User:Curb Safe Charmer

Hi, I am Curb Safe Charmer. My username is an anagram, in case you're wondering!

Organising information has been an interest of mine since I was eight years old when I volunteered in my primary school's library, helping make sure all the books were in the right order according to the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

As a boy I enjoyed the original Batman TV series filmed in the 1960s. In particular I was fascinated by the Batcomputer. Batman could ask it anything, and a few moments later it would spit out the answer on a piece of paper. How did the computer 'know' all of that information? I guessed that at some point, a person must have fed the computer with information, some how. I didn't know anyone who did that for a job but it seemed like a really interesting thing to do. I gave up plans to be a doctor when I grew up, and instead wanted to be someone who inputted and organised the knowledge in a big computer system.

As a teenager, I became fascinated by computers, but when my friends were playing computer games I was more interested in databases.

It is not surprising that as an adult I spend time here, helping to build and curate the world's largest online encyclopedia.

What I do here
Wikipedia is 99% run by volunteers. I benefit a great deal from Wikipedia and feel I have something to offer in return. My main area of volunteering is Articles for creation where I help sift through new articles and consider whether or not they should be added to Wikipedia, based on my knowledge of the project's policies and guidelines.

Unfortunately, some people try to use Wikipedia as free advertising for themselves, their business, organisation or cause. It is not always easy to tell what is promotion and therefore not permitted, and what is acceptable. Some editors go to great lengths to dress up their promo article as being encyclopaedic. The references they give may be to news articles that are substantially based on a press release, for example. So far I have saved a couple of thousand inappropriate articles from being added to Wikipedia.

A particular frustration that I have is when people who work in public relations, marketing or SEO do not realise that they have to disclose the paid nature of their editing, as part of Wikipedia's terms of use, which they accept every time they save a change to a page.

My AfC stats Overall AfC stats Most active reviewers

At the same time, and this is a part of the work that I really like, even though strictly it is not part of the Articles for Creation role, is when I have come across a few articles which have real potential but needed some help, and I have worked with the author to improve their draft so that it is accepted into Wikipedia. The best buzz is from the articles that I've helped with reaching 'Good Article' status.

Deletion
When I come across an article that at first glance looks like it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, I will often set about editing it, such as running ReFill, trimming citations, removing spurious content and tagging issues such as citations that fail verification. Once the article is a bit more concise and readable, if it still looks like there aren't three good sources providing significant coverage then I'll go ahead and tag it for speedy deletion, propose it for deletion or nominate it for deletion. Hopefully the work I've put in will make it much easier for other editors to carry out their review and quickly come to the same conclusion. This process does result in a lot of my edits (about 30%) being deleted, though.


 * Articles I have nominated for speedy deletion - there are many because I tend to do my AfC reviews from the back of the queue where I encounter a lot of 'quick fail' drafts
 * Articles I have proposed for deletion
 * AfD !vote stats - I tend to contribute to discussions about biographies and companies.

reFill
In March 2021 I responded to a request for help and became a maintainer of reFill, a tool for expanding bare references. I since found the learning curve too steep to maintain the codebase, but contribute to the project in other ways.

Article creation
Some of the articles I've created:
 * Saint Helier Harbour, the main harbour in Jersey
 * Nukhba (Hamas unit), Palestinian terrorist group
 * VALL-E, artificial intelligence system (stub)
 * Feudalism in the Channel Islands
 * Mount Bingham, hill in Jersey
 * Disaster victim identification (stub)
 * Mike Bracken, leader in digital government
 * The American Jewish World, newspaper in Minnesota (stub)
 * Pierre Horsfall, Jersey politician (stub)
 * Robert MacRae, Jersey lawyer (stub)
 * Google Lighthouse, web development software
 * Timothy Le Cocq, Jersey lawyer (stub)
 * STS Lord Nelson, tall ship
 * GOV.UK Verify, identity system
 * Jean Martell, Cognac merchant (translated from French Wikipedia article)
 * Colin de Mowbray, yachtsman
 * MSDAIPP, component of Windows (stub)
 * Microsoft Sort, vintage Microsoft product

Some of the articles I've also substantially contributed to:
 * 2021 Jersey dispute
 * Jasraj
 * Gary Burgess
 * COVID-19 pandemic in Jersey
 * Alphonse Le Gastelois
 * Clipper Round the World Yacht Race