User:Loganberry

Note: The text which used to be here can be found at User:Loganberry/Olduserpage.



What I write
I particularly enjoy writing biographical articles on cricketers. Thanks to WikiProject Cricket I was inspired to try to make sure we had something on every man to have played first-class or List A cricket for Worcestershire. After something like three years, that aim has now been achieved!

I'm also interested in motorsport, particularly hillclimbing; as well as articles of local interest (eg Bewdley). I'm a fur (see furry fandom), so keep an eye on related articles, but don't do very much editing on that subject at the moment. When I have bits and pieces of spare time I try to help with grammar and spelling, especially making translated text flow better and using correct punctuation. Correcting it's to its takes up more time than it ought to!

Wikiphilosophy
I really don't think that I would want to be an administrator, despite having made several thousand edits: I try hard, but I don't think I could stand back and coolly reflect enough to do that job. Besides, I don't really want to spend my time on administration: I want to spend it on writing and improving articles. In that connection, I occasionally worry slightly that Wikipedia is becoming too much of a collection of talking shops, and too little of a project to write an encyclopedia. Somewhere on WP recently I read someone complaining that top admins and top editors now barely overlap at all, and that does bother me too.

I'm generally inclusionist, but with a range of prejudices like everybody else: for example, I don't really like the idea that every high school on Earth seems to be be eligible, even though many are only notable very locally, whereas some much more well-known commercial companies are not. Boring Business Systems, which is known to anyone who's typed "boring" into Google, was a good example: that did indeed fail the appropriate notability standards (WP:CORP), so the deletion was correct, but if we applied the same tough standards of notability to schools then so would about 95% of those!

Whinges
(American English speakers please note that this word is supposed to have a G in it!)

There are lots of things I could whinge about, but many of them are simply the result of inexperienced editors making mistakes in good faith, and I've done enough of that in my time!

Article names
Two things I really wish would improve are the tendency of some editors to put quotes around new article names (eg "Example article title"), and the lack of attention to correct capitalisation - which matters in the second and subsequent words. There are too many Forename surnames around.

Trivia sections
These are an absolute pain nine times out of ten, and almost never make an article look better. If a fact is notable and can be sourced, then it can and should be incorporated into the article proper; if it isn't, then it shouldn't be in the article at all. Far too often trivia sections are being used as a dumping-ground for "cool stuff". This is rapidly becoming an exception to my generally inclusionist sympathies.

"In popular culture" sections
Frankly this could be lumped in with trivia, since that's usually what it is. It drives me up the wall when an article on, say, apples has a section listing every single occasion (in the last five years...) that some has-been soap actor was seen eating an apple on screen.

Advertising and recycled press releases
We should crack down a bit more on these, which have infested tech-related articles in particular. Loganberry's Law of Tech Articles: any section including the word "solutions" more than twice is probably worthless.

Americanism
I'm not really talking about a lack of non-US coverage in many international articles: that can and should be rectified by people adding more content to articles. What irritates me, and I suspect a lot of other people, is the tendency in some quarters to use terms such as "foreign" to mean "foreign to US-based readers". This is absolutely unacceptable in an international encyclopedia. Of course, the same applies to other forms of nationalism, but Americanism is by a million miles the worst offender.

Useful things

 * DEFAULTSORT is very handy, but remember it isn't actually a template, even though its syntax is very (confusingly) close to one. It's a magic word, so use   with a colon, not a pipe symbol. The Charles Gregory article uses this.


 * You can use   to indicate a two-column list of footnotes, rather than messing around with the old "div" method.

Fun things


Multilicensing
I am very pleased that the move to CC-by-sa 3.0 has taken place, and thoroughly support it. The template below is now probably of historical interest, but I shall leave it in place in case it turns out to be significant. However, the new licensing arrangements trump the old ones.

I agree to multi-license all my text contributions to the main, main talk and template namespaces, as described below. Contributions in other namespaces, such as user pages, are excluded. This agreement remains in effect so long as the following notice remains on my page.