User:Dr. Blofeld

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I first arrived here in early 2005, although I didn't join formally and become very active until June 2006. I'm the founder of the Actors and Filmmakers project and the Historic Houses project. Fascinated in the Himalayas, Buddhism and the Far East, I started the Tibetan project and also made the Slovenian project an independent one, one of the last European projects to do so. In 2009 I started WikiProject Intertranswiki, a project intended to work towards translating articles from dozens of other language Wikipedias and ensuring that the English version has an article. In August 2015 I started Women in Green, a project intended to focus on improving the quality of existing women biographies, particularly core articles, and getting them to Good Article status.

I am interested in dramatically improving the quality of the average article in the encyclopedia and consistency. I've staged contests, with the support of Wikimedia UK, with mechanisms which produce an extraordinary amount of article improvements and creations within just weeks. Awaken the Dragon (April 2016) and The Africa Destubathon (October-November 2016) produced well over 3000 articles combined. In August 2016 I established the The British and Irish 10,000 Challenge and The African 10,000 Challenge, which I've since broadened out to cover most regions globally, functioning under the umbrella 100,000 Challenge. As it's often difficult to get editors to focus as a group on expanding existing articles, in March 2020 I ran The Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon, covering all 134 counties of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland as well as Jersey, Guerney and the Isle of Man in an effort to improve the average quality of articles, and ended with over 1000 articles expanded. Time permitting, I am considering running shorter one-two week contests in the future to target different areas of the UK, Europe and elsewhere, aiming for 200-250 improvements in a week as part of The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge, started in April 2020 which aims for 50,000 expanded stubs by 2030.

Did You Knows? - 1667 articles - I've barely contributed to Did You Knows since 2015 but I'm still one of the most prolific contributors to it. We set a World Challenge to cover the whole A-Z of countries and entities, but it was never completed.

I've not received many of these since 2017 but I currently have 298 awards.

1. Wikipedia is a gigantic project and major improvements cannot be made within a short period, so be patient. Wikipedia is the most ambitious project I've ever witnessed in this lifetime, the quest to collect the "sum of all human knowledge" is incredibly vast and it is truly a global project. But only a very small percentage of people ever edit Wikipedia in a meaningful way. It is frustrating that we can't attract more active editors, as the project could become 10 times larger and 10 times better in overall quality within a few years. But all we can do is be patient, try to build it brick by brick, and inject some love and affection into a few articles, and concentrate on improving the overall quality of each article slowly.

2. Article subjects with many brief mentions in books are probably notable. If an article subject has dozens of hits in reliable sources, even if brief, chances are the subject is notable. Too many editors and guidelines here expect to see massive amounts of coverage and for many topics this isn't possible due to time period or location in the world. If enough scraps of material can be compiled to write a credible start class encyclopedia article then the article is likely notable. I think the guidelines here should be updated to reflect this and that "extensive coverage" isn't always possible.

3. Red links are productive. However unsightly they are, it is VERY important that notable missing articles are red linked, which will in turn root out many more missing red links, a chain which needs to be in place if the encyclopedia is to reach its potential. Unfortunately many of our editors are ignorant about missing content or short stubs and assume that if an article is missing or short then it's probably not notable and should be deleted. I'm of the opinion that a considerable percentage of our existing articles need to be restarted/rewritten or partly rewritten from scratch and fully sourced. Very few people want to dismantle an extensive article on an important subject and rewrite it, something which needs to change if the overall quality of the website is to greatly improve.

4. Show your appreciation for others. Hitting the thank button occasionally and taking the time to award people for articles you like I think would go a long way towards raising the community spirit on here. Many of our editors are not appreciated enough. I try to thank different people a few times a week for good work I see on the main page.

5. Infoboxes can be useful, even essential in a lot of articles where there is a lot of data not easily put in prose. But in many arts biographies in particular, if there is no information about the career and it's little more than a list of wives and a cemetery I think it puts undue weight on trivia.

6. If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.