User:Jerzy

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Regruntlement Center
Try to state the cause of your disgruntlement, and watch this space while i think about possible punchlines.
ROTFLAMOJ


(I am likely to miss messages you leave for me on this page, for as long a month or more. Messages belong on User talk:Jerzy, generally at the bottom of the page, and never at the top of the page.)

Contents

[edit] note to Non-Native Speakers of English

I got stuck in my brain, years ago, the idea that there's something wrong about modern English singling out the first-person singular pronoun to be spelled with a capital letter. So i spell it without the capital (except at the beginning of a sentence, or when i'm not the sole author). If you follow my example, native speakers will just figure you're ignorant of the basics, or flagrantly casual.

By the way, your English is just fine. Americans raised speaking English may not realize that, because we almost inevitably figure out that English is understood everywhere in the world, as long as it's SPOKEN LOUDLY ENOUGH. Unfortunately, that makes the really difficult task of speaking another language (at all, let alone well) a hard one to get adequately motivated about, for someone who finds it effortless to speak English. Not to mention its being hard for us to grasp how difficult the task is. Because of those cultural "blinders", we are (surprisingly) not usually as stupid as our treatment of your English might suggest.

And thanks for being so neighborly as to gain whatever facility you have with this brash, typically American, and endlessly frustrating language.

[edit] One of Your Friendly Local Neighborhood Admins

Even if you're fairly new here, you've probably noticed the generous set of powers available to all editors:

  • immediately effective editing,
  • creation of articles,
  • renaming articles (by using the "move" tab at the top of most articles),
  • viewing material deleted from an article, and using it in edits, and
  • probably others i now take so much for granted as not to recall them.

In addition, around 200 (WP grows and grows!) 700 of the editors on Wikipedia also have several other permissions (that at other sites would probably be very closely held). These particular editors are called administrators (formally), admins, or sysops (short for system operators), according to the speaker's taste. (Admins are not called "moderators", IMO because every editor is expected to help provide moderation.)

Without trying to enumerate the details, i'll mention two kinds of problems admins can resolve:

  • In some cases where you can't talk someone out of spoiling a good article (among other requirements, normally one that conforms to our Wikipedia:NPOV policy), an admin can often help.
  • Sometimes the "Move this page" link does not do the job of changing the title on a page. Two important things need to be said about this:
    • If you "fix" the situation by cutting and pasting from one page to another, all you've done is cause damage (loss of editing history) that others will have to undo, before accomplishing in an acceptable way what you were trying to do.
    • When "Move this page" doesn't work, the problem is what is usually described as "trying to move a page to an existing page other than a redirect with no history". I won't say that description is wrong, but it occasionally is frustratingly unhelpful, and you don't need to waste time worrying about the details.

I have a notion (whatever the truth may be) that i've been an annoying burden on admins, before becoming one myself, and in effect begged for "more than my share" of assistance in doing page moves. So i especially welcome opportunities to repay my debt to previous admins by assisting future admins (you) with problem page moves. (And also with other needs.) Please ask.

The most likely times to catch me are from 16:00 (UTC), on a Monday through Thursday, until maybe 06:00 the next day. But you can also try later, earlier, and on weekends without it being completely futile. And of course there are literally hundreds of other admins that you can try.

I also have some thoughts about how to be prepared in advance to find an admin quickly when you need one. Copy this markup of link a link to the next heading on this page onto your own talk page, and occasionally follow the link and cursor back to here to check whether i've put a link here to a discussion of those ideas:

[[User:Jerzy#Settling In|Near where Jerzy's link on finding admins will be]]

[edit] Editing Interests

(I still like it here.)

I started out doing a lot of editing "invited" by the "Random page" tool, and i still value the editing that diffuses out from something regardless of the fact that the post-diffusion subject matter doesn't interest me. (An early and productive instance for me was bypassing the Battery disambiguation page i created, from many out of the many, many articles that used to have that link). I see such edits as a valuable form of cross-fertilization, bringing together more combinations of article and editor, and as a strength of the WP model.

[edit] List of People by Name

I somehow blundered into a project: the very mundane task of cleaning up and enhancing accessibility to this, by which i mean not so much the article, but the list that is implemented as several hundred similarly named pages linked, treewise, by the article. When i started doing more to it than add names,

  • List of people by name: Ha-Hd was a 34kB page embodying an unbroken list of 555 names (which drew my attention),
  • List of people by name: Ma (though i didn't know it yet) was progressing toward its peak at 54 kB with about 870 names, and
  • the tree had
    • the LoPbN page as its root,
    • 26 children at the first level below it (6 of them -- J, O, Q, U, X, and Y -- having no child-pages), and
    • fewer than 300 pages as "grandchildren" of the root, none of them having child pages.

As of 07:49, 16 May 2005 (UTC), there are around 600 pages (not all of them listing any names); not only are there now great-grandchild pages, but 9 among them have child-pages, which are great-great-grandchildren of the root. This subdivision has been directed by crowding in specific parts of the tree, permitting, for instance, the Ma... names (which have since grown by about a quarter) are divided among 17 pages, the longest of which has 13 kB and about 200 names, in turn divided into about 14 sections accessible through the ToC, the longest of them numbering 23 names.

Other than work by bots, i'm pretty sure i've done virtually all of the restructuring at the page level, and more within pages than any one other editor.

I worked out the mechanism for generating the links to other LoPbN pages, that appear at the top of each page (and one of the two styles on the root page), and virtually all, maybe all, of the utilization of it has been my work. It eases effort and avoids clerical omissions that would likely break the within-tree link structure. (Unfortunately, it so far conflicts with the attractive box-oriented layout of the link structure that a colleague worked out and that will hopefully return as the software involved advances.)

And handling these entries leads me constructively astray into a wide variety of bio articles. For me, this is a satisfying gig.


[edit] The Art of the Stub

Many of my colleagues here list, perhaps with pride, articles that they've been prominent in editing. Frankly, i don't have a lot of those.

(Off-hand, Nalgene occurs to me, not so much for what i added as for the fact that i added enough to do a "save" on WP:VfD. A save in that sense may occur when an article appears to be not worth having, and further, to be incapable of being expanded into an article worth having. The save itself is the act of editing the article into something that changes the discussion on VfD from a strong consensus to delete into a decision to keep (hopefully at least a majority in favor of keeping); it either transforms it into a retention-worthy article, or proves that could be done by pointing the way there.)

But it strikes me that it may be at least as much in the spirit of WP to be proud of writing worthwhile stubs. I say that because WP is about collaborative editing, and what is more in the spirit of collaborative editing than to bring forward an idea for an article that elicits edits from a dozen other editors?

Here are a few of my examples:

Freelancer 
no article until 10:11, 23 Feb 2004; 13 real editors (not reverts and not reverted, by different users) through 00:10, 16 May 2005
Sidewinder (snake) 
from dab 08:11, 16 Nov 2003; about 12 editors thru 07:42, 28 May 2005
Identification friend or foe 
no article (unless something got merged in later w/o preserving history, hmmm) until 07:30, 16 Nov 2003; 7 more editors thru 05:35, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Stradivarius 
converted 11-month old redir to stub 23:32, 31 Oct 2003; about a dozen other registered editors thru 05:35, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
15 minutes of fame 
created as stub 04:35, 23 January 2005; 5 other reg'd ed'rs & 3 different IPs thru 18:06, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
Per Brinch Hansen 
created as stub 19:25, 28 July 2004 (including a false assertion based on my confusing him with Dijkstra, the true author of "The THE Operating System"; my thanks to many eyeballs); 13 other registered editors & 2 different IPs thru 16:14, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
Table 
Initially another (far senior and now still active) editor's Rdr to furniture; i made it a stumbling Dab 10:39, 8 October 2003, and as of 19:03, 19 October 2006 (UTC) it's seen a little over a hundred edits (that leave it still a Dab). It's used in an example (amusingly, as i think its content was irrelevant to its being chosen), at Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Generic topic.
Yuppie food stamps 
doesn't seem to rate a real article yet, but what would happen if i made it a Dab lk'g to credit card and automated teller machine?
Eric O'Neill 
created as stub 23:14, 31 January 2007; 2nd editor tripled the ext lks in under 2 hours, and 3rd enormously improved on my stub tag in under 4 (besides introducing me to the {{DEFAULTSORT}} tag). I'm hoping these quick improvements on features that aid future editors herald faster-than-usual initial progress on the prose.

[edit] Settling In

[The rest of this section was begun
17:01, 25 Oct 2003 and modified through
02:31, 28 May 2004.
I now consider it obsolete, except for the parts that have been copied above. In particular, i eventually noticed that the List of people known as war heroes, which survived one AfD, and whose relationship to people gaining political power by being perceived as war heroes interested me for a while, was later deleted.]

Yes, i like it here. I'm doing a lot of random editing, and editing that diffuses out from something regardless of the fact that the post-diffusion subject matter doesn't interest me.

I may make a project out of the Interstate Highway System, especially if I-91 starts to feel like it's becoming useful as a result of finding a fruitful format. Or not.

I'm almost done Someone with a bot finished cleaning up the links that need attention due to my disambiguation of Battery; maybe i should learn how to do "robot-assisted disambiguation" -- though i suspect it is not the mechanics but the random substantive editing of those articles that is taking me the time it has.

It looks like i'm making a project out of the very mundane task of cleaning up and enhancing accessibility to List of people by name (the list, not so much the article: the list consists of several hundred similarly named pages linked, treewise, by the article. And who knows what will come of List of people known as war heroes; it looks as if i may be burned at the stake for starting it [smile]. See Talk:List of people known as war heroes.

[edit] My Most Satisfying Edit Ever??

re The Horn of Africa and the Black Rhino

[edit] Some Comments on Myself

I haven't felt much need to talk about myself on WP, but occasion arose 2004 May 20 when Jiang was kind enough to nominate me for adminship. The following has, fairly, been described as a (nomination) "acceptance speech". It is probably more than you want to know about me, but that subject is not likely to be important enough here to justify creating a more efficient account. On the other hand, i've dressed up the links, mostly for their instructional value to newcomers to WP.

(I got there about 15 hours after the nomination, and found a dozen votes already cast.)

[edit] Re Adminship Nomination

Awaiting acceptance from Jerzy of nomination.
My goodness.
  • In favor, i will point out that it would save effort by the ever-generous Angela, since i could do my own deletes when they are required for moves.
  • Potentially on the negative side:
    • I've got a fairly odd brain, perhaps most relevantly when it comes to making subjective judgements; some might want to think hard enough about this proposal as to consider how well i understand and compensate for those oddities.
    • I am a confirmedly pseudonymous user, and some may decide that makes me in some senses less accountable than typical hard-core editors who, if i perceive correctly, are almost always more fully public.
    • I have a few internally imbedded insects, and i might nag the community about them, a little more often as an admin than i presently do (and if i do, then you were warned [smile]). Two policies come to mind in this regard; altho i think they need to be complied with (and altho i correct others' deviations from them), i consider them both bone-headed and look forward to the time when others agree with me:
    • I do not consistently monitor WP:VP, WP:CU, or WP:VfD, tho i regard doing so a "civic responsibility". I'd like to do a lot better at that, but hope only to do a little better, and may do no better.
    • My understanding of an admin's mandatory responsibilities is "do no harm, or back off when you realize you did". I consider that a shockingly low standard, but that's the extent of the commitment i'd see myself as taking on.
    • I'm the sort of person who would get this far, without having hired a campaign manager. Hey, there's no WP:Campaign manager page; where do i recruit one?
    • My sense of humor is nowhere near as clever as i usually imagine it is.
That's what i've got; i accept the nomination; you decide.

[edit] Outcome

(It didn't work [wink]: they voted for me anyway.)


I am likely to miss messages you leave for me on this page, for as long a month or more. Messages belong on User talk:Jerzy, generally at the bottom of the page.