User:Quack 688
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Wow. My own little web world. What am I going to do with you?
- Personal blog/rant?
- Dating profile?
- Combination short soup recipes?
Um... Wikipedia is definitely home to a vast amount of useful information. When I think of something useful to put here, you'll be the first to know. Until then...
- Australia'll smash the Poms in the Ashes! Stuart MacGill deserves a spot in the eleven! The 110 km/hr regional speed limit is ridiculous! Bring back the Biff! Land rights for gay whales!
- I like flowers, puppies, and sunsets. Ideal partner: Me. With tits.
- I'll pay $20 for a really good combination short soup. Cash after consumption. If it was really good.
In the next episode of Quackipedia: Quack is overwhelmed by the variety of userboxes available, and develops an on-screen colour combination so disgusting it forces users to destroy their monitor and all electronic equipment in a 50-foot radius. Combined with a bizarre chain of events involving Wikipedia links, stolen mass mailing lists, and a photo of a donkey, Quack manages to single-handedly send mankind back to the Stone Age. Coming soon to a web browser near you! Don't miss it!
Until then... send me feedback! Or combination short soup!
(update: Quack finds a logic bomb userbox, whose circular reasoning causes insanity in all who behold it. The largest arsenal of userbox weapons starts with a single one... muhahahaha...
What the? I just added that "Dumb Wikipedian" userbox, and someone's already taken advantage of my dumbidity and vandalized me! "Category: Dumb Wikipedians", indeed! Help! Help! I'm being repressed! THIS MEANS WAR!)
Warning! The following section contains a high dosage of background reality.
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Real Userboxes
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I've been lurking and using Wikipedia as a reference for a while, but I've come into a bit of free time, so I might as well do something useful with it. I always appreciate the chance to expand my perspective, and I should be able to do that here. After all, to quote a certain work of fiction, "Understanding is a three edged sword." Your side, their side, and the truth. Any feedback along the way is welcome, of course.
Things I've learned along the way:
Some articles will always need to be deleted or reworked - but let's do it with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. I especially like the TRAINWRECK precedent.
What's the difference between original research and unsourced material? OR needs to be removed, since it can never be sourced. Unsourced material can survive, as long as references are found in a timely fashion. The real trick is telling which is which - if in doubt, err on the side of caution. Of course, the longer it takes for someone to find references for alleged "unsourced material", the more likely it is that it's actually OR.
It's easy to say "That article's incomplete/unsourced/whatever, let's delete it." Of course, by that logic, the only way to get an article past the new page patrol is for one user to work on it alone in a sandbox, and post it when it's complete. Funny, I always thought Wikipedia was supposed to be collaborative.
That was for new articles - things change when dealing with deleted articles. Bringing back deleted articles, with vague promises to improve them later, could be taken as trying to bypass the AfD decision making process. Maybe there should be a "grace period" between the time when an article's undeleted and the time it can be nominated for AfD again - this would let people work on it while in the public eye, and leave them open to offers of collaborative help, but make it clear that if the grace period goes by and nothing's significantly improved, the article will be sent back to the bin.
