User:Cedders

I didn't often log in until April 2006, but made several random additions and corrections anonymously from 2004 onwards. I'm most interested in history of ideas, politics, science fiction, and artificial intelligence. --Cedderstalk /Toolbox /Proposals /...

Mission
Please don't take offence if I mark a page that you have started for deletion or speedy deletion. Instead please see What Wikipedia is not, List of bad article ideas, and whichever is appropriate of the following guidelines for notability:
 * People and autobiography
 * Corporations and organisations
 * Bands and musicians
 * General non-notable non-encyclopaedic promotional pages

I do a bit of new changes/pages patrolling and may start helping with one or more of the following tasks:
 * Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit
 * Category:Articles that need to be wikified
 * Category:Wikipedia articles with style issues
 * Category:Wikipedia articles needing rewrite
 * Category:Category needed, Special:Uncategorizedpages, Special:Uncategorizedcategories, Category:Underpopulated categories
 * possibly Pages needing attention
 * possibly Wikipedia:Cleanup


 * Keeping an eye on Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and Category:Proposed deletion for what I think might become a useful article or stub. Eclectic examples of articles I have written or rewritten in order to prevent deletion are Alexander Vampilov, Rob Buckman and Orang Minyak.

My IRC name on freenode.net is 'Ceddrs'.

Editing philosophy
Wikipedia by definition is not adding to the sum total of human knowledge. The most it can hope to do is present some existing knowledge in a convenient, concise form. However, a major part of that must be summarising paper sources which are not already available through the web - perhaps the best web commentaries and summaries should still be in static pages outside Wikipedia along with original research.

Is Wikipedia reliable? No, I would not rely on it for anything at all important. Of course all editors are hoping it will tend towards accuracy, but because of vandalism and inexperienced editing article will always vary in quality.

I tend towards inclusionism, although would prefer the coverage of Wikipedia to be a bit more even - there is a lot of information about current TV programmes, say, but much less about 20th century writers. Therefore I am also attracted by mergism.

One exception to erring on the side of inclusion is where an article or insertion obviously has a public relations or promotional provenance. Attempts to remove point-of-view are usually only partially successful even if most of the article is deleted. I believe this kind of abuse of Wikipedia should be strongly discouraged by deletion, as in fact usually happens if the new pages patrollers are alert enough. Please see my /Proposals that there could be more structured referral of these editors to other Wikis where NPOV would not be an issue.