User:A bit iffy

Mistaken edits - IMPORTANT
If I've reverted someone's edits for no apparent reason, please see the top of my Talk page - thanks. --A bit iffy (talk) 08:12, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

About me
I live in Brighton, England. I don't want to say what my name is, how old I am, what I do, where I'm originally from etc. If you're really, really clever, you can work most of this out by looking for patterns in my edits.

Contact
Almost always it's best to contact me via my Talk page. If for some reason you need to contact me privately, email me at:
 * abitiffy
 * at
 * inbox dot com

Twitter: @abitiffy_wiki

Declarations
(i.e. disclosure)
 * A bit iffy is my second Wikipedia account. I used to use Finbarr Saunders, but came to dislike the name.

Interests

 * Beer, especially real ale
 * Favourite pub: the Evening Star, 100 metres from Brighton railway station&mdash;always something new to try
 * Favourite brewery: Dark Star&mdash;never afraid to experiment
 * Politics
 * Film
 * Favourite actor: Kevin Spacey
 * Favourite film: The Usual Suspects
 * Local history, especially of Brighton

My approach to Wikipedia

 * Why do I really contribute to Wikipedia? I can't stand seeing defective writing anywhere and I have a (worryingly compulsive) need to fix things. Often, these faults are just minor ones, so I suppose I should class myself as a WikiGnome. I wonder if I'm spending too much time doing this: when I see faulty web page outside Wikipedia I go to the top of the page to try to click on the "edit" link...
 * I suppose I'm a deletionist, but with intermittent doubts. Fancruft just plain irritates me, but as it's almost always about subjects I have no interest in like games and science fiction TV series that I've never heard of, I rarely dare touch them. (Hmmm...having just written that, I wonder if I'm being unfair: do I think "fancruft" = "anything I'm not interested in"?) Anyway, I've deletionist tendencies because I don't like to see the goal of the Wikipedia project undermined by being composed of 95% poorly-written junk which is what will happen if non-notable subjects and excessive detail is allowed to flourish.
 * Wikipedia is just an encyclopaedia - a tool for learning stuff. It's not a religion.

Things I really hate about Wikipedia
.
 * It's slow. I don't know whether the servers are slow, or there aren't enough of them, or there isn't enough bandwidth from WikiMedia's service provider, or the database indexes and/or SQL need attention. This slowness is the one thing that puts me off contributing more. I just want something done about it, and I'd be willing to put my hand in my pocket to help. It's now a lot faster &mdash; excellent work, whoever's responsible.
 * Instruction creep. The overly long instruction pages actually put me off from following accepted conventions. It just takes so long sometimes to find out how to do things correctly. Even though you sometimes see references to Instruction creep in those pages, they still keep growing. The results are that either (a) I go against the rules, or (b) I just don't bother fixing things that I know are wrong.
 * Vandalism. To be honest, I used to find it fun to hunt for and squash vandalism. It's great that the intelligent design of this project means it's usually as easy to undo vandalism as it is to do it in the first place. (If only physical vandalism in real life were as easy to rectify.) However, vandalism is now really annoying me; it's absurd that a large part of people's editing time is taken up with countering it. As maybe 99% of vandalism is from anonymous IP addresses, I now believe all posting should be from registered users. I think some of the proposals in anonymous users should not be allowed to edit are extreme: such proposals undermine the whole point of the project. Allowing people to remain anonymous behind a nickname is fine - in fact, absolutely necessary as many people may not wish to be publicly identified (I certainly don't). Generally I do like the approach of User:Anastrophe-wikipedia, though I don't see the necessity for even requiring an e-mail address. The basic principles should be:
 * New users must have a relatively pain-free experience&mdash;both in signing up, and in making initial postings.
 * A campaign of vandalism must be a painful experience for the vandal.
 * Edit conflicts. These drive me up the wall as I am a slow thinker and typist. It's so annoying when updating a rapidly-changing page to find my changes didn't go through, and then having to work out what the other person did before I can try again. It's especially annoying when I get an edit conflict with a vandal. However, I do understand there are valid reasons to have some sort of locking mechanism in place, and it looks like Wikipedia have some workarounds: Help:Edit conflict.

Things about Wikipedia that irritate me

 * Excessive linking. OK, I do a fair amount myself, but is it really necessary to disrupt the legibility by linking every other word? Links should only be made to things that are directly relevant to the article concerned. Probably there's a policy or guideline somewhere that says this, but I can't be arsed to hunt for it. And what's with this thing about making links of dates? OK, it's reasonable to Wikify a date such as 1 January so that it gets formatted to the user's preferred style, but why does it have to end up as a link? Couldn't some other mechanism be devised? And with years, e.g. 1956, I see very little point in making links of those. I think it's unlikely that users, on reading that someone was born in 1956, would then want to go to the 1956 article.
 * Further to this, I find this morning 15 October 2005 that links are no longer underlined. Did I inadvertently change something in my preferences? Or has someone decided to make the change for all users? Whichever, it's excellent. Things are a whole lot more readable now.
 * Overflowing boxes. If an image is taller than the section it's in, it often flows down to the next section, either obscuring or realigning text. Similar things happen with infoboxes. I've not figured out exactly what's going on, so I'm not sure whether it's a fault of the contributors to the page, or whether there's something more basic wrong with the way Wiki software is rendering Wiki mark-up into HTML.
 * Non-use of edit summaries. Users that don't provide edit summaries are especially irritating when I'm trying to track down who made a particular edit some time ago. And users that don't give a reason in the edit summary are also annoying: it's not enough to say WHAT you've done; you should say WHY you've done it. So saying "Removed link" in an edit summary is little better than saying nothing at all. Far better to say "Removed irrelevant link," and we would all know why you've done it.
 * Editors that miss the point of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not an end in itself, it's just (as I've said somewhere else) an encyclopaedia, a tool for learning stuff. Today I've come across the latest lunacy: a notice on an article &mdash; in this case, Caroline Flint &mdash; telling you that the article hasn't got a photo. What's the point of that??? You can SEE the article hasn't got a photo!!! Not so long ago, a few editors were putting large banners on the tops of articles saying that the articles lacked geographical co-ordinates (the small, unobtrusive latitude and longitude that go at the top right of such articles). Why slap the casual reader in the face with that big banner when they're only trying to look up something on a small town in Poland?

About talk pages
Talk pages aren't articles, but are discussions about articles. Hence, in my opinion, they should use tools better suited to dialogues such as the PHP bulletin board software widely used elsewhere on the internet. (I am borrowing this idea from some other Wikipedia user, but I can't remember who it was.) Using the tools intended for articles results in discussions that can be difficult to follow. Also, I have recently seen a case where a talk page had been edited to undermine other contributors' positions.

Favourite articles
'' Not articles that I've contributed to, but ones that I've found that delightful, informative or a surprise in some way.
 * A. E. J. Collins
 * Context speaking budgies
 * David Icke
 * Dutch elm disease
 * Fermi paradox
 * Gimli Glider
 * Heavy metal umlaut
 * Mad scientist
 * Memento mori
 * Mondegreen
 * Moresnet
 * Numbers station
 * Oblomov
 * Omnipotence paradox
 * Time Cube
 * Unofficial Football World Championships
 * Yola language

Articles I've started
I'm not much of a writer, plus I get bored with things quickly&mdash;hence the stubbiness of most!
 * B95 (bird)
 * Boris Schapiro
 * Brighton & Hove City Council election 2007
 * Brunswick (Hove)
 * Dark Star (brewery)
 * Duke of York's Picture House
 * Emma de Caunes
 * Garryowen Football Club
 * Harveys (brewery)
 * Hockering
 * London to Brighton Veteran Car Run
 * Miriam Karlin
 * Misery lit
 * Overberg Test Range
 * Pavilion Theatre (Brighton)
 * River Fergus
 * Royal Sussex County Hospital
 * Shaw Taylor
 * Simon Fanshawe
 * Stickam
 * White Dot
 * ZiL lane
 * Zoufftgen

Photos I've uploaded
See /Photos subpage.

To do

 * Maybe create an article on Encona sauces . I like them. As at 12:48, 1 October 2005 (UTC), there's zero mention of them in Wikipedia.
 * Try fixing the instruction creep mentioned above. Not sure how to start.
 * Do more on proposed article on /C.A.T.S., currently languishing in a subpage under my old account.
 * Do more on proposed article on /Oldest pub in Britain detailing the many pubs in Britain that claim to be the oldest.
 * Do more on proposed article on /John Lees if he still holds the record for the fastest time to walk across the US (coast-to-coast). I've heard he was in the Guinness Book of Records for this, but he's not in the 2006 edition.
 * Do Expand article on Brighton Festival. I'm amazed that there's virtually no mention of it anywhere in Wikipedia.
 * Improve Rottingdean article. (Wikifying, mostly.)
 * Maybe do article on Luncheon Vouchers.
 * Do article on Dotun Adebayo Damn - someone's beat me to it.
 * Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty - intro is rather clumsy. Needs cleaning.
 * Saga - attn. needed. What about Saga hols etc.?
 * Loanword - cats needed.
 * BN postal area - create.
 * EQUAL - http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/equal/about/key-doc_en.cfm
 * The Larkins, 1958 sitcom
 * Editor review

Ten random articles
Taking my lead from User:Rebecca's The 10 Random Pages Test, I decided to click the Random article link ten times to get ten random articles. I'll keep an eye on them, and try to maintain them. This is intended to be a personal experiment to capture my thought processes during article maintenance.

The articles are Salisbury Cathedral, Mioko Fujiwara, Legend of the Five Rings, Carlstadt Public Schools, Gressenhall, Adam Holloway, Foreign relations of Azerbaijan, Oranienburger Straße, Mazatec shamans, and Bo Bo's Chicken.

My reactions and progress are in this sub-page.

Tools

 * Articles for deletion: how-to
 * Boilerplate text
 * Categories: how to find
 * Criteria for inclusion of biographies
 * Edit counts
 * Example requests for permission
 * External links: the rules
 * Geographical coordinates


 * Glossary
 * Importance
 * Jdavidb's anti-linkspam project
 * Library
 * Manual of Style
 * Music notability guidelines
 * RC patrol
 * References syntax on my /examples page
 * Requests for administrator attention
 * Special pages
 * Stub types
 * Templates
 * UK Wikipedians' notice board
 * Uploading images
 * Own works
 * Template:Reqphoto
 * Vandalism
 * What Wikipedia is not
 * Wikipedia Signpost

Sandboxes

 * /Sandbox
 * /Sandbox 2
 * /Sandbox links

Licensing etc.
I agree to multi-license all my text contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below: