User:Northernhenge

Policies
When he was a more active editor Northernhenge made an effort to take policies and guidelines into account though this is not his natural inclination. He might have sometimes referred to Biographies of living persons, Neutral point of view, No original research, Verifiability or What Wikipedia is not. He always intended to leave edit summaries but didn't always do so. He was particularly negligent with minor edits and talkpage edits. He probably still imagines that editors read their own talkpages in any case and that minor edits are self-explanatory but that's not really an excuse.

What's not to like?

 * In two-or-three words, drive-by tagging. If you have time to tag “Cleanup bare URLs”, you have time to clean them up. Don’t demand that other editors do things you can’t be bothered to do yourself. Also, they’re a problem for new editors. Someone sees a drive-by tag and feels good about applying what they think is a quick and effective fix, for example deleting text that could have been rephrased, or adding a reference to a YouTube video or Facebook page. They now also think they’re helping by adding their own drive-by tags in similar situations across Wikipedia. Drive-by tags take up other people’s time and mislead new editors.


 * Ownership of articles is a tricky one. We need enthusiasts but editing an "owned" article can be frustrating and drive editors away from the page and maybe Wikipedia itself. But how many articles would not exist if it wasn't for their !owners? To use some very old examples (he should move on really!), CLANNAD and Yodeling have probably illustrated both sides of the argument at one time or another.


 * Don't get Northernhenge started on the whole Wiki Loves Monuments fiasco from quite a few years ago now. Essentially a mass-destruction of numerous editors’ hard work, just to standardise a load of pages to (wait for it…) enter a competition.

What's to like? (Current favourite page.) (Always out of date.)

 * Heimskringla
 * And his favourite redlink is... Sylvie Facon

Activites

 * Northernhenge isn't quite sure what an edit count actually measures. (See also Editcountitis, AfD statistics and his edits in the wikipedia namespace.) When – despite this – he looks at his total number of edits, he includes his Commons edits on purpose, and other namespaces because he’s too lazy to think about which should be be included.
 * Results from an API query
 * He was seen for a while at Articles for deletion and could have got hooked on Categories for discussion or even Disambiguation pages with links until WP:BUSYLIFE took over. WikiProject Deletion sorting/Women looks important, given the gender imbalance here.
 * Another place to while away the hours (articles with leads that are too short)
 * He rarely creates articles.
 * He's a reviewer who therefore visits Special:PendingChanges.
 * Lua looks interesting.

Cataloguing fairy tales

 * Search for "Aarne-Thompson Grouping" (mainly found in infoboxes)
 * Search for articles in ATU categories
 * Categories which use the "Fairtytale_collector_category_lede"
 * WikiProject Folklore/To do/ATU fairytale notability

Obvious punctuation errors
For example, searching for insource:/[,;][;,]\<ref/ found 544 articles in May 2024. There's work to be done!

London Underground
Northernhenge wonders if articles such as these could be brought together more clearly. It’s a shame that category pages can’t be used as articles on this wiki. Maybe a family tree would work. {{quotebox |align=left|

Map

 * 1908 map

Articles

 * Underground Electric Railways Company of London
 * Baker Street and Waterloo Railway
 * Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, a.k.a. Hampstead Tube Railway
 * Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway
 * Central London Railway
 * City and South London Railway
 * District Railway
 * Metropolitan Railway
 * Great Northern & City Railway

Related articles

 * Widened Lines
 * Snow Hill tunnel (London)
 * Great Northern & City Railway

Related lines

 * London and Blackwall Railway (Docklands Light Railway)
 * London, Chatham and Dover Railway
 * North and South Western Junction Railway

Categories

 * Railway stations in London
 * Predecessor companies of the London Underground}}

Search tools

 * PetScan
 * Quarry
 * SPARQL queries against wikidata

An idea on-hold for a long time
One of Northernhenge’s early efforts (June 2010) was recreating the Whitland and Cardigan Railway using edits like this one, either to the railway station articles or the towns if they had no article. The town links were a bit controversial, though most of them survive as of August 2022. Since 2010, someone has created all the remaining station articles and added their own versions of the “rail line” links to the new pages, so Northernhenge’s original edits are redundant really. The original idea was to do the same thing elsewhere to recreate other vanished railway lines but, to avoid controversy, every former station would need its own article and it would be hard to demonstrate notability in many cases. Maybe navboxes would have worked better than “rail line” links.

Other wikis

 * WikiVoyage
 * Commons (Uploads)
 * MediaWiki
 * Meta
 * Wikidata
 * Books

Tip of the day etc.

 * 1) Useful citation tool
 * 2) Don't forget Database download
 * 3) Explore Category:Lists based on Wikidata
 * 4) Tips...