 2006

Just about everything in the embarrassingly close-to-the-truth Onion article Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
Several points made in this Wired article describing Wikipedia as "the perfect argument space"
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 articles sit there defaced by graffiti, or just plain wrong, for minutes or hours. Subtle vandalisms such as changes to dates may never be corrected
Volunteers have to catch vandalism both overt and subtle. They police the subjects they care about, and might police 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. Similarly, abuse of the Bush family dogs Barney and Miss Beazley may also go undetected
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?
Articles like Brian Doyle created only 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 keep slipping their POV into totally unrelated articles
Lizzie Borden's "Alleged lesbian affair with actress Nance O'Neil" gets more wiki-ink than the actual murders
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 sneak in a POV change under color of a misleading edit summary
People who never provide edit summaries at all. Prominent among these are the Mafioso wannabes who quietly sneak their own names into the "See also" section of Colombo crime family, and remove any photographic record of disgraziati such as "Sammy The Bull"
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
In Talk:Jill Pike during a debate over the article's proposed deletion, an anonymous user has observed "Where's her picture? Jeez, she's smoking hot! You have articles for navel lint, Pocket Pool, Dirty Sanchez, etc. and you want to delete this one. What a joke!"
Silly shit like this

	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.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

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

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 Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to a photograph of a hairy human asshole

v • d • e

Human anatomical features

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

Sex organs (Penis/Scrotum/Testicle/Clitoris/Vagina/Ovary/Uterus) – Hip – Anus – Buttocks

LIMBS: Arm – Elbow – Forearm – Wrist – Hand – Finger (Thumb/Index/Middle/Ring/Little) – Leg – Lap – Thigh – Knee – Calf – Heel – Ankle – Foot – Toe (Hallux)

SKIN: Hair

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 Barney and Miss Beazley.
It was quite a surprise to learn that the Better Business Bureau was founded by Al Capone.

CAN YOU SPELL HAND JOB???, I SPELL IT C-L-I-F-F-C.

Speaking of vandalism, the above example, which I have left in situ, was contributed by User:24.187.136.22, aka User:24.187.139.186, aka User:67.82.81.102, aka User:Popartpete, an editor with whom I have had past differences about contributions to Haunted Castle at Six Flags Great Adventure, but whose web site was good-naturedly retained in that article's external links section in spite of his personal attacks on my writing skills and manliness. Pete is also the author of Nicholas "Nicky Buck" Piccolo, about which I can offer Pete only one word of editorial advice: paragraphs.