User:Rich Farmbrough/FAQ

Answers are in italics.

Why have you created this FAQ?

To save your time and mine. I actually don't get all that many FAQs so I don't mind answering them, but if the answer is here already, you don't have to wait.

Why do you sign your messages "All the best"?

To remind everyone, including me, that this is a collegial endeavour. I do wish everyone, even those who seem to be attacking me, the best. I hope they either see the error of their ways (if they are wrong) or find a positive way of expressing their dissatisfaction (if they are right). Codename Lisa likewise signs with "Best regards".

Dates

Why did you delink the dates in <article>?

It's only worth linking date like entities in a very few contexts.

Where the date is itself important - so that there is value in following the link - decreasingly often as WP grows.
When the text is about the entity e.g. a link to 2000 or 2001 in The Millennium.
There is also the process of linking to "[Year] [month] in <subject>" via a piped link, e.g. 1999 in television as 1999 - this eventually can suffer the same problem as the first point, and is seen by some as an undesirable Easter egg - i.e. taking the user to a different place than expected.
Notes: In the infancy of WP all these entities were linked as there was a plan to extract meta - data from them. Similarly there is a request to the mediawiki developers to provide a different way of allowing date preferences to work than overloading the linking mark-up.

See WP:DATE for details, and the talk page for over 48 archived pages of wrangling over the exact meaning of "links valuable in context" and "the correct use of the non-breaking space" or "the endash".

Wording

Why have you changed "Trivia" to "Miscellanea"?

The reason is that "Trivia" is information which is not really of use or interest. Ideally information that is of interest should be in the article body, information that is not should not be in the article at all. Nonetheless miscellaneous useful information may need a section of it's own - calling that section "Trivia" invites the addition of facts such as "Harold Lloyd took more cream in his coffee making this film than in the two previous films put together." You may well find a better name than I have used, if so, please change it and let me know. See also Wikipedia:Trivia.

Euphemisms especially "passed away"

WP eschews euphemism in all its forms. However euphemisms that have an alternative meaning are worse, moreover they are often anachronistic or unclear to non-native speakers.

Block log

You were blocked a number of times between 2010 and 2013. What was that all about?

It's complicated.