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.
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?
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 (Always out of date.)
Northernhenge isn't quite sure what an
edit count actually measures. (See also
Editcountitis,
AfD statistics and
his edits in the wikipedia namespace.) When – despite this – he looks at his total number of edits, he includes his Commons edits on purpose, and other namespaces because he’s too lazy to think about which should be be included.
found 544 articles in May 2024. There's work to be done!
London Underground
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.
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.
The
Community bulletin board (aka
WP:CBB) is a terrific way to let your newly created Portal, WikiProject, etc., be known to the community, including at the
Community Portal. It's also a great way to recruit fellow editors. If you post a notice there, please follow these guidelines:
Use present tense.
Bold the main link.
Keep it short and sweet, news style.
Use pulldates (one week) by inserting them into a hidden comment like this: <!-- Pulldate: July 3 -->
Or just follow the instructions on the page, which will be visible when you edit it.
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