User:Chriscf

 This person needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of cleanliness. After the person has been cleaned up, shaved, and neatly dressed, you may remove this message.

Philosophy

 * The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
 * Generally, I find it useful to make a contribution that, while in itself small, leads to greater things. This includes things like creating substub articles in the knowledge that someone else knows better.  Though, in doing this, I am mindful of not taking that first step when it's unlikely to get any further.

Licensing
I believe that multilicensing creates too much work for those intending to use bits of WP at a later date. Rather than making contrived arrangements for people to be able to integrate parts of WP into CC-licensed works, but only when you've cleared every word that you're including to make sure it wasn't added by someone who isn't multilicensing, and that it's also licensed into the particular flavour of CC code that you're using, etc., I am happy for people to use my contributions here under the GFDL, with the usual attributions (i.e. indicating that the page has come from Wikipedia, and including any boilerplate text).

This template appears to be broken when used with the customised Babel, so see NoMultiLicense.

However, should Wikimedia need to change its license, I will not stand in its way. The single-licence nature of my contributions will make changing to another licence easier, as it willo only require the consideration of one set of contributions under one licence.

Wikipolitical stance
I am neither inclusionist nor deletionist, preferring instead to be commonsensist.

Inclusionists, when challenging a request for a page to be deleted, posit loose and flimsy reasoning, often with no ground in logic. Inclusionists will often vote keep on a VfD simply to make a point, without giving a solid reason - examples include "it's cool" or "I like them". Therefore hardcore inclusionists are devoid of common sense.

Deletionists often post VfDs for pages which only marginally fail to meet inclusion criteria, often a small enough gap that someone can bring it up to scratch. This is as opposed to those VfDs for articles which blatantly shouldn't be here. They often find the smallest fault in articles and insist they should be deleted. Unlike inclusionists, deletionists do have some common sense - it's just that often they don't realise it.

Then there are the hardcore mergists, whose ultimate goal is to merge and condense all of Wikipedia into a single article, all less than 32kB of course. Unfortunately, there is little room for common sense in this 32k, what with there being more important topics to take into consideration.

As a commonsensist, I stand for the following values:
 * Recognising the existence of bias
 * Wiki is not paper, though we are not unlimited
 * Something that may meet one or two criteria in deletion policy might not actually merit deletion. Similarly, something not meeting individual creiteria in deletion policy does not automatically merit inclusion.
 * Following from the previous point, if something can only pass a given test by relying on a technicality, it has de facto failed that test.

For all the pedants that keep weaseling around things by claiming that their activity is supported or not technically outlawed by Wikipedia policies, I offer this quote: "What is written down on Wikipedia is not the actual policy. It is a codification of the theory of it."

Wiki activity
As well as being a voice of commonsensism on VfD, I have committed random acts of Welsh on location articles, and am slowly on the way with articles covering the area of Cardiff. Fixed some random stuff related to the United Kingdom general election, 2005. Also look out for useful stubs which can be taken further.

Save often
An important principle to remember when making any large edits is to save your work often. There are a number of reasons for this.


 * When adding large amounts of information, if something goes wrong you have less work to do to fix things.
 * In the case of edit conflicts, you need to fiddle with the "stored" version that much less.
 * Increased edit-count is a side-effect. Make of that what you will (beware editcountitis).

Three Conflict Rule
Over the time I've been here, as anyone else who has been here any great length of time, I have experienced edit conflicts regularly. It can be very annoying to have inserted large amounts of text into an article in various points, only to have to reinsert them later. Having done this repeatedly, I have started working to a personal rule of thumb, which I call the "Three Conflict Rule".


 * In the case of encountering three consecutive edit conflicts on the same page without a successful edit, I will, without examining the changes in the new version, unilaterally replace the stored version with that which I had tried to apply.

The rationale for this is that my time is precious, just like everyone else's. I would rather spend it on adding information to an article, contributing to a discussion, or doing things In Real Life than resolving edit conflicts. So, if having tried to resolve the conflict twice I am presented with a third edit conflict, I will ignore it and insert my version. Someone else (maybe someone who hasn't just had to wade through three edit conflicts) can resolve it.