User:Pliny

Manifesto
I work mainly as a social worker at the moment and have a general background in the arts, particularly the performing and visual arts. My particular interest is in contemporary art, counter culture, the underground, transgressive art, new movements and initiatives, art controversy, innovation, unorthodoxy, Postmodernism, and comedy. Born in Brum, I am a confirmed Birmingham City supporter. My wife, who is French, is an artist, and also makes contributions, mainly on art. We are both active in LGBT issues. We used to live in Brighton. Since 2009 we have lived in Suffolk.

I became interested in Wikipedia when I was researching some arcane stuff and found the information on Wiki. This makes me tend towards being an inclusionist, as I think Wiki can provide a source of information that isn't available elsewhere&mdash;or at least isn't always easy to find. This is particularly the case in the arts, where a lot of things outside the mainstream build up a complex picture of relationships and influences, which are necessary to an understanding of how culture functions. However, I certainly don't think every name in the phone book deserves an entry, but I do think some minor achievements can have both interest and encyclopedic value.

WikiProject Arts
 '''WikiProject Arts Announcing the creation of WikiProject Arts, an effort to create a collaboration between all arts projects and artistically-minded Wikipedians in order to improve arts coverage.

WikiProject Visual arts
Some of the tasks:
 * Check for factual errors on visual arts pages.
 * Check for spelling errors on visual arts pages.
 * Check categorization of existing articles and help organize.
 * Create new pages as requested.
 * Create and edit pages about artists.
 * Upload and add images to visual arts pages.
 * Add links to websites where more art can be viewed.
 * Expand art stubs and artist stubs into full articles.
 * Check references on visual arts pages.

WikiProject Contemporary Art
Please have a look at this if you can help.

Editing tip for newcomers
Some of the coding on Wiki is difficult, or other things like categories might not be easy to discover. Find another article similar to the one you're working on, click the edit button, then copy the relevant code, categories, stub notice or whatever, and paste it into your own article, changing the text where relevant. You can do this for inserting pictures into an article as well.

Writing articles

 * The perfect article
 * Lead section
 * Guide to layout
 * Manual of Style
 * Neutral point of view
 * Verifiability
 * Reliable sources
 * Footnotes
 * Citing sources
 * Citing sources/example style

Images

 * Image use policy
 * Image copyright tags
 * Image description page
 * Fair use criteria

Other

 * Policy Library
 * Merging and moving pages
 * Boilerplate text
 * Help desk
 * 5000 newest articles
 * Wikipedia Commons

Vandalism

 * Administrator intervention against vandalism
 * Requests for investigation
 * Template:TestTemplates

Templates

 * Wikipedia:Template messages
 * Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace

Articles for deletion

 * WikiProject Deletion sorting/Visual arts
 * WikiProject Deletion sorting/Arts
 * Deletion process
 * Guide to deletion
 * Jimmy Wales on AfD courtesy problem + Another AfD example