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User:Loganberry/Olduserpage

< User:Loganberry

NB: This is no longer my current user page; it is archived here simply for the convenience of anyone who wants to read it.

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Watership Down, taken by me in 2004

Introductory waffle edit

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naylte-2 Um ithé lay veth meth Naylte vao-byt.
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Hello there! I'm Loganberry, named after the fruit as a homage to Watership Down. You see, I'm a lapine fur, and in WD most of the male rabbits bear the name of a plant - Hazel, Dandelion and so forth. As to what a fur actually is, I shall be immodest and point you in the direction of the furry lifestyler article, which I had a substantial hand (or should that be paw?) in bringing to its present state. I think that Wikipedia's coverage of the furry fandom as a whole is reasonable, allowing for the frequent vandalism it suffers.

I do a lot of writing about cricket, and am a member of WikiProject Cricket. (New members welcome!) Within this subject, my particular interest is in biographical articles; as I write this (August 2005) there are still a number of very significant cricketers who do not have a word written about them, and I hope that in due course we can at least come up with a reasonable article on anybody who has played Test cricket. I also proposed a new {{cricketbio-stub}} template to assist in such editing, which was created on 16 August 2005.

Thoughts on Wikipedia edit

A somewhat pretentious title, I know, but at least it's clear. I've been here now for a bit over a year (first edit was 1 July 2004), and Kate's Tools tell me (rather terrifyingly) that I've managed to rack up several thousand edits in that time, so I suppose that I should use my nice little space here to do some pontificating.

The most important thing edit

Wikipedia's reliability when it comes to speed is unacceptable; simple as that. If this is ever going to become a real encyclopedia of record, then pages need to start loading within five seconds at least 999 times out of 1000. We are currently nowhere near this, which is not the case with the BBC, Yahoo, Google, or indeed any other major information provider's site. It's bad enough that editors often have to try several times to get an edit through, but readers should be able to come here with the confident expectation that pages will load quickly. At the moment, they're not doing so, and it's going to hurt our reputation if this is not fixed soon. I'd go so far as to say that funds should be diverted to this from elsewhere, since if people can't get at information then Wikipedia is useless anyway.

Notability edit

I think that any time people start to try to define a hard edge of notability, they're asking for trouble. Using cricket as an example: clearly anyone who has played Test or ODI cricket is notable, but what about a player who has appeared once for a minor cricketing nation such as Afghanistan? Someone who has played ten seasons of county cricket should be there, but what about the person who has appeared twice for MCC? A tentative set of personal standards (for cricket) is here.

Vandalism edit

As hinted above, this is a significant problem with some of the furry-related articles. I have sympathy with those who believe that only logged-in users should be able to edit Wikipedia. It's true that making such a change would mean that editing would no longer be open to everyone, but Jimbo Wales himself has endorsed the statement that Wikipedia is not primarily an experiment in Internet democracy. It's a project to write an encyclopedia. That being so, there should be no absolute objection to having some form of registration requirement if vandalism gets too bad, though it should be as simple and easy as possible - allowing freemail accounts is a must, for example. However, for the moment I don't think that stage has been reached and so I don't think we need to stop anonymous editing.

Update: Jimbo's decision to stop anons starting new articles, but still allow them to edit existing ones, is an interesting one and I hope it works well. Early signs seem to be qutie good: WP:AFC could become a very important page.

Microthoughts edit

  • There's nothing wrong with using spaced hyphens - like this - for dashes. So they're not used in print encyclopedias? Neither are redlinks. Language changes over time, and typography does too.
  • I can't see what's so important about having consistency in serial commas. We have a much bigger inconsistency in endorsing the use of both US and British English in the same encyclopedia, after all.
  • After some wavering, I now mark as minor only edits that simply correct grammar, spelling or syntax. Adding a stub notice, or changing an existing one, is not minor. Redirects may or may not be, depending on whether they need an explanation.
  • There are too many lists and categories that serve no real purpose; personally I find the Births/Deaths by year ones to be of very little worth.
  • Articles for Deletion can be a morass: criteria for speedy deletion could do with being expanded.

Articles written or substantially expanded edit

Cricket edit

Biographies: John Ferris
Biographies: Joe Ainley, Michael Ainsworth, Kabir Ali, Tom Armitage, Billy Bates, Ian Bell, Albert Bird, Jack Birkenshaw, Granville Bromley-Martin, Douglas Carr, Rikki Clarke, Dominic Cork, David Denton, Graham Dilley, John Fereday, Christopher Foster, Norman Gifford, William Greenstock, John Harber, Tom Hayward, Patsy Hendren, Graeme Hick, Richard Illingworth, Shaftab Khalid, Devon Malcolm, Nadeem Malik, Matthew Mason, Maneer Mirza, Parvaz Mirza, Albert Moss, Reginald Moss, Alan Mullally, Phil Newport, Eddie Paynter, Andy Pick, James Pipe, Neal Radford, Chris Read, Maurice Read, Dermot Reeve, Steve Rhodes, Mark Robinson, Harry Rogers, Fred Root, Fred Rumsey, Ian Salisbury, Andy Sandham, Chris Schofield, David Shepherd, Sandy Singleton, Ben Smith, Vikram Solanki, John Spilsbury, Thomas Straw, Fred Titmus, Hedley Verity, George Ulyett, Mark Wallace, Stuart Wedge, George Wheldon, David Wigley, George Alfred Wilson, George Clifford Wilson
Biographies: Feiko Kloppenburg, Roland Lefebvre, Steven Lubbers
Biographies: Billy Spiller
Biographies: Winston Davis, Andy Ganteaume, Lance Gibbs, Malcolm Marshall, Patterson Thompson

Motorsport edit

Places edit

Other edit

Extras edit

 
I, =Nichalp «Talk»= award you these two Barnstars, the first for laborious or repetitive addition of cricket articles...
 
...and the second for your large number of cricket biographies. (2 July 2005)
 
I hereby award you the oldest cricket bat in recognition of your sterling contributions to WikiProject Cricket. (From jguk, 14 August 2005)


Multilicensing edit

I agree to multi-license all my text contributions to the main, main talk and template namespaces, as described below. Contributions in other namespaces, such as user pages, are excluded. This agreement remains in effect so long as the following notice remains on my page.

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  Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation
I grant non-exclusive permission for the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to relicense my text contributions under any copyleft license that it chooses, provided it maintains the free and open spirit of the GFDL. This permission acknowledges that future licensing needs of the Wikimedia projects may need adapting in unforeseen fashions to facilitate other uses, formats, and locations. It is given for as long as this banner remains.
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