User:Ash/Activities

Ever since writing programmes on a BBC Micro and code to flash on to EEPROM I was hooked. As a career I have branched off into other things but the programming bug still occasionally bites me and I find myself spending nights debugging some lovely script that has grabbed my butterfly like attention.

I have worked on some difficult large and disputed topics making progress in each, such as homosexuality, gay bathhouse, UFO religions, Theosophy, etc. These topics tend to attract either fanatics (religion) or vandals (sex). I am slightly amused when editors who are looking for a dispute make false assumptions about me, and I enjoy advising some of the more fanatical editors how they can make positive contributions (such as the UFO cultists) rather than just using Wikipedia to promote their cause. Generally after patient discussion, even the most ardent extremist realizes that Wikipedia is too hard to manipulate and either goes away or proceeds to make their additions as factual as they possibly can (which may still be POV, but at least there is some common-ground).

My contributions on Wikipedia switch between pretty varied article topics as well as a few complex templates and Wikipedia related JavaScript.

Contributions worth highlighting (roughly in date order) are : Gay bathhouse, I spent much of a fortnight's holiday researching and re-writing this controversial article. It eventually gained GA status. Finding out the best way of using citation templates (and the harv template) has been useful since. I ran in to problems working out how to keep an image of a free flyer on Commons, there is a lot of copyright law that I do not claim to understand, but I have a better appreciation for it now.

aan, this template can be plunked on an archive page and sorts out an archive header quite nicely. An improvement on the old template, this version detects nearby numbered pages and shows them in a navigation bar. As WP has some difficulty supporting string and number manipulation, quite a tricky thing to get working.

RFC countdown, a small template to give an automatic countdown of days left until a RfC is closed (or can be used for other types of countdown).

WP:Third opinion/User FAQ, after helping out by giving several third opinions (WP:3), I suggested writing up a user FAQ. I drafted out a version and with a few collaborative tweaks this is a pretty helpful guide for the general benefit of dispute resolution.

Article deletions, I have started many AfD discussions mostly for relatively non-controversial deletions of articles with outstanding tags for improvement more than a year old. Some of the oldest can be found on Category:Articles with a promotional tone. Sometimes these have led to me improving an article where I have no knowledge or earlier interest in the subject but a hunt on Google Books or elsewhere turns up a few interesting clues about notability.

WP citations using Greasemonkey, after some interesting fiddling with JavaScript I developed a tool for turning Google Books pages into citations that can be formatted and edited within the Google page and then cut & paste into articles. I find it pretty darn useful for quickly creating a bibliography. See. I went on to use the same core code for several other sites. AutoEd modules, my most common nit-picking irksome repeat edits have been crystallized into AutoEd (/standardize.js and /tidyCitations.js). Dead handy for quickly tweaking an article and the time spent on JavaScript has definitely been worth it.

Fighting vandalism. I keep an eye on several often vandalized pages. After re-organizing the bibliography on homosexuality and editing same-sex marriage (both are included on Most vandalized pages) I noticed a lot of talk page as well as article vandalism (of the "Jim is gay" and "gays should die" sort). These are most frequently from anonymous IP addresses and it remains a puzzle for Wikipedia how to stay open, welcome new users and keep a balance for avoiding excessive vandalism and getting a poor reputation from the press due to it (the most notable type being the press picking up examples from biographic articles falsely announcing that somebody has just died, even if the vandalism only stays for a few minutes this can be a headache for Wikipedia). I believe that educational ranges (especially schools and public terminals (e.g. MacDonald's free WiFi access)) where there is a sustained history of vandalism should have full IP range blocks unless there is credible response from the organizations involved. As anyone can still create an account there seems little loss to the organizations involved. ABUSE seems potentially helpful but is undergoing upgrade at the time of writing. I have used Vandal Fighter which works well on my Mac Mini. It seems useful for trapping random anonymous IP vandals (schools seem to be the top hot topic for vandals). If I have five minutes to kill, then looking at recent edits and filtering by "living persons" is quite productive, particularly as an extra bit of JavaScript in my monobook.js highlights the anonymous IPs and as the diffs pop-up in a comment box it is fairly easy to spot a few vandals in breach of BLP.

External links, I have trimmed commercial linkspam as long as I can remember editing. At one point I contributed to WP:ELNO after editing Stephen Fry about how Twitter links should be handled and creating an RfC on Fry's talk-page was quite helpful. I created the Prune shortcut and adapted the text to deal slightly better with talk page abuse. The policy in this area slowly improves but can sometimes be tricky to interpret to make sure links to organizations are not automatically rejected arbitrarily. I often add NoMoreLinks and add a link to the ODP where a suitable directory exists. A rationale that often works is to question why an organization desperately needs to have an external link if it is not mentioned in the article...

Further reading, a more subtle form of trivia list problem I have met on several articles; Further reading sections are normally unreferenced and unjustified, growing indefinitely with no inclusion criteria defined. I improved the clean-up notice Further Reading after discussion on WT:Layout. For significant articles a discussion about converting the section into a proper referenced bibliography can (eventually) sort out the issue but may be stymied by repeated arguments that the items are "interesting" or might be useful for readers. WP policy in this area is much weaker than for external links or embedded lists. edit

List of male performers in gay porn films, is a highly contentious topic. After noticing repeated deletion discussions of this list, I started checking the disputed sources (there are few published reliable sources) and improving some of the linked biographical articles. There seems to be a significant number of editors that would rather this stuff was not on Wikipedia, a view that may well be influenced by some natural prejudice against such topics. This is a tricky area and getting a consensus on how to manage such a list while preserving the principle of NOTCENSORED may not be easy or even realistic.