User:The Bipolar Anon-IP Gnome/Mensa

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[edit] My contributions - a tale of research

It all started when I stumbled across Asia Carrera while checking members of Category:Members of Mensa after the 2nd AfD for "List of famous members of Mensa" ... she had a link to a scan of her article from the American Mensa monthly magazine ... I remembered reading that issue, which had about 20 "famous" members, and vaguely remembered her only because she was a noted porn star ... well, that led me on a quest for that issue to add cites for others who already had articles here ... that's when I added

"Famous Mensans" (July 2004). Mensa Bulletin (476): p. 23. American Mensa. 

That reference was enough for me to go online to the Library of Congress and request a copy of the article ... a few days later, I got a phone call from a researcher at the LoC (it's a local call), a fellow Mensan, to let me know that he had found it, and wanted my FAX number to send me a copy! Since I don't have a FAX, he mailed me a xerographic copy, and I updated the citation ...

"They're Accomplished, They're Famous, and They're MENSANS" (July 2004). Mensa Bulletin (476): p. 23. American Mensa. ISSN 0025-9543. 

You see, American Mensa will neither deny nor confirm anyone's membership ... active members may purchase an annual membership directory, but memebers may also request that their names not be included, so it is not a reliable source ... OTOH, a published article featuring notable members is, so I figured I'd take this as an opportunity to reliably add some names to the Category ... among the 20 or so people featured in the article (each with several paragraphs and a photo) I found others who already had Wiki-bios (to name a few):

I actually had a conflict with another editor over the Geena Davis article, which already had a mention of her membership with a reference to her IMDb biography ... long story short, I replaced the IMDb citation with the one from Mensa Bulletin as being more reliable, and they reverted it ... we compromised by having two citations because it was IMDb that made the dubious claim of an actual IQ number ... since there were multiple refs made to the IMDb bio, I turned it into a {{cite web}} as well.

Davis is a member of American Mensa[1] with an IQ of 140[2].

  1. ^ "They're Accomplished, They're Famous, and They're MENSANS" (July 2004). Mensa Bulletin (476): p. 21. American Mensa. ISSN 0025-9543. 
  2. ^ Biography for Geena Davis. IMDb.

Notice how the different Mensa Bulletin citations have different page numbers? It's because once I had the actual article in hand, I could get the correct page where each person was featured, not just the starting page of the article.

The point of this little tale? Simply that those edits were part of a short-term WP:GNOME project to add a single citation to multiple articles ... based on research with the assistance of the Library of Congress ... something that I KNEW, but had to PROVE in a way that anyone could confirm ... this is the WP:V part of WP:RS ... that was the problem with the Carrera article to begin with, that the "citation" was just a JPEG of the article, but not enough information about when or where it was published, so it could have been a PhotoShop creation by the subject herself ... and the IMDb biography is anonymous and unsourced, meaning that it was not really a reliable source, but neither was it original research ... so I fixed it (over the course of a few weeks), and then went on to my next project ... "It's what I do."

I only mention this because another editor has recently accused my of being a disruptor who never makes any helpful contributions ... if I found a page that had three explicit external links to the same article, and I made a {{cite web}} from the URL and created a <ref name=fubar> to replace the multiple links, they said that I was a WP:VANDAL and reverted to their last version.

But since my IP address changes randomly, any User Contributions will only show a few days or weeks of my activity, and it's usually focused on something Entirely Different than it was a month before, or even the week after that snapshot of my edits. So if I appear to be on a vendetta of "drive-by tagging" articles, you're just seeing a temporary, passing obsession on a single topic ... and I'll move on to something else in a few weeks.

Right now, I'm in a Very Strange Place ... I tag an article for dubiuos citations, the author removes the tag, another editor prods it, the prod is removed, a third editor does a WP:CSD, and the author takes it to WP:DRV, where the Speedy is overturned, and it goes to WP:AFD for consensus ... all within 24 hours, and simply because I put a {{Notability}} or {{Unreferenced}} tag on an article where I had just spent an hour trying to track down and clean up a bunch of refs, all to make Worthy Citations out of them, with author names and publication dates.

But some editors feel threatened when a stub article that they have neglected for months since creation is questioned for WP:N because it does not have any WP:RS citations, just External links to websites that turn out to violate WP:COI or WP:NPOV ... or sometimes the entire article turns out to be a WP:COPYVIO from a bio page for them on some other website, and the next thing you know I'm commenting at another DRV because after I put a {{copypaste}} on an article, an administrator replaced it with a {{db-copyvio}}. —72.75.85.159 (talk · contribs) 11:11, 5 January 2007 (UTC)