User:Richard001
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It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. - Charles Darwin
Contents |
[edit] About me
I'm Richard Wilde, an undergraduate student from New Zealand doing a Bachelor of Science in environmental science and biology at the University of Auckland. I'm here to help fight in the War on Ignorance (including, of course, my own) and to make the internet not suck, or at least to suck somewhat less.
I'm interested in many subjects, including but not limited to philosophy and science. I'm currently working on a range of ecology, ethology and evolutionary biology related topics in my spare time, and my editing activities involve assessing articles (we now have 1.6 out of 2.4 million assessed), adding to do lists (I feel articles are a bit like a headless chicken without one), and requesting, creating or expanding articles themselves. As a Wikipedian I feel I can never, never do enough.
Parallel to Wikipedia, I'm also interested in making old public domain materials available online, as well helping to build a free audio/visual media library (i.e. Wikimedia Commons).
If anyone needs me to look up a journal article or something similar, I have access to a range of databases through the university library system.
[edit] Common mistakes
There are some frequent mistakes I constantly fix, which I'll list here as I come across or think of them. Hopefully someone reading this will learn from them.
[edit] See also sections
- Further information: WP:SEEALSO
These sections should seldom contain links already in the article, especially those linked in the first sentence. The see also section is a place to link related topics that wouldn't be out of place linked in the text of the article, but which currently are not present. Listing half the article's internal links again is of no help. Also, please keep lists alphabetical. I often leave the same message in brief as a hidden comment simply because this happens so often.
[edit] Headings Should Not Be Capitalized
The above heading should of course read 'Headings should not be capitalized'. The same goes for article names. A common mistake among new users, though I seldom see experienced users fixing it.
[edit] Lead sections
Too often I see articles with a tiny introduction or lead section. An article's lead should be a concise summary of the whole article. There are some articles with overly large leads, but more often they are too short. The length should be proportional to the length of the full article, so while a brief article can get away with only a one paragraph lead, a detailed one should have a lead of 3, 4 or even 5 paragraphs. Unfortunately even some GA or 'A' class articles suffer from this issue.
[edit] The tragedy of the Commons
Please upload these to Wikimedia Commons. The number of free images that could be moved there is staggering, and seems to be growing larger by the day. The template {{un:c}} is useful for new users.
Also, please link to Commons whenever possible (use {{commons}} or {{commonscat}}. You don't have to look far to find an article that is screaming out for a link to a useful Commons gallery or category to be added.
[edit] Citations
Citations come after punctuation,[1] not before.[2] The previous sentence is a good example.
[edit] Talk pages
Talk pages are only for discussion of improving the article. This means that off topic material should be removed from talk pages. If you see off-topic fluff floating around, please, do as I do and remove it.
[edit] Reverting vandalism
There is little point reverting vandalism if you are reverting to a revision that itself contains vandalism. Often I see someone revert one IPs vandalism by merely rolling back to a vandalized version by another IP. And guess what usually happens next? Yup, people assume everything has been fixed and the vandalism stays put. If you see this happening, please find the reverter and explain what has happened. Bots do it too; there's not much we can do about this besides closely watching articles. Often, this doesn't happen though (see below).
[edit] Ideas to improve Wikipedia
[edit] The need for organized page maintenance
See User:Richard001/Maintenance for an essay about the need for organized maintenance of Wikipedia pages.
[edit] Article requests
The Wikipedia assessment scheme describes how articles can be placed in certain classes - stub, B-class etc. But what about articles that don't exist? I'm not suggesting that we assess the quality of such articles, but rather I think we should pay more attention to article requests. I think WikiProjects are the best way to handle requests. More WikiProjects need to get involved with requests, and in a bigger way. Requests pages need to be refined and improved, sorted etc. Requests should also be assessed in the sense of "yes, this is a good request, we should have an article on it" or "no, there is already an article on this topic/it isn't notable etc" (i.e. there would be three classes of non-existent article: non-requested, new requests and approved requests. Of course, some non-requested articles may still be article worthy, even urgently needed!) Request lists should include assessment of how important it is to any relevant project(s) (and thus how urgent a request it is) and, if possible, reliable sources which could be used to create such an article. It is important for projects to look not only at what articles they have and how good they are, but what articles they should have, how many there are, and how important they are.
[edit] Want a dictionary definition?
Wikipedia is not a dictionary, but if you want a definition just type "wikt:" before the word, e.g. "wikt:candor", and you'll be taken to the Wiktionary entry.
[edit] Current work and to do
| 47 | This user is a Level 47 Wikipedian. |
[edit] Focus article
- Mimicry and subarticles
[edit] WikiProjects
I am listed as a member of the following WikiProjects. I work on a range of articles and assess almost anything, but these are the ones I'm most involved with:
[edit] Recent new articles
[edit] Some articles to create
Feel free to beat me to creating these!
- Exploitation (ecology)
- Condition (ecology)
- Resource (ecology) - three highly important ecology articles
- Religion and morality
- Mineral resources
[edit] Notes
- Read WP:NPOV again.
- R/K selection theory within a species
- Expand on argument by analogy (or analogical reasoning)
[edit] Other projects I contribute to
| respect | This user is a strong atheist, but respects the beliefs of other atheists and realises not all non-believers wish to follow the same path. |
My other work at WMF projects is mainly at Commons. Check out m:Help:Unified login to merge your accounts!
