User:Wham2001

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This page originally read I'm an occasional editor, making small changes as I pass through., which was true at the time but is less so now.

About me

I prefer to edit psudonymously, but I find it helpful to have some idea of who the people I am interacting with on Wikipedia are; hence, a brief biography. I was born, grew up, and live in Northern Europe. English is unfortunately the only language that I understand with any useful degree of fluency. I studied the physical sciences at university, and have a science-related job, though these days I spend more time in Zoom meetings than in a lab. I don't edit articles related to my job much, since doing so feels like work. I'm fortunate enough not to be very concerned which pronouns other people refer to me by, but he/him or they/them would be the obvious choices. I'm not the only internet user who calls themselves "Wham2001", and I only call myself "Wham2001" here. I'm not notable, but I do appear in a photograph in at least one Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia editing

I love reading, but am not very good at writing (you can tell from the preceding paragraph, no?) Perhaps as a result most of my Wikipedia time is spent gnoming around articles others have written. I often patrol recent changes, in particular focussing on articles about living people. I feel strongly that we have a duty not to invade the privacy of the subjects of our articles, particularly those who are mostly out of the public eye.

In the pre-plague era lot of my editing was done with a smartphone from public transport, in particular most of the anti-vandalism work. I find that Twinkle works well on a smartphone in desktop mode, though I have it set to require confirmation to avoid mis-clicking rollback links. I like this essay though I suspect that the author is a lot more patient than I am! One small tip is that the syntax highlighting feature causes the wikitext editor to behave eratically on my (cheap Android) phone; you can disable it by tapping the icon that looks like a lipstick in the bar above the edit box. I operate a second account, Wham2010, so that I can have different preferences set on my phone.

Days of the year

I don't like, although I understand the reasons for, the consensus that it's OK for our articles on days of the year to be mostly unsourced but that new unreferenced edits added to these articles should be reverted. I think this is unfair on the (often new) editors adding to these articles in good faith, who are effectively being told that the existing unsourced content, written by insiders, is of more value than their equally unsourced work. The best way out of this situation is for the articles to be fully sourced, so I started to add references to those articles. This is a large task with only a few editors working on it, which would benefit from your assistance; see here for instructions and style guidelines. On a typical day roughly 60 000 readers look at a Day of the Year article – half of those at the article for today and half at all the rest put together – so your work will not go unread.

Useful resources for birthdays etc.

WP:RSN – Reliable sources noticeboard and perennial sources
User:Wham2001/DotY RSP – Notes on infrequently discussed sources which crop up repeatedly when looking for "Days of the year" sources
Library of Congress authority search

Cats for herding practice

Ordered kittens to lions:

Stuff I have to search for every darn time

ReFill for lazily fixing bare URLs
{{Columns-list}} puts lists into multiple columns
{{reflist-talk}} - I always expect this to be called reflist-section...
{{diff||prev|oldid|waffle}} or {{diff||next|oldid|waffle}} for linking to diffs (or use {{URL_to_diff|url=|label=}}).
{{wikicite}} – creates anchors to allow {{harv}}/{{sfn}} to point to hand-made references
{{cnf}} / {{Incomplete short citation}} / {{fcn}} – grumble about broken citations
{{para}} |para= vs. {{param}} {{{param}}}
Template:Cite archive – how many more "secret" citation templates are there?!
Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects – does what it says on the tin
Articles requiring cleanup about Swedish and Danish topics
Swedish newspaper archives

And finally

If you have a question or concern about one of my edits, please contact me on my talk page. I appreciate feedback and try to reply to all posts there, other than obvious trolling. Please don't email me unless you feel it really necessary, but if you do please let me know on my talk page; otherwise the chances of me reading – let along replying to – your email are very small.

TODO

Find references for the many unsourced statements in Lund – very slow progress
Translate sv:Romeleåsen and find references for it – largely stalled
Re-read Harris (2005) and use it to improve Stuart Restoration – summer project?
Pages needing more extensive reference work:
- History of Algeria – piles of no-target errors, mishmash of sfns and {{rp}}, article needs some severe trimming
- Yom Kippur War – mix of sfn formats, talk page note left 2024-07-04 (and now archived without comment), underway (slowly)
- Banu Qurayza – mix of sfn formats
- Ajuran Sultanate – mix of reference styles
- Bar Kokhba revolt – would benefit from some reference systematising
- British Raj – multiple sfn formats, some conversion to sfn also needed
- Lyndon B. Johnson – half templated, half plain-text, mess of formats
- Warsaw Uprising – Huge article, messy ambiguous plain-text sfns
- Action of 9 August 1780 – chaotic reference list, plain-text sfns