User:RHaworth



Roger W Haworth

I live in Croydon, UK. My web sites are at RHaworth.net.

Talk page policy from 2020 Jan
I have revised my view on talk page messages as originally expressed in "Parliamentary language" below. Parliamentary language tends to be confrontational. But Wikipedia is collaborative. So I will try to reflect this in my messages. (Clearly the aspect of parliamentary language that one must comment on the issues, not the person still apply.)

Parliamentary language
I have a well-justified reputation for blunt speaking on talk pages. But such pages are not a vicar's tea party. I take my standards from parliamentary language - if a Speaker would allow it then I use it. To summarise it: you must not call the honourable member opposite a fool but you may say that his proposal is foolish. But it would be better to replace "foolish" with a phrase such as "ill conceived" or "totally unworkable". Also, I always try to give positive advice, even if it is only "publish on your own website".

COI
There is a distinct school of thought that anybody can become a Wikipedia editor if you talk to them nicely and nurture them. I disagree: true Wikipedians are a distinct sub-species of Homo sapiens. People often tell them "get a life" - but Wikipedia is their life!

People come here to promote their company or band and write technically poor articles because they cannot be bothered to waste time learning wiki markup, etc. Are they ever going to become Wikipedians? No - the Ethiopian cannot change his spots nor the leopard his skin.

Protection
I am hesitant about protecting this page because doing so seems contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia. I have done so for one reason only: to save the good people who have repaired vandalism so many times from wasting their time in future. If you want to be rude to me, my user talk page is available but even there instead of pointless vandalism such as this (the IP address had no 'previous' so it was impossible to tell about what they were complaining) explain what your beef is - with a link.

I also protect my talk page archives. This is not to prevent messages - quite the reverse - I want to see them so I can reply. My talk page archives are not on my watchlist so if someone leaves a message there and does not ping me (and newbies don't know about ping) I will never see the message.

New page patrolling
Multi-posting. Sorting new articles by User Id helps me detect cases where an article has been posted multiple times. The record may be twelve copies of Neri vs. Senate. (There was a case of about twenty versions of College of the North Atlantic but these were potentially different articles and the creator had made a tiny change to each version.) When I find a multi-posting I usually merge all the versions together by doing a "forced merge to existing title". Then I restore all the edits. This resulted in me having the dubious honour of being top of the list of restorers for at least a year (2007 July 29 earliest listing available). (NawlinWiki overtook me on 2008 Sept 9 and looks set to stay top of this particular ranking.)

Articles started or heavily hacked about

 * London Stone (riparian) - I got a five minute spot on the wireless as a result of that
 * Gongoozle - my first tentative step into Wikipedia - 2004 Dec 21 as Anon. Now at gongoozle in Wiktionary
 * How can a tram route cross a trolley bus route without short circuits - lasted nearly 48 hours before being butchered
 * International Sand Sculpture Festival (FIESA) - just an excuse to link to some of my holiday snaps
 * No Man's Heath (four counties)
 * No Man's Heath, Cheshire
 * Category:Orders of magnitude (population) - actually I just created 1 E5 people. The category and the other articles were created by others within a few hours!
 * Subscriber toll dialling to fill empty link
 * Trunk vs Toll
 * UK STD code 1252
 * UK STD code 1438
 * Union Bridge - got listed on 'did you know'
 * Warlingham Park Hospital


 * List of all my creations (and many of my moves) up to 2008 Nov 13

Rescued from deletion

 * Apple Blossom Flower Fairies. Not my scene at all. I rescued it as a counter to the systemic bias here towards modern kidcruft. Then I discovered a better reason Cicely Mary Barker came from Croydon.
 * Boot house - I was surprised that I had never heard of them.
 * She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor and in the same genre &hellip;
 * My Girl's Pussy
 * spray pond
 * A Sea–Spell
 * Larry Harmon - a clown running for president - so what's new?
 * Westlake, Canberra

Map link templates
brldb -- brldb prim -- gbmaprim -- GBvoss -- stn art lnk -- mmukpc

Plus &#123;{oscoor}} which enables Egil Kvaleberg's brilliant map sources system to be called using grid references. See oscoor's rank in the most used templates list. I like adding grid refs to articles about GB places and I will also add them to articles about:
 * fiction - Llareggub and games - poohsticks
 * poetry - Cataract of Lodore and even &hellip;
 * people - James Hanratty, Mavis Enderby.

Disambiguation exercises
Boi -- Croydon (at the suggestion of Nickj) -- Hendon -- Hixon -- Lee -- Malden (Netherlands does not link to it!) -- Queen's College -- Seven Sisters -- Smithfield -- Sutton -- Uxbridge

Pictures uploaded
See pictures I have uploaded.

Favourites
The story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Discussed here in rather high-flown language but the parallels between the Encyclopedia of Tlön and Wikipedia are too close to ignore.

Guy Macon's frank admission of Wikipedia bias.

Number of edits
See the admin stats box at the top of this page. I had no ambition to figure high up the list of Wikipedians by number of edits but by being around for long enough, I have moved fairly well up it. The growth in my edit count over my first year is given below. I have given up recording it but the current value can be found from this edit counter. See also JamesR's league table of admins and WikiProject edit counters. Some landmarks:
 * 2008 Sep 08 - Number 1 by number of restorations
 * 2009 Apr 09 - demoted from 11th to 12th in the league table of deleters
 * 2015 Jul 14- crept past NawlinWiki to be Number Two in the deleters table. I have no wish to catch up with MZMcBride who achieved that massive count by deleting user talk pages of IP addresses using some sort of automation

I spend most of my time on this, the English Wikipedia, but despite speaking no other languages, I have made several contributions to other wikis.


 * 11133 (plus 2613 deleted) @ 05:43, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 9267 (plus 1693 edits to articles which are now deleted - mainly speedy tags - plus about 4000 deletions - I am an inclusionist really!) @ 04:18, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
 * 5731 @ 09:20:03, 2005-08-09 (UTC)
 * 2583 @ 2005 Jun 1
 * 1026 @ 10:29, 2005 Feb 15 (UTC)
 * 924 @ 21:56, 2005 Feb 9
 * 2 @ 08:19, 2005 Jan 1 plus a few as Anon before that