User:Jerzy

This user used to be an admin, and decided to Kill two birds with one stone when he got so daft that remembering his password became daunting: his new account is user:JerzyA, he has a cool set of backups for never again forgetting it again, and the acct does not have admin permissions. --JerzyA (talk) 14:51, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

(an odd little tool)
This section exists so that i can, almost invisibly, provide a link (in the midst of talk that others have saved) which can inform others, who can see no indication (that IMO ought to have been made by a third editor) clarifying whether a short unsigned 'graph and a following short signed 'graph, on a talk page, represent
 * one signed contrib, or
 * one unsigned contrib, followed by 2nd, signed, contribution (which was made by a presumably different colleague). --Jerzy•t 00:35 &:53, 8 January 2017 (UTC) (UTC)

= Slightly less odd stuff =

Back June 22, '10.

I am likely to miss messages you leave for me on this page, for as long a month or more. Messages belong on User talk:Jerzy, generally at the bottom of the page, and never at the top of the page.

Most of the dozens of "Jerzy" accounts i control on various WikiMedia Foundation projects (and three that i do not) are displayed at meta:User:Jerzy/Jerzy accounts. My (non-global) acct at Commons is Commons:User:enJerzy

note to Non-Native Speakers of English
I got stuck in my brain, years ago, the idea that there's something wrong about modern English singling out the first-person singular pronoun to be spelled with a capital letter. So i spell it without the capital (except at the beginning of a sentence, or when i'm not the sole author). If you follow my example, native speakers will just figure you're ignorant of the basics, or flagrantly casual.

By the way, your English is just fine. Americans raised speaking English may not realize that, because we almost inevitably figure out that English is understood everywhere in the world, as long as it's SPOKEN LOUDLY ENOUGH. Unfortunately, that makes the really difficult task of speaking another language (at all, let alone well) a hard one to get adequately motivated about, for someone who finds it effortless to speak English. Not to mention its being hard for us to grasp how difficult the task is. Because of those cultural "blinders", we are (surprisingly) not usually as stupid as our treatment of your English might suggest.

And thanks for being so neighborly as to gain whatever facility you have with this brash, typically American, and endlessly frustrating language.

Somewhere and -when since writing that, i stumbled across the orthodox (and IMO probably correct) explanation of the odd (and seemingly egotistical) casing: it apparently dates back to the age of manuscripts and scriptoria. When you're dealing with oak-gall ink and parchment from Pergamon (or with papyrus) (and pens made by cutting off the tip of a goose quill at a sharp angle, then cleverly splitting the new tip to make it feed the way a fountain pen does), you're going to have a fair number of stray marks -- particularly if it's not yet standard to "dot" the lowercase letters i and j (which i conjecture was another means of distinguishing them from strays). I presume that (except in the cases of royal personages) that need, institutionalized as orthography, was the source of the way i was taught to spell the nominative first singular pronoun. YMMV, an' dat's 'kay w/ Me!

'dja notice i never got around to saying that capitalized "I" (especially with handwritten serifs) is a lot more distinguishable from a stray mark than is "i", which does not become much more distinctive by including that silly dot?

(And, by the way, that lower case I and J share the dot, bcz (i've observed and/or heard or read that) I and J are variations on a single letter (in a language that didn't make a distinction between an "ee" or an "aye" phoneme), and the Y-like consonantal sound you end up hearing when someone draws out  "ee" or "aye" long enuf, and then slides into a following vowel, as in ee-aye-(y)ee-(y)o. And is it mere coincidence that  I and J are not distinguished in ancient Roman jnscriptjons, and that the Latin alpha-beta didn't distinguish U from V, nor have  a W,   but the name of W is pronounced "double ee-yoo" (or, in some languages a version of "doop'l-yoo") and the letter looks like "VV".  And the W-like consonantal sound you end up hearing when  someone draws outwhen  someone draws out  "oooo" long enuf, and then slides into a following vowel, as in ooo-(w)ee. (I haven't checked, but i'll bet our articles on I, J, U, V, &/or W, and/or those in other Romanized-language editions of WP, would confirm my cockamamey OR ravings. Or not.)

One of Your Friendly Local Neighborhood Admins
Even if you're fairly new here, you've probably noticed the generous set of powers available to all editors: In addition, around 200 (WP grows and grows!)  700 1000 of the editors on Wikipedia also have (and currently use) several other permissions (that at other sites would probably be very closely held). These particular editors are called administrators (formally), admins, or sysops (short for system operators), according to the speaker's taste. (Admins are not called "moderators", IMO because every editor is expected to help provide moderation.)
 * immediately effective editing,
 * creation of articles,
 * renaming articles (by using the "move" tab at the top of most articles),
 * viewing material deleted from an article, and using it in edits, and
 * probably others i now take so much for granted as not to recall them.

Without trying to enumerate the details, i'll mention two kinds of problems admins can resolve: I have a notion (whatever the truth may be) that i've been an annoying burden on admins, before becoming one myself, and in effect begged for "more than my share" of assistance in doing page moves. So i especially welcome opportunities to repay my debt to previous admins by assisting future admins (you, for now) with problem page moves. (And also with other needs.) Please ask.
 * In some cases where you can't talk someone out of spoiling a good article (among other requirements, normally one that conforms to our NPOV policy), an admin can often help.
 * Sometimes the "Move this page" link does not do the job of changing the title on a page. Two important things need to be said about this:
 * If you "fix" the situation by cutting and pasting from one page to another, all you've done is cause damage (obscuration of editing history) that others will have to undo, before accomplishing in an acceptable way what you were trying to do.
 * When "Move this page" doesn't work, the problem is what is usually described as "trying to move a page to an existing page other than a redirect with no history". I won't say that description is wrong, but it occasionally is frustratingly unhelpful, and you don't need to waste time worrying about the details.

The most likely times to catch me are from 16:00 (UTC), on a Monday through Thursday, until maybe 06:00 the next day. But you can also try later, earlier, and on weekends without it being completely futile. And of course there are literally hundreds of other admins that you can try.

I also have some thoughts about how to be prepared in advance to find an admin quickly when you need one. Copy this markup of link a link to the next heading on this page onto your own talk page, and occasionally follow the link and cursor back to here to check whether i've put a link here to a discussion of those ideas:
 * Near where Jerzy's link on finding admins will be

Editing Interests
(I still like it here.)

I started out doing a lot of editing "invited" by the "Random page" tool, and i still value the editing that diffuses out from something regardless of the fact that the post-diffusion subject matter doesn't interest me. (An early and productive instance for me was bypassing the Battery disambiguation page i created, from many out of the many, many articles that used to have that link). I see such edits as a valuable form of cross-fertilization, bringing together more combinations of article and editor, and as a strength of the WP model.

List of People by Name
I somehow blundered into a project: the very mundane task of cleaning up and enhancing accessibility to this, by which i mean not so much the article, but the list that is implemented as several hundred similarly named pages linked, treewise, by the article. When i started doing more to it than add names, As of 07:49, 16 May 2005 (UTC), there are around 600 pages (not all of them listing any names); not only are there now great-grandchild pages, but 9 among them have child-pages, which are great-great-grandchildren of the root. This subdivision has been directed by crowding in specific parts of the tree, permitting, for instance, the Ma... names (which have since grown by about a quarter) are divided among 17 pages, the longest of which has 13 kB and about 200 names, in turn divided into about 14 sections accessible through the ToC, the longest of them numbering 23 names.
 * List of people by name: Ha-Hd was a 34kB page embodying an unbroken list of 555 names (which drew my attention),
 * List of people by name: Ma (though i didn't know it yet) was progressing toward its peak at 54 kB with about 870 names, and
 * the tree had
 * the LoPbN page as its root,
 * 26 children at the first level below it (6 of them -- J, O, Q, U, X, and Y -- having no child-pages), and
 * fewer than 300 pages as "grandchildren" of the root, none of them having child pages.

Other than work by bots, i'm pretty sure i've done virtually all of the restructuring at the page level, and more within pages than any one other editor.

I worked out the mechanism for generating the links to other LoPbN pages, that appear at the top of each page (and one of the two styles on the root page), and virtually all, maybe all, of the utilization of it has been my work. It eases effort and avoids clerical omissions that would likely break the within-tree link structure. (Unfortunately, it so far conflicts with the attractive box-oriented layout of the link structure that a colleague worked out and that will hopefully return as the software involved advances.)

And handling these entries leads me constructively astray into a wide variety of bio articles. For me, this is a satisfying gig.

The Art of the Stub
Many of my colleagues here list, perhaps with pride, articles that they've been prominent in editing. Frankly, i don't have a lot of those.

(Off-hand, Nalgene occurs to me, not so much for what i added as for the fact that i added enough to do a "save" on WP:VfD. A save in that sense may occur when an article appears to be not worth having, and further, to be incapable of being expanded into an article worth having.  The save itself is the act of editing the article into something that changes the discussion on VfD from a strong consensus to delete into a decision to keep (hopefully at least a majority in favor of keeping); it either transforms it into a retention-worthy article, or proves that could be done by pointing the way there.)

But it strikes me that it may be at least as much in the spirit of WP to be proud of writing worthwhile stubs. I say that because WP is about collaborative editing, and what is more in the spirit of collaborative editing than to bring forward an idea for an article that elicits edits from a dozen other editors?

Here are a few of my examples:
 * Freelancer : had no article until 10:11, 23 Feb 2004; 13 real editors (not reverts and not reverted, by different users) through 00:10, 16 May 2005
 * Sidewinder (snake) : from dab 08:11, 16 Nov 2003; about 12 editors thru 07:42, 28 May 2005
 * Identification friend or foe : had no article (unless something got merged in later w/o preserving history, hmmm) until 07:30, 16 Nov 2003; 7 more editors thru 05:35, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Stradivarius : I converted 11-month old redir to stub 23:32, 31 Oct 2003; about a dozen other registered editors thru 05:35, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * 15 minutes of fame : I created it as a stub 04:35, 23 January 2005; 5 other reg'd ed'rs & 3 different IPs thru 18:06, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Per Brinch Hansen : I created it as a stub 19:25, 28 July 2004 (including a false assertion based on my confusing him with Dijkstra, the true author of "The THE Operating System"; my thanks to many eyeballs); 13 other registered editors & 2 different IPs thru 16:14, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Table : was initially another (far senior and now still active in 2008) editor's Rdr to furniture; i made it a stumbling Dab 10:39, 8 October 2003, and as of 19:03, 19 October 2006 (UTC) it's seen a little over a hundred edits (that leave it still a Dab). It's used in an example (amusingly, as i think its content was irrelevant to its being chosen), at Disambiguation.
 * Yuppie food stamps : doesn't seem to rate a real article yet, but what would happen if i made it a Dab lk'g to credit card and automated teller machine? (I wrote that entry 19:03, 19 October 2006, but none of the fans of this user page rose to the occasion by creating such an article on WP. I now see that a stub at the wikt entry predates my comment above, and there are now tens of thousands of Google hits for the phrase; i may add some of the missing senses of the term, becoming that wikt entry's fourth live editor.)
 * Eric O'Neill : I created it as a stub 23:14, 31 January 2007; 2nd editor tripled the ext lks in under 2 hours, and 3rd enormously improved on my stub tag in under 4 (besides introducing me to the DEFAULTSORT tag). I'm hoping these quick improvements on features that aid future editors herald faster-than-usual initial progress on the prose.
 * Motif of harmful sensation : started out 21:43, 19 April 2004 as a silly list of 5 instances including one of my favorite Monty Python sketches, and it was a "Did you know?" entry in the first two months of that institution. My 9 edits in the first 50 made my involvement a bit beyond just starting a stub; in any case, 4 years and about 500 edits later, i see it's shaped up into a nice analytical article. Eventually deleted 31 March 2009, on 2nd AfD nomination.
 * Deflavorizing machine : I started it minutes ago at 2008-09-03 22:38; i've no confidence it can be more than a stub, but i started work on it unsure i could keep it from being OR. Time will tell.
 * Yellow Pages : I started it six years ago at 18:09, 8 May 2004; now over 1100 edits by over 700 users.
 * Squeeze bottle : It was a bad Rdr to Wash bottle for almost 2 years (one of the main-namespace uses was from its own target, and the other two made use of the redirect grossly illogical; i described two more distinct classes of squeeze bottle, with links, in a stub at 06:12, 11 November 2011‎.

Settling In

 *  [The rest of this section was begun 
 *  17:01, 25 Oct 2003 and modified through
 *  02:31, 28 May 2004.
 *  I now consider it obsolete, except for the parts that have been copied above. In particular, i eventually noticed that the List of people known as war heroes, which survived one AfD, and whose relationship to people gaining political power by being perceived as war heroes interested me for a while, was later deleted.]

Yes, i like it here. I'm doing a lot of random editing, and editing that diffuses out from something regardless of the fact that the post-diffusion subject matter doesn't interest me.

I may make a project out of the Interstate Highway System, especially if I-91 starts to feel like it's becoming useful as a result of finding a fruitful format. Or not.

I'm almost done Someone with a bot finished cleaning up the links that need attention due to my disambiguation of Battery; maybe i should learn how to do "robot-assisted disambiguation" -- though i suspect it is not the mechanics but the random substantive editing of those articles that is taking me the time it has.

It looks like i'm making a project out of the very mundane task of cleaning up and enhancing accessibility to List of people by name (the list, not so much the article: the list consists of several hundred similarly named pages linked, treewise, by the article. And who knows what will come of List of people known as war heroes; it looks as if i may be burned at the stake for starting it [smile]. See Talk:List of people known as war heroes.

My Most Satisfying Edit Ever??
re The Horn of Africa and the Black Rhino

Some Comments on Myself
I haven't felt much need to talk about myself on WP, but occasion arose 2004 May 20 when Jiang was kind enough to nominate me for adminship. The following has, fairly, been described as a (nomination) "acceptance speech". It is probably more than you want to know about me, but that subject is not likely to be important enough here to justify creating a more efficient account. On the other hand, i've dressed up the links, mostly for their instructional value to newcomers to WP.

(I got there about 15 hours after the nomination, and found a dozen votes already cast.)

Re Adminship Nomination

 * Awaiting acceptance from Jerzy of nomination.
 * My goodness.


 * In favor, i will point out that it would save effort by the ever-generous Angela, since i could do my own deletes when they are required for moves.
 * Potentially on the negative side:
 * I've got a fairly odd brain, perhaps most relevantly when it comes to making subjective judgements; some might want to think hard enough about this proposal as to consider how well i understand and compensate for those oddities.
 * I am a confirmedly pseudonymous user, and some may decide that makes me in some senses less accountable than typical hard-core editors who, if i perceive correctly, are almost always more fully public.
 * I have a few internally imbedded insects, and i might nag the community about them, a little more often as an admin than i presently do (and if i do, then you were warned [smile]). Two policies come to mind in this regard; altho i think they need to be complied with (and altho i correct others' deviations from them), i consider them both bone-headed and look forward to the time when others agree with me:
 * Day, month, and year of birth and death in the first sentence of a bio.
 * Applying the casing rules for article titles to titles of sections.
 * I do not consistently monitor WP:VP, WP:CU, or WP:VfD, tho i regard doing so a "civic responsibility". I'd like to do a lot better at that, but hope only to do a little better, and may do no better.
 * My understanding of an admin's mandatory responsibilities is "do no harm, or back off when you realize you did". I consider that a shockingly low standard, but that's the extent of the commitment i'd see myself as taking on.
 * I'm the sort of person who would get this far, without having hired a campaign manager. Hey, there's no WP:Campaign manager page; where do i recruit one?
 * My sense of humor is nowhere near as clever as i usually imagine it is.
 * That's what i've got; i accept the nomination; you decide.

Outcome
(It didn't work [wink]: they voted for me anyway.)

A wiki-moment
I may change my mind tomorrow, but today the following exchange seems to say something interesting about me, and perhaps even about the, uh, Wikipedia process:

Unfathomable

Please revert immediately your recent talk-pg Rdr, or explain why reversion of is not necessary. --Jerzy•t 16:49, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * All other CSD talk pages redirect to Template talk:Db-meta, as it helps centralize discussions. There is a box on that page that says, "To help centralise discussions and keep related topics together, all CSD template talk pages redirect here. For discussions on each individual template prior to July 2008, see the histories of each talk page."  They probably forgot to redirect Template talk:db-disambig to Template talk:Db-meta, which is my reason for redirecting.  Thanks, Logan Talk Contributions 16:51, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I have also copied your suggestion for Template:Db-disambig to Template talk:Db-meta so that it is not lost in the history. Sorry about the confusion! Logan Talk Contributions 17:01, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I'd argue that the Rdr'd (former) talk pages also require central archiving of the old discussion, but thank you for your thoro explanation, diligently moving that page from my
 * WTF?
 * list to my
 * I can't fix every WP problem [frown] -- nor in practice any of them, if i insist on seeing every one that i notice thru to its complete resolution! [shrug]
 * virtual list. Happy editing, and thanks again. --Jerzy•t 17:50, 30 March 2011 (UTC)


 * In the spirit of wiki-based copy-left attribution, see the relevant portion of the history of the talk page where that discussion took place.

Before you edit this page ....
I am likely to miss messages you leave for me on this page, for as long a month or more. Messages belong on User talk:Jerzy, generally at the bottom of the page. And by the way, no one is supposed to edit "user pages", such as this one, except the pages' respective owners, whose username makes up most of the page's name. --Jerzy•t 00:22, 8 January 2017 (UTC)