User:Drat





Subpages

 * User:Drat/Userboxes - Userboxes I make.

About me
I'm 31 years old, male, and I like computer games and cats. I'm from Gosford, Australia. I registered on Wikipedia under the name DooMDrat in late November, 2004. Almost a year later, I had my username changed to Drat. Any user called Drat anywhere other than on Wikiquote and Commons isn't me.

I particularly like Doom, Doom II, System Shock, System Shock 2, Quake, Quake II, Thief, Thief II, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2 and NetHack. Graphics don't have much effect on me, and I almost never use graphical enhancement mods for games. Gameplay comes first, graphics second.

I like video game music and remixes centred on my favourite games. As for non-game music, I'm into metal and also various songs from the 60's, 70's and 80's.

I have an interest in Linux, but need to get around to putting it on a computer again.

Wikipedia philosophies
I am a bit of a mergist. I feel that one large article is better than several crappy little ones. It's also easier to edit one article than it is to edit eight. If you can only realistically write two lines about something without “waffling”, its not really worth dedicating a seperate page to it. Of course, once an article starts to get quite large, it can be a good idea to split up some sections into their own articles. Various aspects, such as the characters and seasons are of sufficient importance to have separate pages dedicated to them.

I'm also somewhat of a deletionist. I have nominated many machinima productions for deletion, as all bar a relative handful have had any sort of significant coverage in reliable, independent sources. The amount of productions being added has, however, decreased in frequency in recent years. Whether this reflects the changing popularity of Wikipedia, or the growth of subject-dedicated Wikis, or the growing acceptance by machinimators of the concept of notability is a good question, and one I'm too lazy to find out.

Some guidelines for editors
Some of this stuff is obvious, but here's a reminder anyway.

Check your edits
The preview buttons are there for a reason; use them. Be sure to check any internal or external links you create or modify that you are not sure of. This will help eliminate unintentional redlinks, redirects, and bad external links. It also cuts down on having to do multiple edits, which reduces clutter in the article history.

Splitting an article
This is mainly concerned with elements of fictional works. When should you make an article on (for example) an individual character in a book/movie/game/etc.?

Weigh up the following:
 * How big (filesize) and/or long (vertically) is the main article? Can you write about the character there without making the article too big or long?
 * How much can realistically be written about the character? I don't mean necessarily right now, but where do you see the article in six months? Is there enough reliably sourced information to write a decent (or even half-decent) amount? If you can only really write a few sentences without waffling or delving into speculation and original research, it's not worth putting it in a separate article.
 * Is the character important enough to the topic to justify a seperate article? In addition, is the character relevant to more than one work? A character related to multiple works may warrant a page more than a character related to just one work.
 * How many other characters are there? Would it be better to make an article on all of these characters? One big article is better looking and takes less time to read and edit than twenty little ones. That said, the article could end up being something akin to a game manual or guide, something which Wikipedia is not.

Avoid trivia sections
Trivia sections are the bane of a true encyclopaedic article, and should be avoided. People often fill them with every stupid little factoid they can think of, regardless of importance, and they act as powerful magnets for more of such material. They are also a prime source of original research.

At the same time, there is often salvageable encyclopaedic information in there. Ultimately, every important, useful item should be sourced (if it needs to be), and integrated into the prose. The rest should be deleted. At the very least, help educate people by adding the trivia template to overly large trivia sections. Of course, trivia sections may not be named "Trivia", so watch out for names like "Notes", "Facts", etc. Hell, I've even seen "Fun facts".

Quick tips for writing better articles

 * Don't address the reader. Avoid using "you", "your", etc. The reader may not necessarily be interested in the subject and it doesn't look that great anyway.
 * Do not use contractions in articles (use in quotations being an exception). There's no problem with using them in user pages and talk pages.
 * Watch your tense as appropriate for the subject. For example, I've seen many articles on older games which use past tense when describing features of the game. Unless every single copy (hard copy or soft copy) ceases to exist, it is still technically playable (even if it requires emulation). Exceptions would be games that were cancelled before any sort of playable content (such as a demo) were released.
 * Bear in mind regional variations of English. As a general rule, stick with the variation relevant to the articles subject. That is, use British English for British subjects and American English for American subjects. If in doubt, stick with the variant primarily used in the article.

Dealing with vandals
When you spot vandalism, revert or fix it (obvious, I know). But be sure to warn the user (unless you think it's a really minor infraction, like test edits), and always remember to substitute the templates. Make sure to put the talkpage on your watchlist, as sometimes vandals may blank their talk messages (not realising the history tells all), or they may make offensive changes to messages.

Check the user's contributions for other vandalism, and revert/fix as needed. If there are lots of contributions, just check recent ones - but watch for patterns in previous weeks/months of the same articles or similar ones being edited. If it is an IP user, edits made a few weeks ago or earlier are much less likely to be the same person (unless the IP is static), and any really old vandalism has likely been spotted and fixed (not always the case, of course). If you have to fix multiple instances of vandalism, only warn the user again for vandalism they have caused after you last warned them.

If there is a long stream of recent vandalism, it may be easier to post the details on the adminstrator's incident noticeboard. They can do automatic mass-reverts and deal further with the user. Keep in mind that when mass-reverting, they sometimes skip over articles that have been edited since being vandalised, so check that those articles have been fixed appropriately.

Persistent vandals should be reported to Intervention against vandalism. Longer term pests should be reported to administrator's noticeboard. State your case properly. Remember, the more info and evidence you can provide, the better the chance of the troublemaker being dealt with.

Linkspam
One thing I absolutely despise is seeing people using Wikipedia as an advertising service. If you add a external link to a page on my watchlist, I'm going to have a look. If I think it adds nothing of value, I'm probably going to revert it, and then check all your contributions, reverting as I deem necessary. In extreme cases, I'll ask an admin to do a mass revert – manually reverting 40+ articles gets tedious. If your site has genuinely useful and reliable info, then you are better to add the info to the article, and cite the page instead of just chucking it into the external links section.

Here's how to avoid this: First read "How not to be a spammer". But let me re-iterate certain behaviours that will really serve to elicit my contempt (or at least raise my suspicion):
 * Adding the link to loads of pages; furthermore adding the link at the top of the link sections (or subsections).
 * Not contributing anything to the pages when you add the link, and/or not having any really useful content on the site. Show airdates, TV listings, blooper lists, game cheats, inane trivia and stuff like that are not useful.
 * Adding a site that is brand new - or recently relaunched after a long downtime. Unless the site previously had a large following, or there's been some sort of big advertising campaign, the only person who is going to know about a site that has only been online for a few days is the creator or a friend.
 * Prettying up the link by putting your opinion of how "great" the site is.