User:Kelvinc/Archived January 2018

Archived 1 January 2018.

''Because we live in an age where humour is unfathomable and digging up online histories is par for the course: the following is mostly tongue in cheek, especially the political stuff. I've already had someone accusing me of agenda pushing for trying to correct OR/POV such as File:Brain_drain.PNG so I'm sure some day someone will dig this up and accuse me of being the reincarnation of Cecil Rhodes or something. I don't really edit Wikipedia anymore so I'm not bothering to clear this up (it caches all previous edits anyway), but I thought I'd let it stand with some context.''

Hello. The most I can say about myself is that I'm just a fellow Wikipedian: I do not claim to be particularly well-versed in any subject, so nowadays I mostly try to trim the hedges: looking out for copyvios, re-writing awkward English, and so forth. I reached my 2000th edit on the first day of 2008 and my 3000th edit in the same year.

Anglospherism
My primary interest is politics, particularly within the "White Commonwealth": the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and occasionally dabbing into Éire and South Africa. Particularly, I have a unhealthy obsession with following Australian politics, the unhealthiness stemming mostly from the fact that I live in Canada. A recent Ruddslide had increased the urgency of maintaining fact from fiction in the Westminster world: keeping tides of users from prematurely changing titles such as "Prime Minister of Australia" in article had been my biggest beef in the few days after the election.

Incidentally, this current event has increased my appreciation for some of the political knowledge of my compatriots: our recent chain of minority governments makes us a lot more aware of the difference between winning the election and actually getting sworn in as Prime Minister a couple of weeks later. Folks like David Emerson and Michael Fortier really understand the difference.

I should note that this interest is partly out of laziness: it's much easier as a Canadian to relate to the Tory/Coalition/National versus Labour/Labor/Labour contests than trying to figure out the nationally cleaved party system in Belgium, or why Switzerland operates pretty much on a permanent grand coalition basis.

And don't even get me started on presidential or semi-presidential systems: understanding the United States is quite enough for me, thank you. Although I suppose if I ran my own country, it'd probably be semi-presidential: all the perks of being the head of state, and the sadistic fun of sacking a prime minister whenever he pisses me off... ...excellent. 

Sinospherism
After all that, it therefore may surprise you to know that I am also keen to offer my perspective, as a Chinese person, to articles where I find the Sinocentric view to be inadequately expressed. Or, more accurately, where I find the Sino-eccentric views to be excessively expressed. I am not planning to launch invasions of Outer Mongolia or the Outer Northeast from Wikipedia, but I still think there's some value to pointing out that despite the de facto independence of the island of Taiwan from Beijing's grasp, they still fly the same flag as the one that flew over the rest of China until 1949, and is the same flag that the Reds themselves (nominally) fought under while beating off the Wokou.

At the same time, though, I find POV-pushing by my brethren to be totally tasteless and embarrassing by association, and thus will be just as adamant about getting that kind of ridiculousness out of Wikipedia as the next person.

In this stream, I hope to be following in the footsteps of Blueshirts, Jiang, Миборовский, Pryaltonian, and Yuje, although maybe being less of an ass. 

Wikipedism
I had previous contributed through the IP address 69.157.200.158, between 30 June and 28 July 2004. My first article is on the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform (British Columbia), which I'm slightly embarrassed to admit is not much better today than it was three years ago.

They say that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small, which is why it's not surprising that Wikipedia is full of its share of cranks and nutjobs. One time, because I reverted some unverifiable edits about a housing development, I was accused of working for "the man" and received an RfC, but the instigator forgot to post it onto the appropriate page. Therefore, I decided to do him a favour and put the limelight on this dirty episode of my Wikipedia career, and to archive the event for posterity.

Recently, I have taken an interest in maintaining Wikipedia as a free encyclopedia: namely, hunting down copyright violations. This interest began when procuring the necessary license for this wonderful photo of Yésica Toscanini: the effort involved gave me new appreciation for the effort of such people as Videmus Omnia. Therefore, it really pisses me off when some hack just uploads an image downloaded from another web site and then proceeds to pretend that it's perfectly fine to use it here. For those who just don't seem to get it, here is my interpretation of how fair use works:
 * 1) Someone, such as a professional photographer, or a graphics designer, makes an image.
 * 2) That person may have used tools such as a camera, a computer, Photoshop, etc., to produce this image.
 * 3) Can you, given these tools, produce an image that conveys the information necessary for Wikipedia?
 * 4) *Note: your lack of artistic skills are not an excuse. Why do you think photographers and graphics designers get paid in the first place?  All we need is the basic information.  For example, in the case of Yésica, just enough of her visual appearance to identify her.  We don't need perfect lighting or her seductively gesturing for us, though those would be much appreciate the next time around.
 * 5) If it would be within your human abilities to do what the photographer or designer did with their copyrighted work, then don't upload it onto Wikipedia.

I suppose, in the big scheme of things, that I'm an eventualist exclusionist deletionist, though not quite as strongly as those descriptions suggest. I think it's silly to develop excessively strong feelings about Wikipedia. After all, "April 4, 2007. The day Wikipedia jumped the shark."

Or take July 25, 2008, when the Did you know... feature happily informs us:

And while we're at it, can someone implement these new templates ASAP?

Previously, I had littered this page with userboxes, but there had been some controversy over their use, leading to random editors re-formatting this page whenever a box gets killed. Being generally peeved at my user page being messed up by this process, all my former userboxes have been archived. Personally, I think the dust has sufficiently settled that I'm willing to give the boxes another go, but the effort required to add the dozens, if not hundreds, of worthy boxes seems a bit too much to chew at this stage.