User:Kazvorpal

Truth, not Silence
If one's goal is to help produce a truthful, accurate, and complete Wikipedia, not to fulfill one's own agenda, one quickly comes to realize that there are two kinds of people fixing allegedly inaccurate or PoV entries:


 * There are people who attempt to fix the error, generally by changing the wording so that it's more objective and accurate. "Senator X lied about Such and Such" should usually be changed (if the lie isn't pretty much proven) to "So-and-so asserted, based on this and that, that Senator X did not tell the truth about Such and Such".


 * And then there are people whose goal is to censor information that doesn't fit their own personal agenda. These people tend to delete supposedly flawed material wholesale, and often will insist continuing to delete any reference to it, no matter how much others attempt to fix the material to comply with their objections. There's no way, if such a person likes Senator X, that any even vaguely accurate mention of Such and Such will survive deletion.

We should all strive to be the former, not the latter, even...or especially...when the topic at hand is important to us and we do prefer one side over the other.

Acknowledged Articles
People keep saying I should track the articles I've created, or dominantly edited, that have gotten awards, features, et cetera. Unfortunately, I haven't kept track of them at all. Here are a few I know of...

Catalaphyllia
The DYK project (nominate) 08:03, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

The Kentucky Volunteer
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:48, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Autopatrolled
Hello, this is just to let you know that I have granted you the "autopatrolled" permission. This won't affect your editing, it just automatically marks any page you create as patrolled, benefiting new page patrollers. Please remember:
 * This permission does not give you any special status or authority
 * Submission of inappropriate material may lead to its removal
 * You may wish to display the Autopatrolled top icon and/or the User wikipedia/autopatrolled userbox on your user page
 * If, for any reason, you decide you do not want the permission, let me know and I can remove it
 * If you have any questions about the permission, don't hesitate to ask. Otherwise, happy editing! Acalamari 18:31, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Media Mention
In the article The Republican Primary, as Told by Wikipedia Edits, Kaz is in the list of top editors in the Ron Paul category, with additional mention of the article he created, List of companion plants and, for some reason, Jehovah's Witness, probably some coincidence of what he was editing at the time of the article.

Since it's a multimedia page, one cannot link directly to the view showing Kaz, so here's a screen shot:



Pages Kaz Created
Ten years ago, I figured we'd soon run out of new articles to create. But not only is there more to what we know than one generally thinks about, but I'm also constantly surprised at the relatively important topics that nobody, even all this time later, has bothered to put together even as a stub. So I just filtered my contributions by "only show edits that are page creations", and I'm going to list a few here that I'm especially proud to have shared with the community since I became an editor in 2004. While I'm overtly showing off my contributions, my secret underlying motivation is to encourage people to read about these wonderful, but apparently overlooked, bits of human knowledge. And to be bold by creating your own Wikipedia articles, when you discover that something worthwhile has been overlooked. There are still many out there that need to be made.
 * The Brothers Grunt — Best...cartoon...ever.
 * 666 (Aphrodite's Child album) — One of my favorite albums of all time
 * Romano cheese — Had no article until I made it. Weird.
 * Monks Mound — The best example of the Mound Builders civilization's eponymous structures. Oh, I created the Mound Builders article, too.
 * WWIV — The software I used for my BBS and network, in the early to mid 1990s.
 * Ice cream float — Even back then, it was kinda strange that this didn't have an article.
 * Brach's — Yep, I made the actual Brach's company article, back in 2005. And the article for its founder, Emil J. Brach.
 * Alien Legion — Spectacular comic series, like Guardians of the Galaxy but better.
 * Dreadstar — The other SF comic better than Guardians of the Galaxy.
 * John Philiponus — 6th century polymath.
 * Castorocauda — a beaver-like predecessor of modern mammals, from halfway through the age of the dinosaurs
 * Beelzebufo — A gigantic frog that may have eaten baby tyrannosaurs. I also made the graphic where it dwarfs a full-grown bullfrog.
 * Virginia Heinlein — Wife of Robert Heinlein. I've written a huge chunk of Bob's article, too.
 * Richard Timberlake — One of the most important living economists. And a great guy.
 * List of basil cultivars — I made this primarily for my own edification, to organize my basil-planting plans for that year, but it became a Featured List on Wikipedia. Also List of tomato cultivars
 * Moultrie Flag — Also known as the Liberty Flag, one of the first American flags in the Revolutionary War
 * Yellow curry — not quite as yummy as snow peas, but worth having an article
 * Snow pea — Yummy.
 * 15 Bean Soup — Savory.
 * Russian tea cake — Okay, it's one thing for nobody to bother with trivial things like world-changing economic or political works, but how is it that nobody had made an article for this amazing pastry?
 * Elijah P. Lovejoy Monument — A 120 foot tall spire raised for the top abolitionist of the Saint Louis area, murdered while defending his anti-slavery newspaper's printing press from mindless thugs.
 * Catalaphyllia — The coral beloved by everyone with a reef tank.
 * The Denationalization of Money — Another important text by Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, that didn't have an article
 * Morgan's Riflemen — Without these guys, we may well have lost the American Revolution. Daniel Morgan, Nathaniel Greene, and Casimir Pulaski (no relation) won the war, not George Washington, who was losing it in the North, but happened to be there to take credit for the final British surrender, in a Yorktown battle Washington had actually opposed fighting, which had been initiated by the French (Rochambeau) and Virginians without his knowledge.
 * Saint Louis cuisine — Can you believe this article didn't exist?
 * Indica (Ctesias) — The first, albeit dubious, account of India and perhaps China known to the Western world. Ctesias was a Greek writer in Persia in the 5th century BC.
 * The Counter-Revolution of Science — One of the most important topics in the Philosophy of Science is this work by Friedrich Hayek.
 * Cladodont — The most dominant type of shark in the devonian, didn't have an article. I actually bought a cladodont tooth off of eBay in order to take the pic used therein.
 * Three-hand effect — If you were a piano music aficionado in the mid 19th century, this would be the FIRST article you'd create. But only 150 years later, nobody had made it at all. When he was alive, Franz Liszt was more famous for his version of the three-hand technique than for his classical compositions. And it's the only reason Thalberg is even remembered to history.
 * The Constitution of No Authority — Lysander Spooner was the most important abolitionist of his day, but reacted to the extreme wrongs of the Civil War with this criticism of forced submission to authoritarian government.
 * Our Enemy, the State — Both modern American Conservatism and libertarianism would not exist in their current forms, without this book, which is attacking the authoritarian state, not government in general.
 * Galapagos tomato — The galapagos islands have their own unique tomato species (plural).
 * Thomas Godfrey — wrote the first professional play by an American author, The Prince of Parthia. The educated thespians among you probably know that one. He definitely deserved an article.
 * The next several are all seminal economic books, none of which had articles. It's one of those categories that is strangely neglected. Same with aquaria, exotic pets, and horticulture. Not sure why, since they all have large fan bases.
 * Della Moneta — Galiani's book is at least as important as The Wealth of Nations, which it laid the foundation for, yet it didn't even have an article. All modern realms of monetary theory are explicitly identified herein.
 * Trade of the World — Isaac Gervaise (no relation) wisely destroys mercantilism and protectionism in this super-early monetary theory epistle.
 * Money and Trade — This book is not as famous as it should be. John Law convinced the Crown to set up one of the first paper money systems, using this missive.
 * Of the Balance of Trade — One of the most important post-classical philosophers, David Hume, wrote a book that changed the way economists saw money, and nobody'd made an article for it.
 * On the Writing of Speculative Fiction — Robert Heinlein may have influenced more Science Fiction writers than any other author, or any other human but Hugo Gernsback, and this is his most famous advice on how to write.
 * Uncloudy Day — This is one of the most-covered gospel songs of all time. No matter what kind of music you like, you should check out The Staple Singers version here, which helped inspire Bob Dylan to become a musician. The deep, soulful vocals starting halfway through were coming from the heart of a 14 year old girl.
 * Cyberpunk (novel) — This is the story by Bruce Bethke that named the entire cyberpunk genre, and nobody'd made the article for it. I also had to make one for his parody of the genre, Headcrash.
 * Dianthus plumarius — commonly known as the garden pink, this is the flower from which the color pink got its name...and yet nobody had made an article, I guess because this flower was trendy only back in the 17th century, and is almost forgotten today.
 * SegWit — The BitCoin branching that allowed better scaling
 * The Kentucky Volunteer — The first song copyrighted under the brand-new US Constitution in 1794, by one of the top American publishers of music for that decade, and one of its key musicians.
 * A Discourse on the Love of Our Country — The famous Richard Price speech that set off one of the most important pamphlet wars (pre-internet meme wars eventually silenced by the advent of copyright law) in history, the Revolution Controversy
 * Crazy About My Baby — the first Rock & Roll song, recorded by Blind Roosevelt Graves in 1929.
 * The Army of a Dream — A story by Rudyard Kipling, which inspired Robert Heinlein in his writing of Starship Troopers
 * Young Thing, Wild Dreams (Rock Me) — A hit song in the early 1980s, by Red Rider.
 * A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World — A book by Edward Cooke, famous in the early 18th century, with an account of the rescue of castaway Alexander Selkirk, leading to the writing of Robinson Crusoe
 * Silkhenge — A tiny structure that can mysteriously appear in places in South America, which turns out to be built by a species of spider to protect their eggs.
 * React Fiber — the new engine revamping the React library/framework popular in JavaScript.
 * Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry? — an article published by Robert Heinlein in 1957, critical of those advocating a unilateral American ban on nuclear testing.
 * The double thank-you of capitalism — the famous phrase explaining that when two people trade voluntarily, they both become richer.
 * Physalis infinemundi — the oldest known species in the solanum family, known as "the first fossil tomato".
 * Our Noble, Essential Decency — The most famous of the This I Believe essays collected by Edward R. Murrow, this one written by Robert Heinlein
 * Horns of Ammon — The spiral horns that Egyptian and Greek royalty had depicted on their heads as an endorsement of the god Amun
 * Carry On (CSN&Y Song) — That's right, this song you've heard a thousand times on album-oriented rock stations didn't have an article, even in 2019.
 * The Four Horsemen (Aphrodite's Child song) — I created the album article 15 years earlier.
 * The Android and the Human — Dick follows up on the ideas he outlined in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and others he would expand upon in A Scanner Darkly
 * The Malindi Kingdom — This East African nation was a crossroads for global trade in the 14th century, even visited by famous Chinese explorer Zheng He, as well as India, Portugal, and Arabs. And yet in 2020 didn't have an article.
 * The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom — by Herbert G. Gutman, a book refuting the Moynihan Report's racist claims that black families were falling apart because of permanent damage done by slavery.
 * The Rihla — by ibn Battuta, this is the travelogue written by the man who travelled farther than anyone else known in history until the modern era. It's his 14th century account of travel from his home in Morocco to Egypt, Mecca, Persia, Mogadishu, the Swahili Coast, Byzantium, India, China, Spain, and Mali, a voyage of about 75.000 miles...three times as far as Marco Polo.
 * Arthur Dudley — A possible son of Queen Elizabeth, "The Virgin Queen" who had a love affair with Robert Dudley, moved him into a suite right next to her bedchamber, and "fell ill" with a condition that "made her body swell" twenty years before Arthur showed up as a young adult claiming her as his mother. I think silly people who seriously believe she died a virgin were very determined not to document this interesting story.
 * Honky Tonk Train Blues — Perhaps the earliest boogie-woogie recording, certainly one of the greatest boogie songs before the genre was renamed "Rock and Roll"
 * The Doorway Effect — The reason you forget what you were doing, when you walk into another room

Honorable mention

 * The article for Galileo didn't include his full name, "Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaulti de Galilei", until I added it in 2019.
 * Speaking of names, the ibn Battuta article didn't even have an explanation about his nickname, much less the name you and I know him by, Shams al-Din Abu’Abdallah Muhammad ibn’Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Lawati al-Tanji ibn Battuta. The horrors. Anyway, I felt that might benefit the article.
 * Cyberpunk didn't have a History and origins section, until I added it.
 * Fossil didn't have a History of the Study of Fossils section until I added it. Did you know that Classical Greek culture was strongly influenced by fossils?
 * Can you believe that An Unjust Law is No Law at All was nothing but a stub? MLK Jr would be horrified. I've fleshed it out.

Multicat Script
My latest script project

Star Trek Template Project
I've moved this project to its own page: User:Kazvorpal/startrek-template

Paleo Template
I'm now working on a template to give quick summary to basic stats, initially for dinosaurs, but perhaps eventually for more. It's User:Kazvorpal/paleo-template

Contact
-- Way Too Much Information About KAZ