User:DDerby

My name is D. Derby.

See also my Wikipedia activities

Featured articles
User:Jengod has written an excellent list of often-overlooked procedures for bringing your article to featured status.

English spelling and grammar
Please do not correct usages of Commonwealth English in Wikipedia. Wikipedia accepts all common forms of English, though particular usages should be uniform throughout an article. Common usages mistaken by users of American English as misspellings include words that end in "s"ed (Anglicised/Anglicized) and punctuation outside of quotes when it is not part of the quote, "like this".

Toki Pona
The Toki Pona wikipedia now exists at Wikicities. Learn the language - by far the simplest I've ever seen - at the Toki Pona website, then create a few articles at sin Toki Pona alisona!

Heroes
People I aspire to be like: Jesus Christ. Loving yet uncompromising. Gave His life for those he loves. Homeless itinerant philosopher for 3 years. John Taylor Gatto. A teacher who teaches life, not servitude to the social-corporate system. George Washington. Turned down an offer of kingship in favor of government by the people. Johnny Cash. Wore black, gave concerts at prisons. Jonathan C. A friend who is more like the above people, or at least tries to be like them harder than anyone else I know. Chuck Norris. Contrary to popular belief, it was Chuck Norris, not meteors or global climate change, that killed the dinosaurs.

List of films that provide accurate and revealing looks at world affairs
Americans should watch these films because Americans often know too little about the world around them. And because these films are good.


 * Brokedown Palace - read the real-life story of Schapelle Corby first. For deep thinkers, it's also a postmodern take on Christ's words "greater love has no man than this, that one lay down his life for his friend." (Later) I had to write this article after some lamer created it with the text "Brokedown Palace is a movie that stars Claire Danes. It is quite lame." Thanks to *drew for adding all the standard details and making it look nice.
 * Hotel Rwanda. The story of a man who fights to save lives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
 * Maria Full of Grace. A Columbian woman becomes a drug mule, visits America.
 * Lord of War - release date September 16, 2005. A look at the international illegal arms trade. See its Rotten Tomatoes page. I don't know the quality of this film firsthand yet; there is no consensus among reviewers.

Major props
RickK was an awesome editor, a voice of reason and a dam standing firm against the crap that finds itself into Wikipedia every day. I miss him. DDerby 06:08, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Old illustrations
Currently preparing to upload ~15 images from Pictoral History of the United States of America, published 1855 - waiting until I can get on my other computer and save them as PNGs. I will update the images as I find time to clean them up in an image editor. See also commons:User:DDerby

Unwanted content
Articles that receive a lot of vandalism, fandalism (thanks, RMaloney!), POV, graffiti, and other unwanted edits include:


 * 2005 (and various day of the year entries) - this article is vandalized regularly, in addition to attracting some not-quite-relevant entries like breakups of somewhat notable bands.
 * Good Charlotte
 * Napoleon Dynamite
 * George W. Bush - at 01:18, 8 September 2005 (UTC), 2 out of the previous 50 edits were useful, one of which was by a logged-in user. 21 vandalisms were performed by 17 unique non-logged-in IPs and 2 logged-in users. All within 21 hours.

(from wp:vand) A 2002 study by IBM found that most Wikipedia vandalism is reverted within five minutes. (See official results.)

External link spam
External spam links are a growing problem on Wikipedia, particularly in business-related articles (venture capital) and articles on topics that attract a lot of business (golf). Some of my criteria for spam removal are:
 * 1) If anyone posts similar links to more than two articles, it is spam and can be removed. See edits by Special:Contributions/Danjwp. Such a person can be called a "linkspammer."
 * 2) If a link goes to a subpage of a generic site, the link may be removed as spam if the subpage is not extremely useful and original. For example, links to drumscore.com such as The Killers Drum Kit Scores (note that I removed these because of criteria #1, not #2). To comment on this, see Wikipedia talk:Spam.

Marketing and related topics in particular receive lots of spam links.

See Spam for more on this growing problem, and what kinds of links you can help search and destroy.

Here is a message, possibly a future template, to use in the talk pages of external link spammers. It's really hard to assume good faith, especially from someone named User_talk:NBA-Forum.net, but he began making good edits after I gave him a message similar to this:

Possible message template for external link spammers
Your recent edit history consists entirely of adding an external link to Wikipedia articles. Putting a link in multiple articles is considered spam. This specific link, NBA-Boards.com, is inappropriate for Wikipedia because it can not be accessed at all without logging in. Please be careful about adding external links to articles. But please continue to be bold and improve the encyclopedia! ~

produces

Your recent edit history consists entirely of adding an external link to Wikipedia articles. Putting a link in multiple articles is considered spam. This specific link, NBA-Boards.com, is inappropriate for Wikipedia because it can not be accessed at all without logging in. Please be careful about adding external links to articles. But please continue to be bold and improve the encyclopedia! ~

Other templates: Please do not add commercial links (or links to your own private websites) to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or a mere collection of external links. You are, however, encouraged to add content instead of links to the encyclopedia. See the welcome page to learn more. Thanks. Please stop. If you continue to use Wikipedia for advertising, you will be blocked from editing. Adding unrelated external links to articles is considered vandalism. If you continue to use Wikipedia for advertising, you will be blocked from editing. This is your last warning. The next time you insert a spam link, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia.
 * Template:Spam
 * Template:Spam2
 * or, Template:Spam2a
 * Template:Spam3
 * Template:Spam4