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Hello! I'm a fifty-something paralegal living in the Boston area. My Wikiactivity centers around hockey -- I'm a longtime statistician and sometime member of SIHR -- but I'm interested in everything from military history to politics to roleplaying games (and no, not in the console games that marketing departments insist on calling "RPGs").
For your tireless contributions to the Hockey WikiProject, please accept this barnstar. BoojiBoy 20:49, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
For your commentary on the Barbara Schwarz AfD in first half of March 2007, explaining the concept of WP:OR and WP:RSDennisthe2 21:57, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
I am so sorry, and I want you to have this as an apologetic gift. JONJONBTtalk•homemade userboxes 18:01, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
I'm constantly stumbling across your edits, and they are, without fail, shrewd, constructive, and sorely needed. On behalf the internet users of the world, thanks for all your hard work! Fullobeans (talk) 18:56, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
The Special Barnstar
Thank you for everything you've done for me and for the WikiProject! Taste the rainbow! Vyrida 10:56, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
The Barnstar of Diligence
Re your efforts in resolving the issues relating to Vassallo5448's contributions. LessHeard vanU (talk) 13:40, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
My Rant of the Month
My wife Amanda and I are walking home in the icy rain from Walmart, getting drenched. On the way, we have a conversation about clinging to belief. Substantively, we agree on the following point:
People, upon first encountering an issue, swiftly decide which side they support. This decision is often knee-jerk, and not based on much of anything: whim, emotion, the point-of-view first presented to them (especially when by someone likeable), and so on. Since humans are tribal animals, they then cling to that position in the face of all reason and contrary fact, and often dissolve in confusion or throw up irrelevancies when brought up short on their POV. I'm minded of the news yesterday about repeated Republican attacks on Newt Gingrich, who espoused an anti-global warming message in a public forum; plainly he's a traitor for breaking ranks just because of pesky scientific fact.
I run into this syndrome all the time on Misplaced Pages, where in various policing and content discussions - for some of the most turgid thinking extant, take a gander at WP:AFD - folks find the most startling explanations as to why they are right and the facts are wrong. All this to avoid the statements so many people would rather die than admit:
"I'm wrong." "I was mistaken."
It isn't easy to confront it; sometimes it is simpler to walk away. I'm as prone as the next fellow to fighting my corner ... but when it happens I have to accept when someone trumps my beliefs with fact and change my POV.
These are the things I think about.
Pet Peeves
I am not particularly interested in "putting myself over" Who really gives a damn how many contributions I've made, what articles I've started (46, apparently ), what credentials I have with which to beat you over the head that I am so much cooler than you, or anything other than whether I know about what I'm talking? I'm proud of my work here, and tickled by seeing it recognized, but I'll never post a puffed up list of the articles I've helped bring to FA/GA status (a number, so far) or listing my DYKs (five, so far). I'm more into improving stubs than into creating new articles. What Misplaced Pages needs more than sheer page count is improved quality of articles. Many editors seeking a catchphrase that makes for an easy slur call this "deletionist."
I am extremely particular about grammar, spelling and the non-use of diacriticals. I see no reason why time-honored grammar usages are invalidated just because today's typists are lazy sods, and if you have a burning desire to put umlauts and diacriticals over proper names, go over to the foreign language Wikipedias where such usages are proper -- this is the English Misplaced Pages, last I checked. (And don't bullshit us; they don't use diacriticals on non-North American en-language websites any more than in Canada and the US.)
I care strongly about documentation. If you assert it, you should be prepared to back it up, with a non-Misplaced Pages verifiable source. If you can't, you should retract it.
That being said, computer verification isn't the be-all and end-all of everything. An AfD was filed sometime ago against an author who had jack for Amazon.com sales ranking and not many Google hits. No kidding, folks, he wrote several popular books in the Seventies and early Eighties, pretty much nothing since, and his stuff's gone out of print. Any number of prominent Victorian authors have Amazon rankings which aren't anything about which to write their descendants.
Subjects that should be prima facie grounds for CSD: dorm buildings, bands or wannabe auteurs with Myspace pages for lead Google hits, game/fan/mediacruft that received less than ten minutes of screentime or ten pages of action, MMORPG gaming guilds, elementary schools, any portmanteau "X in popular culture" list ... gods, I could go on for a bit.
Articles that should be blocked from CSD: Articles within six hours of their creation, unless they're blatant vandalism, hoaxes or attack pages. It drives me nuts to see articles CSDed or AfDed four minutes after their creation, and from watching Special:Newpages, many articles are CSDed seconds after creation. Folks, Misplaced Pages doesn't give prizes for the first ones to file a CSD. What is your freaking hurry? (Alright, now I realize that this is a hallmark of people shilling for admin. You're getting a firm Oppose from me.) Can we give these people some chance to improve their articles?
People who pick over this user page for ammunition to use in AfDs and other discussions: If you think this means you, you may well be right. Needing to find some dirt to fling because you can't win on the merits of the argument is a sure sign that a collaborative encyclopedia is not the environment for you. Maybe Britannica is hiring.
There should be a guideline with equal force to WP:BITE - that in their own turn, newcomers have a duty to act respectfully, courteously and with maturity, to make an effort to acquaint themselves with Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines, and to assume good faith on the part of existing editors who seek to apply them.
"!vote" is politically correct weasel-wording - Yeah, yeah, I know we're not supposed to be "voting" on things, although no one's told the RfA process, and the screams of rage when admins at XfD make policy-over-consensus determinations are palpable. That being said, let's get a grip. The dreaded letters V-O-T-E don't vanish by virtue of putting extra punctuation in front of them, and doing so reminds me strongly of my bunny ducking her head underneath a towel and pretending no one can see her. Plainly we need a word that means "registering one's opinion in such a fashion that (usually) comes down on one side of an issue or another." "Vote" is a recognizable candidate for such a word. Chill, folks.
To steal the wording from another editor, and in the same fashion as above ... "WP:AGF is not a suicide pact. If someone writes a post with blatant personal attacks, signs another user's name, then starts posting in multiple places calling for the banning of the innocent party, they are a troll. Calling them such is not a failure to AGF: it is a logical deduction." It's maddening how often the aggressor gets off scot-free in the ensuing chaos, because blame-the-victim is SOP.
Finally, I care about research. This is an encyclopedia, and not only do we have an obligation to know about what we're talking, we have no right to vote or make edits in willful ignorance -- if you insist on being ignorant, go hang out in a blog instead. It drives me nuts to see AfDs filed on articles where the nom could -- and should -- have taken five minutes to follow up a few Google hits and realized the genuine notability of the subject. It drives me just as nuts to see "seems notable," "seems non-notable," "looks good" and their ilk. Translation = you don't really have a clue. You're really just guessing off of a five second glance at the article, swallowing any presumption whole and racking up a quick meaningless edit on AfD. News flash; no one will give a damn five years from now about your edit count. We are supposed to be building an encyclopedia here, not playing some geeky MMORPG and competing for Game High Score.
Postscript
"But the biggest worry is that the great benefit of the open-source approach is also its great undoing. Its advantage is that anyone can contribute; the drawback is that sometimes just about anyone does. This leaves projects open to abuse, either by well-meaning dilettantes or intentional disrupters. Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality."
-- The Economist, 3/18/2006
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~
