User:NapoliRoma

''' "Probably right, but incomprehensible!" '''

NapoliRoma isn't a place; it's a couple of types of tomatoes. I have no particular affinity or aversion to tomatoes of any kind, but I had just coined an account name to use on (where else?) Rotten Tomatoes at about the same time I climbed on the WP bus, so I used it here, too, for lack of any better idea. 'Cuz, you know, I was only going to edit one or two things, anyway.

I seem to spend a lot of time on the history of computing, especially that related to open systems (one of the first articles I overhauled). I am also predisposed to wikignoming, such as untangling previously-impenetrable dab pages.

I would describe myself as a "rational inclusionist", characterized by an interest in preserving that which has a fighting chance at notability and being informative, tempered with a recognition that not everything has a fighting chance at notability and being informative.

Edits are from my own brain and do not necessarily reflect the views of past, current, or future employers. As if.

Pet peeves

 * Factoid-insertion vandalism
 * "Temporal float": use of terms such as recently, soon, and so on, which very quickly lose their intended context. I just discovered the when tag, which I will probably now proceed to overuse.
 * Multiple Editor Personality Disorder (aka "thread mode")
 * "Cleaning up white space": Huh? White space is good.  Lackofwhitespaceisoftenconfusing.  The specific "cleanup" of annoyance to me is editors who take citation templates that were laid out one-field-per-line (so-called "vertical formatting") and moosh them into one line. Maybe I can't convince you to use white space yourself (in which case I'm guessing you probably were never a programmer), but please don't unilaterally delete white space that another editor has gone to the trouble of inserting for clarity and ease of maintenance. (Note that this has nothing to do with, say, removing blank spaces at the end of sentences or collapsing multiple blank lines where only one is called for. Clean away and feel the pride!)
 * "Simplifying" links by avoiding redirects, often by adding or changing a pipe. If this is at all tempting to you, please read Wikipedia:Redirect#Do not "fix" links to redirects that are not broken.  The proper approach is to use the valid link that best matches the (presumably correct) text being linked—which, yes, could very well be a redirect, but often results in not having to use a pipe at all (simplification!). BOCTAOE; for example, using a pipe that expands an abbreviation upon mouse-hover isn't a bad idea at all.
 * Speaking of simplicity: I've found myself actively defending against the inclusion of unnecessary hatnotes, and it's all about avoiding clutter in any user interface. A couple of instructive examples:
 * The classic thought experiment: How Microsoft would redesign iPod packaging
 * How much Google is committed to simplicity: even if there's a "must have" link that needs to be added, their front page stays 28 words long.
 * Ponder these examples when you find yourself thinking, "Oh, just one more hatnote. What could it hurt?"

The "ASCII Table Rule of Thumb"
My inclination to inclusionism is much weaker on disambiguation pages: I believe that the more non-dab-related things are added to a dab page, the less functional the page becomes.

The common defense for adding extraneous bits is, "But, the page will be more useful to the reader if we include it!" I finally formulated a rule of thumb for this: if the same rationale could be used to justify adding an ASCII table to any arbitrary dab page, then it is not a sufficient rationale on its own.

Is Wikipedia a vast wasteland?
Alarmists abound, but to paraphrase Newton Minow (from the same speech that "a vast wasteland" came from): When Wikipedia is good, nothing—not the encyclopedia, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.

Of course, there are a lot of places where it just plain sucks out loud.

I mention this ("good", not "sucks out loud") because of the gem I ran across today[ kind of annoying, innit?]: the name of the S. S. Minnow turns out to have been chosen by Sherwood Schwartz as his own little protest/commentary/revenge against Minow. And there's a citation and everything. This is the kind of serendipitous discovery that keeps me coming back to Wikipedia.