User:Smjg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stewart Gordon (born 24 September 1979 in Crawley, West Sussex, England) is an amateur computer geek.
In March 2006, Stewart finished his PhD in Mathematical Sciences at Loughborough University. His research involved computer modelling of diffusion in solid materials on the atomic scale.
Stewart's family home is the village of Pease Pottage, near Crawley. However, as of early 2007, he is still in Loughborough most of the time.
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[edit] Wikeeping activities
Stewart also has a few regular tendencies towards maintaining the integrity of Wikipedia's content. These have been known to include:
- Making sure dates appear in all three places where applicable (date of year page, year page, actual article it relates to).
- Reciprocating listings on List of twin towns and sister cities.
- Fixing instances of, in Michael Hardy's words, A dog is a term used to describe an animal that barks instead of A dog is an animal that barks.
- Other tasks as detailed in the following subsections.
[edit] Disambiguation fixing
Stewart normally fixes links to disambiguation pages as and when he stumbles upon them. However, there are times when it isn't clear which path a disambiguation link should really be taking. There are also too many disambiguation links to get them all fixed simply by stumbling.
He has therefore taken a slow but sure approach looking on Disambiguation pages with links from time to time and going through fixing some of the links.
These have included:
- Denomination, clear as of 26 April 2005.
- Cavendish, though unfortunately several link to the noble family name, which has a section on that page rather than a page to itself.
- Hebrew, down to 24 as of 5 July 2005.
All are invited to join in the fun cleaning them up. Possible strategies can include:
- Pick an entry on that list, and go through fixing the disambiguation links. Of course if you choose one with lots on, there's no need to fix them all in one session.
- Look at some of the highest-ranking articles on the list, and fix one or two links into each.
[edit] Fixing linguistic errors
Stewart has, in his time on Wikipedia, noticed numerous mistakes in the English of some pages, from plain typos to people using words they don't know the meaning of. Fellow literate ones around here are encouraged to do the same.
Some common errors that are to some extent searchable:
- comprise - the whole comprises (or consists of, is composed of or is made up of) the parts, not vice versa. Searching for "comprised of" reveals some of these.
- off of - off is a preposition, not one of those words like out.
A possible edit summary to use (especially for what's listed here): correct English ([[User:Smjg#Fixing linguistic errors|you can help!]])
Note that even for instances of the same error, the correction isn't necessarily the same. You should use your judgement to decide what are the best words to use instead.
[edit] Fixing broken phone numbers
Along with the linguistic errors, Stewart also goes round fixing wrongly-formatted UK telephone numbers. Just to name a few of them:
The search results must be examined individually, since they may include false positives, including explicit references to the confusion, phone numbers in other countries and other uses of the same digit sequences.
Possible edit summary: fix [[0207 & 0208|broken]] phone number ([[User:Smjg#Fixing broken phone numbers|you can help!]])
[edit] Linking dates on year pages
The Manual of Style dictates that, in general, links should not be repeated in close proximity within the same article. An exception is dates, which must be linked for users' date format preferences to work. The problem is most noticeable on year pages when somebody has omitted to link a date or when somebody has gone through unlinking them. For example:
- July 27 - Shea Hillenbrand, baseball player
- July 27 - Alex Rodriguez, baseball star
If you can't see what's wrong with this, then here's one that looks right to some people who have preferences different from yours:
- 27 July - Shea Hillenbrand, baseball player
- 27 July - Alex Rodriguez, baseball star
Another style that has sometimes been seen is:
- July 27:
- Shea Hillenbrand, baseball player
- Alex Rodriguez, baseball star
An August 2005 survey has produced a consensus. They shall look like this:
- July 27 - Shea Hillenbrand, baseball player
- July 27 - Alex Rodriguez, baseball star
Possible edit summary: format fix ([[User:Smjg#Linking dates on year pages|you can help!]])
Also, feel free to dot this comment about any year page that you find yourself having to fix: <!-- Please make sure all dates are linked even where repeated. This is required for date format preferences to work correctly. -->
Also, when a range of dates is given for an event:
- Leave both day and month intact at both ends, so that it doesn't appear as a mess to some users.
- There should be no space either side of the hyphen that separates the two ends - only either side of the one that separates the date (range) from the event description. This is for clarity.
