Jump to content

User:Northernhenge

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
TeXThis Wikipedian is a TeX user.
This user contributes using Linux.
This user has Cornish ancestry.

Northernhenge is mainly a WikiGnome and thinks he's been here for quite a while. His main interest is how the value of the information contained in Wikipedia – features that make it better than other encyclopaedias – can be maintained. He believes that this is supported by wikilinks and categories. He is probably guilty of overlinking, may tend to be an inclusionist regarding categories, and was disappointed when date linking was dropped. He certainly needs to know more about Wikidata and should use Citation bot.

Policies

[edit]
delThis editor is a deletionist.
inclThis user is an inclusionist.

When he was a more active editor Northernhenge made an effort to take policies and guidelines into account though this is not his natural inclination. He might have sometimes referred to Biographies of living persons, Neutral point of view, No original research, Verifiability or What Wikipedia is not. He always intended to leave edit summaries but didn't always do so. He was particularly negligent with minor edits and talkpage edits. He probably still imagines that editors read their own talkpages in any case and that minor edits are self-explanatory but that's not really an excuse.

What's not to like?

[edit]
  • In two-or-three words, drive-by tagging. If you have time to tag “Cleanup bare URLs”, you have time to clean them up. Don’t demand that other editors do things you can’t be bothered to do yourself. Also, they’re a problem for new editors. Someone sees a drive-by tag and feels good about applying what they think is a quick and effective fix, for example deleting text that could have been rephrased, or adding a reference to a YouTube video or Facebook page. They now also think they’re helping by adding their own drive-by tags in similar situations across Wikipedia. Drive-by tags take up other people’s time and mislead new editors.
  • Ownership of articles is a tricky one. We need enthusiasts but editing an "owned" article can be frustrating and drive editors away from the page and maybe Wikipedia itself. But how many articles would not exist if it wasn't for their !owners? To use some very old examples (he should move on really!), CLANNAD and Yodeling have probably illustrated both sides of the argument at one time or another.
  • Don't get Northernhenge started on the whole Wiki Loves Monuments fiasco from quite a few years ago now. Essentially a mass-destruction of numerous editors’ hard work, just to standardise a load of pages to (wait for it…) enter a competition.

What's to like? (Current favourite page.) (Always out of date.)

[edit]

Activites

[edit]
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than 15 years (17 years and 27 days).
This editor is a Tutnum and is entitled to display this Book of Knowledge.
This user has pending changes reviewer rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify)
Music of the common peopleThis user enjoys folk music.

Cataloguing fairy tales

[edit]

Obvious punctuation errors

[edit]

For example, searching for

insource:/[,;][;,]\<ref/

found 544 articles in May 2024. There's work to be done!

London Underground

[edit]

Northernhenge wonders if articles such as these could be brought together more clearly. It’s a shame that category pages can’t be used as articles on this wiki. Maybe a family tree would work.

Search tools

[edit]

An idea on-hold for a long time

[edit]

One of Northernhenge’s early efforts (June 2010) was recreating the Whitland and Cardigan Railway using edits like this one, either to the railway station articles or the towns if they had no article. The town links were a bit controversial, though most of them survive as of August 2022. Since 2010, someone has created all the remaining station articles and added their own versions of the “rail line” links to the new pages, so Northernhenge’s original edits are redundant really. The original idea was to do the same thing elsewhere to recreate other vanished railway lines but, to avoid controversy, every former station would need its own article and it would be hard to demonstrate notability in many cases. Maybe navboxes would have worked better than “rail line” links.

Other wikis

[edit]

Tip of the day etc.

[edit]
  1. Useful citation tool
  2. Don't forget Wikipedia:Database download
  3. Explore Category:Lists based on Wikidata
  4. Tips...
Linking to non-Wikimedia wikis

You know normal links‍—‌they look [[like this]]. But did you know that you can use normal links to pages on any other wiki? This is called InterWiki linking, and applies to all wikis, not just Wikipedia's sister projects. You can link to a page on MeatballWiki by typing [[MeatBall:PageName]], for example. See Interwiki map.

However, links to Wikipedias in other languages are done a little differently. You can link to these by typing, for example, [[:de:Hauptseite]] (replace "de" with language prefix). The colon at the beginning prevents the link from becoming an interlanguage link, which shows up in the left sidebar.

To hide the prefix from the link, use the pipe trick.

Bonus tip: the same basic syntax works in the search box. ( Try typing in Meatball: )

To add this auto-updating template to your user page, use {{totd}}
Special pages (maintenance) Information
Broken redirects
Dead-end pages Dead-end pages
Dormant pages Forgotten articles
Double redirects Double redirects
Lonely pages Orphaned articles
Long pages
New pages New pages patrol
New pages feed Page curation
Protected pages Protection policy
Short pages
Uncategorized pages Categorization
Uncategorized categories
Uncategorized templates
Unused categories
Unused files (images)
Unused templates
Without interwiki links
Most interwiki links
Wanted pages
Most-wanted articles
See also: Maintenance departments