User:MelanieN

Things I've learned at Wikipedia

 * When you become an administrator, your user talk page gets a lot more interesting.
 * WP:Assume good faith can be a valuable approach in many circumstances of life, not just Wikipedia.
 * Use "page preview" before saving an edit.
 * Use the "thank" feature often.
 * It's amazing how often a controversial situation can be resolved by a simple rewording.
 * Check an article's history before proposing it for deletion.
 * Look for a plausible redirect in lieu of deletion.
 * Check new articles for copyright violations.
 * On Wikipedia, it's important to know when to stop arguing with people, and simply let them be wrong. (credit to User:Atsme)
 * Wikipedia guidelines are like scripture: somewhere in the labyrinthine network of rules, you can find support for any position. (originally by User:S Marshall, now borrowed from User:Fences and windows)

Wit and wisdom seen about town, good enough to share

 * The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.
 * I used to have a dream that my computer would be as easy to use as my phone. And my dream came true. Now I don't understand my phone either.
 * The bad news is, the guy who bullied you in school is still taking your lunch money. The good news is, he makes a pretty good Subway sandwich.
 * Some people say the glass is half empty. Some people say the glass is half full. I say, are you gonna drink that?
 * War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
 * Humankind: be both.

Wit? Wisdom? No, just puns.
Special collection: puns for nerds, aka: new units of measure. (Borrowed from Math-Explosion.com)
 * Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter: Eskimo Pi
 * 1 millionth of a mouthwash: 1 microscope
 * Weight an evangelist carries with God: 1 billigram
 * 365 days of drinking low-calorie beer: 1 Lite year
 * 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone: 1 Rod Serling
 * Half of a large intestine: 1 semicolon
 * 2000 mockingbirds: 2 kilomockingbirds
 * 8 nickels: 2 paradigms

And a couple of new ones:
 * I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
 * What do you call a snake that is 3.14 inches long? A πthon.
 * One man's fish is another man's poisson.
 * Why does the Norwegian Navy have bar codes on the sides of their ships? So that when the ships come into port, they can Scandanavian.
 * A pun enters a room and shoots ten people. Pun in, ten dead.
 * What do you get if you boil a funny bone? Laughing stock. (Sorry, I just thought this one was humerus.)
 * Never say "Part A" backwards. It's a trap.
 * I want to tell you about a girl who only eats plants. I bet you've never heard of herbivore.

About me
I am a native Californian (5th generation no less). I grew up in Oakland, California, and now live in San Diego. I attended Oakland Technical High School and Stanford University. I have also lived in Los Angeles, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Honolulu.

On Wikipedia I mainly work on articles related to San Diego, particularly things having to do with San Diego history and San Diego neighborhoods. I also function as a Wikignome, cleaning up or proofreading articles that I come across. And I occasionally "rescue" an article which had been nominated for deletion, by adding sources to prove notability, or by rewriting to meet Wikipedia standards. Others who want to do this kind of thing could look for "unreferenced biographies of living persons" at Category:Unreferenced BLPs.

I've been hanging around Wikipedia off and on since 2006. I began editing in earnest in June 2009, when I saw articles about the San Diego Yacht Club and Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego that contained blatant errors of fact. I corrected those errors, and was hooked. Fourteen short years later, I have become one of the 1,000 most active Wikipedians. Actually #896 last time I looked, but who's counting? 0;-D (That's my personal smilie: an angelic grin.)

In January 2015 the Wikipedia community decided it was high time I got down to work and handed me a mop. I enjoyed being an administrator, but I handed back the mop in April 2024.

Articles created
Articles I've created or substantially expanded include:


 * Point Loma, San Diego (a Good article)
 * Midway, San Diego
 * Old Town, San Diego
 * Sunset Cliffs, San Diego
 * La Playa, San Diego
 * Shelter Island, San Diego
 * Roseville-Fleetridge, San Diego
 * Loma Portal, San Diego
 * Bird Rock, San Diego
 * Downtown San Diego
 * Mission Valley, San Diego
 * Barrio Logan, San Diego
 * Sorrento Mesa, San Diego
 * Swan Canyon, San Diego
 * Camp Kearny
 * California Quadrangle
 * El Prado Complex
 * San Diego Pride
 * Fiesta del Pacifico
 * Wonderland Amusement Park (San Diego)
 * Rosecroft (San Diego)
 * Medico-Dental Building
 * San Diego Brewing Company
 * Beer in San Diego County, California (a Good Article)
 * Louis M. Martini Winery
 * May 2014 San Diego County wildfires
 * St. John's Presbyterian Church (Berkeley, California)
 * Griffith Park Zoo
 * South San Francisco Hillside Sign
 * La Jolla Recreational Center
 * Monarch School (San Diego)
 * Gompers Preparatory Academy
 * e3 Civic High School
 * Rock Academy
 * Serrano High School
 * Chaparral High School (Phelan, California)
 * Death Valley Academy
 * Paradise High School
 * United States International University
 * Roble Hall
 * Lane Medical Library
 * The Cocktail Hour
 * The Other Wise Man
 * The Littlest Angel
 * The History of White People
 * On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
 * La Loca (opera)
 * Eurydice (Aucoin)
 * The Central Park Five (opera)
 * Omar (opera)
 * Chocoholic
 * Assume a can opener
 * Dial (soap)
 * Garden State Fireworks
 * Mountain Fire
 * Canyon Fire 2
 * Fixer (person)
 * 2020 dismissal of inspectors general
 * Trump administration political interference with science agencies
 * Roly Bain
 * Fred Baker (physician)
 * Belle Benchley
 * David Bennett (opera director)
 * Jeff Berry (mixologist)
 * Kenneth C. Brugger
 * Jeffrey S. Buchanan
 * Russ Buettner
 * Patricia Charache
 * Samuel Charache
 * Wallace H. Clark, Jr.
 * D. C. Collier
 * C. Lockard Conley
 * Sandy Cornish
 * Roberto de la Madrid
 * Nancy Dickey
 * Gerry Driscoll
 * Lin Farley
 * Thomas B. Fitzpatrick
 * Fred Franzia
 * Ronne Froman
 * Casey Gwinn
 * Robert Heptinstall
 * Elliot Hirshman
 * John K. Frost
 * Walter S. Graf
 * Justin Halpern
 * John E. Hart
 * Ben Hulse
 * Grover Hutchins
 * J. J. Isler
 * Mitchell Landsberg
 * Levi Cooper Lane
 * William Walter Leake
 * Opal Lee
 * Charles L. Lewis (California politician)
 * Henry T. Lynch
 * Doug Manchester
 * M. Brian Maple
 * Bejun Mehta
 * Sherman Mellinkoff
 * Denise Mueller-Korenek
 * Walter R. Nickel
 * Mark F. Pomerantz
 * D. Gregory Powell
 * Frederick Taylor Pusey
 * James Robb (pathologist)
 * Dave Roberts (California politician)
 * Alfred D. Robinson and Marion James Robinson (A Good Article)
 * Fernando Sanford
 * Glenn Shafer
 * Scott Sherman (politician)
 * Peter W. Smith
 * Suzy Spafford
 * Bill W. Stacy
 * Thomas Welton Stanford
 * Marcus Stern (journalist)
 * George Stevens (California politician)
 * Salvador Torres
 * Catalina Trail
 * Fred and Norah Urquhart
 * Robert J. Vlasic
 * Aldred Scott Warthin
 * James A. Washington Jr.
 * Shirley Weber
 * Harry M. Wegeforth
 * Royce Williams
 * John H. Yardley
 * Laura Yeager
 * R. Timothy Ziemer
 * List of breweries in San Diego County, California
 * List of presidents of the American Medical Association

Articles rescued
A partial list of articles I "rescued", by improving them after they had been nominated for deletion in an AfD (articles for deletion) discussion:


 * Folie à Deux (winery)
 * Benjamin Franklin Haynes
 * James W. Maney
 * Ghân-buri-Ghân
 * Robert Boone
 * Thomas William Ferguson
 * William James Wanless
 * Harry S.N. Greene
 * Lucy Jefferson Lewis
 * Kama'aina
 * Del Cerro, San Diego
 * Sunshine tax
 * Kit Carson Park
 * Frank Worth
 * California Chaparral Institute
 * Emil Frei
 * Stephen Decatur Bross
 * Hitler's Munich apartment
 * Real Mex Restaurants
 * Buzzword
 * The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
 * helped with Ika Hügel-Marshall (a Good Article)
 * helped with Naomi Sager
 * Huy Duc
 * John Thomas sign
 * Lou Bellamy
 * San Diego Repertory Theatre
 * "Big Bay Boom incident," renamed and refocused to Big Bay Boom
 * "The Wise Men," renamed and refocused to The Wise Men (book)
 * "The Celebrity Source," renamed and refocused to Rita Tateel


 * and 409 others, primarily articles which had been tagged as "unreferenced BLP" (unreferenced biography of a living person) - a tag which can result in their deletion.

Articles used for "Did you know...?"
Articles I wrote or expanded that were featured on the Wikipedia front page with "Did you know...?" items:
 * Bejun Mehta (586 views)
 * Old Town, San Diego (1,100 views)
 * Camp Kearny (658 views)
 * Salvador Torres (423 views)
 * assisted with USS Recruit (TDE-1) (4,300 views)
 * William Smeathers (997 views)
 * assisted with Robert O. Peterson (2,400 views)
 * Justin Halpern (3,700 views)
 * Suzy Spafford (1,400 views)
 * The Cocktail Hour (1,700 views)
 * J. J. Isler (602 views - not bad considering it up was from 10 pm to 4 am during Christmas week!)
 * Roberto de la Madrid (1,700 views)
 * Gerry Driscoll (2,400 views)
 * Ronne Froman (3,000 views)
 * Dial (soap) (5,350 views - my first DYK to make it into the DYK Statistics page)
 * Stanford University Libraries (The way the hook was written, it appeared to be about Jane Stanford rather than about the libraries. The library article got only 566 views, while the Jane Stanford article got 5,400.)
 * assisted with La Playa Trail (1,900 views)
 * Rosecroft (San Diego) (3,950 views)
 * Chocoholism (2,265 views)
 * John E. Hart (1,296 views)
 * William Walter Leake (2,129 views)
 * M. Brian Maple (only 861 views, although the other link in the DYK - "Woodstock of physics" - got 2500 views)
 * Beer in San Diego County, California (712 views)
 * Marcus Stern (journalist) (524 views)
 * Henry T. Lynch (481 views)
 * Aldred Scott Warthin (446 views)
 * Doug Manchester (522 views)
 * Fiesta del Pacifico (393 views)
 * assisted with Main Quad (Stanford University) (2,154 views) (now a Good Article)
 * ‪History of Chinese Americans in Seattle‬ (3,262 views)
 * assisted with Ika Hügel-Marshall (6,051 views, another for the record book, appropriately timed to appear during Black History Month)
 * The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky (5,696 views, another one for the record books!)
 * La Loca (opera) (683 views)
 * assisted with Naomi Sager (2,692 views)
 * Huy Duc (1,008 views)
 * Fred Baker (physician) (932 views)
 * Walter S. Graf (1,194 views)
 * Sandy Cornish, (8,548 views) - my most-viewed DYK ever, and another for the record book - or is it?
 * Staten Island boat graveyard (14,387 views on the first day, and actually 26,549 counting the two days) - OK, now I suspect the new page view stats really ARE inflating the counts)
 * Roly Bain (6,349 views)
 * assisted with Bowling Green massacre
 * assisted with Foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration
 * Peter W. Smith
 * Denise Mueller-Korenek
 * David Bennett (opera director)
 * Jeff Berry (mixologist)
 * Laura Yeager
 * Paradise High School
 * Eurydice (Aucoin)
 * The Central Park Five (opera)
 * 2020 dismissal of inspectors general
 * The Littlest Angel
 * Mark F. Pomerantz
 * Opal Lee
 * Louis M. Martini Winery
 * Robert J. Vlasic
 * Royce Williams - my most-viewed DYK ever, it ran for parts of two days, August 22-23, totaling 72,836 108,630 views on the two days. (Oops, my mistake - I forgot to add the two days together.)
 * Fred Franzia
 * Sylvia Wu
 * Omar (opera)

Favorites
Some of my favorite Wikipedia pages include:
 * List of lists of lists - I laughed out loud to discover this is a real thing
 * All your base are belong to us
 * Hotel toilet paper folding
 * On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
 * Towel Day
 * History of Wikipedia
 * Glossary
 * Humorous glossary
 * How many Wikipedians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
 * Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass
 * Wikipedia:"With all due respect..." (damn, this got deleted - but it was a great essay)
 * Wikiderata (a takeoff on Desiderata)
 * Last topic pool
 * User:Antandrus/observations on Wikipedia behavior
 * The Cynic's Guide to Wikipedia
 * User:Valfontis/Valfontis' Law
 * Classification of admins by what their name says they are
 * Songs about Wikipedia/The RfA Candidate's Song
 * Editing Wikipedia is like visiting a foreign country

Useful links

 * - a template invented just for me! Thank you, User:Atsme.
 * Wikipedia:Copy-paste
 * user piechart
 * Pages created counter
 * AfD stats
 * RfA vote counter


 * Earwig's copyvio detector
 * tool for English language publications in India
 * Your logical fallacy is...
 * California articles for cleanup
 * Discussions at my talk page about applying the DS: 1, 2 3

Barnstars and such

 * User:MelanieN/Barnstars