About
I often try to take a wikibreak, but then the next day I look something up on Wikipedia... And notice a typo... And fix it... And then look through the article's history... And find vandalism... And look through that user's contributions... And find more vandalism... And revert it... And leave them a message asking them to stop...
These days I spend most of my time patrolling Special:RecentChanges for vandalism. I also get enjoyment out of doing cleanup of articles, spell-checking, Wikifying, and NPOV-ing articles. I periodically contribute content, but 98% of what I do is keeping Wikipedia shiny.
While I absolutely support the deletion of outright garbage, I err on the side of inclusion in the iffy situations. There's a big gray area between what Wikipedia:Notability expressly permits (as well as what common sense dictates) and what Wikipedia:Notability does not permit. We shouldn't have Wikipedia pages about your dog, but if there's a subject that people might Google to find more about, I think Wikipedia should keep the page.
Thoughts
- I've never understood why editors/admins are so incredibly protective of User:Jimmy Wales. (Yes, I know who he is.) If I were him, I'd rather have my user page vandalized all day long than have people vandalizing actual articles on Wikipedia. This isn't to say I condone vandalizing his page, just that I don't see why people consider vandalizing his page much different from the people who keep vandalizing Orange (fruit) or whatnot. Sometimes a WP:RfA entry will say something like, "I don't support 'only warnings' unless they're doing something egregious like vandalizing Jimmy Wales' page" or something. I don't understand the logic.
- I seem to be in the minority, but I like using spaces in formatting... == Heading == is a lot easier to read than ==Heading==, and * Bullet point is clearer to me than *Bullet point. I don't go around editing these spaces into articles, but if I'm making edits, I do it. To the best of my knowledge, there is no official standard on this.
- I occasionally like to do a search for common misspellings and fix them. Others are welcome to add to the my list, or to search for and correct the misspellings. (An important note: if there's reason to believe that the "misspelling" is just a regional variation, let it be unless you're well-versed in the WP:MOS guidelines on the matter. "Correcting" 'colour' to 'color' is arguing over American v. British English, not fixing a mistake.)
- Wikipedia has lots of 'short names' for policies, like WP:SNOW, WP:VAN, WP:AfD, WP:RfA, WP:NOT, WP:AGF... These are great as internal links, but I think it's important to realize that the only people who will recognize what they mean are people who have already read them. Especially when speaking to someone who has 'violated' one of these policies, don't give them alphabet soup. In cases like this, you're not "saving time" by using acronyms, you're wasting time by writing something that many people won't understand!
Rants
- Vandals: Yes, you really can edit almost any page here. That doesn't mean you should. Come help us, rather than screwing up what thousands of us work so hard on.
- Editors:
- Please use edit summaries!
- Please make sure you're familiar with WP:Notability, especially Wikipedia:Notability (people). I find myself removing entirely non-notable people from "Notable alumni" lists on a daily basis. (Being a senior in your high school is not notable, nor is having a high GPA, nor is being on the football team and the chess team.)
- RC Patrollers: Please, please, please:
- Especially in cases of obvious malicious intent (versus what look like well-intentioned, but misguided edits), please take a minute to look through the user's contributions. Oftentimes, they'll vandalize multiple articles before someone reverts one of them.
- When you revert a change identified as vandalism, leave a note on the user's talk page. This is very important when it comes to trying to get persistent vandals banned on WP:AIV.
- When someone else reverts a vandal's edit, don't immediately go leave a note on the vandal's talk page. You can wait a few minutes and see if they do, but it's really confusing (and frankly, annoying) to have someone beat me to it. I view the steps as connected: whoever reverts the change should leave the note explaining that they just did it.
- Anyone doing cleanup: When you find a block of text that sounds really awkwardly-phrased, as if it weren't written for Wikipedia, take a sentence and Google it. It's easy to spot Wikipedia:Copyright violations this way.
Useful Links
Counter-Vandalism
WP:AIV - Administrator Intervention against Vandalism | RecentChanges | RecentChanges, IPs only | WP:Vandalism
General
Wikipedia Signpost | The Five Pillars of Wikipedia | Manual of Style | Wikipedia:Featured article criteria | Wikipedia:WikiProject_Schools | The Wikimedia Servers
Rules of Thumb
My Subpages
Things To Do List | School Pages I Watch | Underdeveloped Pages | Pages I Started | My Templates | User:Fogster/sandbox
