Wikipedia

Quuxplusone

Joined 21 April 2005

User:Quuxplusone has been around Wikipedia for a long time, lurking in the shadows, but only registered an account on April 20, 2005. I do discrete math, history of religions, CS, and pop culture, and I obsessively copy-edit articles.

Editing style

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I have a strong preference for "American-style" typography (recognize over recognise, "x — y!" over "x – y!") in articles dealing with American or generally non-European topics. I put one space between each pair of sentences in an article, never two. I try to follow the Manual of Style's rules on quotation marks and the placement of punctuation around and within them, despite my American aversion to that style. I am a firm believer in the utility of the en dash (1980–84, anti–animal cruelty), and prefer (1984— ) to (1984–present). Naturally, I won't edit an article solely to change its spacing or quotation style, but I will make such changes while editing for other purposes. I like consistency.

I do not understand the grammatical intuition that leads people to write the word however without bracketing commas, as if it were equivalent to but — for example, "He is old, however he is spry for his age." The lack of a second comma there (and the use of the first comma in place of a semicolon) jumps out at me, and I will fix those reflexively.

Software and websites on Wikipedia

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There are a lot of articles on Wikipedia about various software packages, most of them vanity stubs better suited to SourceForge. On August 2, 2005, I nominated KDiff3 for deletion, with the commentary

Advertisement for non-encyclopedic software product. Wait until (1) people start using it (GCC); (2) it enters pop culture (grep, diff), or (3) there's something interesting to write about it.

User:JesseW commented that he liked those criteria, and I ought to put them someplace more permanent. So here they are.

I noticed that a lot of comments in that VfD discussion gave the reason as "Commercial advert," which I was careful not to mention in the criteria above. I don't care if the product in question is GPL'd; most software simply fails Wikipedia's "notability" criterion.

And the same criteria apply for websites, too: Replace "GCC" with Amazon.com, "grep" with Google, and add Pets.com or elgooG as an example of number 3. dress-for-less.com isn't Wikipedia material, sorry.

License

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Multi-licensed into the public domain
I agree to multi-license my eligible text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and into the public domain. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions in the public domain, please check the multi-licensing guide.

I release every single one of my contributions to Wikipedia into the public domain. I'm not a big fan of the GNU Free Documentation License, because it's not clear to me whether it's compatible with the reality of Wikipedia as a free encyclopedia anyone should be able to use for any purpose. I'm not even convinced that the GFDL is compatible with my above statement that all my work is in the public domain, but given that Wikipedia's official position is that it is compatible, I'll go with the flow. See this article for another person's opinion as to why copyleft is unnecessary in the Age of Search Engines.

Another reason the GFDL is bad for Wikipedia: It encourages the proliferation of many little parochial wikis, no one willing to use the content from any other, because of the requirement (as I understand it) for explicit acknowledgement of the source. Consider the Wikipedia article on Qwghlm, which consists basically of a link to [1], the Qwghlm page on Neal Stephenson's pet wiki, The Metaweb. In my opinion, it would be preferable — and in the spirit of freedom — for the Wikipedia article to substantially duplicate the Metaweb article, so that the content is easier to find and less likely to disappear should one or the other site go down.

However, this is not likely to happen, simply because any copying between articles would require a notice such as "This page content is originally from the Metaweb." And then any Metaweb page copying from Wikipedia would have to add, "This page content is originally from Wikipedia." and back and forth, accumulating these useless tags, until the article (for it would be only one article, except in URL!) would devote more bytes to copyright nonsense than to actual content!

Therefore, the Wikipedia article Qwghlm omits mention of the Sghrs, of the geography of Qwghlm, et cetera; and that information is unlikely to make it into Wikipedia anytime soon, because who wants to waste time paraphrasing already-"free" work? And all because of the restrictive silly nature of the GNU FDL.

Projects

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Pages I watch

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I've written C source code for many of the following pages, and I try to keep an eye on them to make sure no bugs are introduced by trigger-happy editors. This list is here mainly so I remember all the places I'm watching code.

Useful templates

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This is template {{opentask}}.

You can help improve the articles listed below! This list updates frequently, so check back here for more tasks to try. (See Wikipedia:Maintenance or the Task Center for further information.)

Help counter systemic bias by creating new articles on important women.

Help improve popular pages, especially those of low quality.

This is template {{userpage}}.

Other accounts

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