User:FeRDNYC

Use my talk page to leave me a message or discuss anything related to any of my edits. Or feel free to comment on any of the information here.



My first COI declaration
It's a very exciting time for me: After more than a decade as a Wikipedian I've finally made my first contribution to an article peripherally related to my past employment. (At Sierra Entertainment, a company acquired by my ex-employer Cendant back in 1996.)

I was only at Cendant myself for 7 months, from late 1998 – early 1999 (at which point it pretty much had no employees left), and I don't recall even being aware they owned Sierra, never mind being in any way involved. (Sierra was on the west coast, Cendant was HQ'd in Connecticut, and I worked in the Cambridge, MA office.) Still, I have dutifully declared my complete lack of objectivity 🙄 on the Sierra article's talk page, as is proper.

Hit List
This is a self-maintained informal scratchpad list of edit "targets", articles I feel need work and that I would be interested & able to improve. (This is in no way a statement that I will be working on anything listed here, as I am in the habit of maintaining TODO wishlists of unrealistic plans that never amount to anything.)

Comment (via my talk page) on any item in this list is encouraged. Anyone who feels they can offer suggestions or guidance, is interested in collaborating, is already working on something listed here and wishes to "mark their territory" (I loathe the thought of unnecessary duplicate work), or has any other input is requested to leave me a note.


 * The tables at the very end of Gray code are being blown out too wide because of all the citations. Moving the names from a header row to the table captions helped some, but bundling the citations would help even more.
 * Maybe at some point propose that XRDS be merged into XRI (and greaaaaatly trimmed down), because it really has shit-all for notability separate from XRI. As a consequence it would have to be shortened, which isn't a bad thing because the freakin' article includes an entire sample XRDS document and there is absolutely no reason that needs to be in Wikipedia. A'tall!
 * Double-mindedness has several issues, not the least of which being that its content is mostly long quotes from sources. But on a technical level, the formatting of those quotes needs normalization into proper transclusions of Template:Quote, and their sources upgraded to proper citations. Honestly, the original 2009 version of the page was better (and made the link to Kierkegaard more explicitly and clearly) before the user who's taken over the page since started reframing it as a religious tract.
 * Skynet (Terminator) needs some real-world POV fixup, particularly in the sections on the 3rd & 4th films. WP:PLOT, WP:PLOTSUM, and the MOS (fiction) section on Plot summaries should all be helpful.
 * Mohammed Benaziza needs some love... the IP user who's been updating it clearly means well, but he doesn't appear to be a native English speaker, and it looks like that page is the only wiki editing he's done so he's not well-versed in wikimarkup and the conventions of article structure here.
 * The lower half of DVD is just nauseating, especially for what should be, given the topic, a Featured Article. (Hopefully it won't be, not in that form!) Needs layoutluv, badly!
 * The Commons disk-storage comparison diagram File:Comparison_disk_storage.svg is excessively busy and confusing. Multiple sizes of the same media are represented, cluttering up the drawing to no real benefit. The sizes never differ in format, and don't allow for useful comparison because they aren't drawn to scale. OTOH, the interesting, unique, and relevant properties of the dual-layer DVD format are completely ignored. Finally, it seems like it might be possible to illustrate CAV vs. CLV within the diagram, rather than textually "tagging" each disk as to its rotational properties.
 * The diagram here fails to illustrate the "Row K" designation of the function key row. Needs updated.
 * The diagram here fails to illustrate the "Row K" designation of the function key row. Needs updated.

Completed/Expired Items

 * List of Essential Mix episodes could use some formatting cleanup. (Some notes not in the Notes column, Template:nowrap needed on some items in Notes, links to the general BBC EM page in the Mixes column for off weeks, etc.) I'm also more than a little worried that all those Mixes links shouldn't be there, but that requires some policy research. ...is deleted.
 * I've created a Template:Infobox conversion of Template:MarvelUSide, to harmonize things like widths and font sizes. It's done and looks good (living at User:FeRD_NYC/Infobox MarvelUSide), a test transclusion can be found at User:FeRD_NYC/sandbox2 (using data from Hyperion (comics)). Now I just need to run it by anyone who might care (via Template Talk:MarvelUSide?) and then install it as the new main template code. Installed at Template:MarvelUSide.
 * Cotton Mather has been damaged by some recent editing, as some of the referenced citations were lost. I was able to find this old revision where they seem to be intact. Reverting would be too severe; better to find & re-insert the appropriate citations, figure out where the damage came from, and gently refer the editor/s in question to the appropriate Help articles. — Huh, what do you know? There's A bot for that, which has taken care of the problem.
 * Paradise Garage is an absolute mess, and an embarrassment to Wikipedia. None of that tangential Essential Mix rambling belongs anywhere in the article at all! Least of all the introduction, which somehow takes up 90% of the entire article. — User:82.44.100.73 whacked the Essential Mix noise (Yay!); the article's still too top-heavy in the introduction, but it's tolerable now.
 * I've proposed merging the one-sentence stub Leapster2 into Leapster. Possibly the least controversial merge proposal of all time, but still... please feel free to talk amongst yourselves. Merged.
 * Those tables in List of Mr. Show episodes are just awful and unreadable. Especially tragic since Wikipedia has some excellent templates for such things. Definitely a case where we should USE THEM!! User:Grapesoda22 went through a few months later and made things happy.
 * Lighting control console reads like an ETC sales brochure, with all of those precisely-identified board photos included. Those need to be at least genericized — nobody needs to know that the unit being used to illustrate a "preset board" is specifically an ETC Acclaim. It's... better now. Enough that it's not worth worrying about.
 * Third Battle of Puebla was renamed from its earlier Spanish-language title, but the article text was never brought into conformance with the rename. A lot of "Battle of 2 de Abril" mentions need to be fixed up. Somebody fixed it.