User:BrownHairedGirl



Some wikipedian user pages tell their life story or reveal all sorts of interesting details about themselves, whilst others define their interests and values. I want to do neither, so a few userboxes is all you get.

Wikipedia Admin
Many thanks to everyone who contributed to my request for adminship in May 2006. I am delighted that it was successful, and I now have administrator powers on Wikipedia. Administrators have access to a few technical features which help with maintenance.

I regard admin powers as a privilege to be used sparingly and judiciously, but if you require the assistance of an admin, please feel free to leave a message on my talk page'''.

If you want admin help, please do try to explain clearly what you want done, and why ... and I'll try to either help you myself or direct you to a more experienced person if appropriate. However, like any admin, I am not your private army in a content dispute. WP:Dispute resolution is thataway.

Sub-pages
See list at Special:PrefixIndex/User:BrownHairedGirl

My bot
BHGbot was approved on 18 November 2007 (see the request for approval at Bots/Requests for approval/BHGbot).

The bot did a lot of work in its first two years, but after years of non-use it was de-listed in 2014.

BHGbot has been reactivated on November 2019, to clean up links to deleted portals per WP:Bots/Requests for approval/BHGbot 4.

Topic areas
When I'm working on articles, I mostly work on Irish topics, especially politics. I have also done a lot of Scottish politicians and judges, and on Westminster MPs from across the UK. Plus Irish and UK constituencies and by-elections. I created the page Families in the Oireachtas, built and developed a large chunk of the articles on UK constituencies, and built the navboxes which unify navigation between the constituencies in Ireland of 5 different parliaments and assemblies. Plus I built the Irish TD table set of templates to list the TDs on articles such as Sligo–Leitrim (Dáil constituency).

There is a long list of topics within that field where I'd like to do more, but my most useful source was the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), which included lots of Irish and Scottish 19th-century papers. That was what allowed me to write in some detail about topics such as the 1868 election in Sligo and the 1960s/70s drink-driving Scottish judge and whiskey heir Lord Grant. Sadly, the BNA no longer offers free access to Wikipedia contributors. Someday I will take out a subscription and start writing articles again.

However, I do have copies of the rare complete set of FWS Craig's "British Parliamentary Election Results" from 1832 to 1974, so if I may help with sourcing where needed.

Categories
I have done a lot of work on categories since 2006. Without BNA sources to assist article-writing, most of my work these days is on categories.

At WP:Categories for discussion (aka CFD), I participate in many discussion and also take an admin role, e.g, in closing discussions. (Though not those discussions where I am WP:INVOLVED).

I routinely monitor and cleanup Special:WantedCategories. In the last year or so I have created and improved many category header templates, esp by-year/decade templates, trying to make as many as possible of them parameterless. I have a vendetta against by-year parameters, which are wholly un-needed; Title year can reliably extract the year in 99% of category sets. I have a particular loathing for those templates which chop up up the year in forms like, or even worse   — both are just time-wasting error-generators. See Category:Wikipedia YearParamUsageCheck for a system I have devised to track those errors and check whether the template can be made parameterless.

I use AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) a lot for category maintenance, esp since I discovered its support for custom modules. Some fairly simple modules have massively enhanced my productivity.

New articles
I used to try to list new articles that I had created, but since I created a lot of new articles, I soon found that the list was too much work to maintain.

I'm still quite proud of the first article I created, back in February 2006: Churchill Barriers. Not a bad start.

In 2018, I created my first featured list: List of women cabinet ministers of the Republic of Ireland.

In between, I created about 1000 fleshy stubs on politicians, and several hundred more start-class or C-class articles.

My edit summary usage
You can check my recent edit summary usage … and please leave me a reminder message if I fall below 99%.

Please WP:TROUT me if I ever start omitting edit summaries anywhere other than in my own userpages.

My barnstars

 * See User:BrownHairedGirl/Barnstars