User:Ritchie333

Ritchie333 is a fiftysomething software engineer, musician and real ale drinker.

Zen and the art of Wikipedia Maintenance

 * 1) Always have sources to hand when creating and expanding articles. Don't write articles based upon your own personal hypotheses and inferences. Don't write articles based upon knowledge that you half-remember learning, but have no idea from where or from whom. Write articles based upon actual, concrete, sources, and ensure that the article cites those sources. If you half-remember something, go and hunt up a source that covers it first, then write. If you don't do this, expect your articles to be speedy deleted, nominated for deletion or asking the AfC help desk why your article was declined.
 * 2) Calculus is good for mathematicians, and it's good for Wikipedians too. Don't worry about how competent an editor is now – focus on the first derivative and worry about their rate of competence change. A good newbie can teach themselves to become more competent. A bad newbie never will.
 * 3) "I think a good number of voices of compassion, balance and reason are probably closer to the Wiki community than most people realise. I don’t think the 91% male editors are all single with no female partners, sisters or daughters."
 * 4) On consensus : He who gets bored of the argument last, wins.
 * 5) Every time you start a thread on WP:ANI, God kills a kitten.
 * 6) ''My own wikocratic oath is : 'First, cause no drama'.
 * 7) I really wish wikilawyering were against policy.
 * 8) "Mark you this, Bassanio. The devil can cite Wikipedia Policy for his purpose." (The Merchant of WP:VENICE)
 * 9) Without the content, Wikipedia is just Facebook for ugly people
 * Hey, who are you calling ugly, ya mingaaah??! Martinevans123 (talk) 09:26, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
 * 1) "If I had a choice between trusting a compulsive liar locked in a straitjacket in a padded cell scrawling his inane ramblings about how the lizard people secretly run the world through an extensive mind control programme on the wall of said cell with his own faeces and trusting what is written in The Sun, I'd flip a coin because they truly are about equivalent in reliability."
 * 2) "... every time I have commented in general on infoboxes, I have criticized both advocates and opponents equally. I will continue to do so. I consider the whole matter to be one of the most useless wastes of time on Wikipedia, but a lot of editors feel passionate about this ongoing battle, for reasons that completely evade me."
 * 3) "It's important to remember that however set-apart and distinct we feel the project is, the point of contact with the real world is the user of the encyclopedia, the person who pops into Wikipedia to find some needed information or just to browse a bit, and couldn't care less what the Wiki-world experience is like to those inside of it"
 * 4) "If people actually wrote the encyclopaedia articles being hidden behind the Wikipedia-editor-made plot descriptions, the lists of fictional mentions, and the lyrics dumps, you all wouldn't get into these disputes in the first place, you know.  Time and again this has happened over 20 years, and time and again it has been the case that writing an actual encyclopaedia article ameliorates the dispute."
 * 5) On consensus : "if everyone opposes every proposal that doesn't 100% match their idea of perfection, nothing will ever happen"
 * 6) "Being right and being a dick are not mutually exclusive."
 * 7) If somebody tells you to "get a life", they might have a point. Enjoy editing Wikipedia, but don't let it consume you, and make sure you experience the real world enough to get perspective on things. Especially if you have a wife and kids.
 * 8) "As for why I like editing Wikipedia, well it’s better than watching Eastenders or Strictly Come Britain's Got The X-Factor or whatever passes for Saturday night television these days".
 * 9) When people have problems with editing wiki markup, it's a problem with the software's poor interface, not the end user.
 * 10) If you see an angry rant on a talk page about your revert to that article that talks about "the truth" but ends with — Preceding unsigned comment added by..., you can probably ignore it. If it's an IP, you probably can rest safe that your revert hasn't even been touched.
 * 11) There is no race to be "first" to answer a question on WP:HD, WP:RD, WP:AFCHD and WP:ANI .... all you get is an edit conflict with SineBot for your troubles if you're lucky.
 * 12) If you want to be an admin, find your best friend's car, take out the rotor arm, slash the tyres, then tell them to their face you did it. If you can survive the abuse you get back, you might have what it takes.
 * 13) "You have a userbox saying you want to be an administrator some day. Remove that userbox and the overtly political ones as well. Then, stop bouncing around like a ping pong ball, and start conducting yourself in a more level headed fashion. Those steps will enhance your chances."
 * 14) Twinkle has a lot of magic buttons to automate tasks. None of them are for writing content and adding sources. The best content editors ignore twinkle, and vice versa.
 * 15) Assume good faith can mean deleting an article or doing a blanket revert, then apologising to affected editors that you needed to do it.
 * 16) Those that can, do. Those that can't, bicker about the manual of style or the citation guidelines. I mean, who cares that somebody's falsely accused of murder – just put that bloody full stop BEFORE the ref tag.
 * 17) Make your articles good or utterly brilliant if you so wish, but beware the lure of the rubber stamp and remember that if it doesn't improve the encyclopedia, balls to it.
 * 18) "I don't have an effing clue what a template with a doi parameter or an id parameter is and could not care less, I edit articles on MUSIC because readers come hear to learn about MUSIC not all that technical bollocks."
 * 19) "Start with an article that looks like shit and reads like it was written by a high-school dropout. A hundred edits later, take another look at the article – and it still looks and reads like shit. That's because the intervening edits did useful things like replace m-dashes with n-dashes, capitalized the first letters of template names, added interwiki links, vandalized and reverted the vandalism, made sure that bold text was being used as laid down in the manual of style, removed extraneous blank lines and miscellaneous other actions which did not, in any fundamental way, improve the article. This is the problem with eventualism: it assumes that, somewhere along the way, someone's actually going to fix the real problems and not just niggle around the edges."
 * 20) If somebody really wants to win an argument, just let them. You'll live. As Mark Twain put it, "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of good example." (other religious magazines are available)
 * 21) If I see one more editor throw the term WP:RS at a newbie without explaining what it stands for and why it's relevant, I will scream.
 * 22) "We can't do anything to change Wikipedia until the WMF crumbles. In the meantime we should all go write an article to console ourselves." (with apologies to Banksy)
 * 23) As for gender itself, all we should be interested in here is what an editor has in their head, not in their pants.
 * 24) One of the most dangerous habits you can get into is to take Wikipedia too seriously. Dozens of editors have been indefinitely blocked at ANI and Arbcom because the encyclopedia is super-duper important and blocking them is soooooo unfair.
 * 25) If you use personal attacks in a debate, you're wrong. Even if you think you're right, you're still wrong. That the other party is also wrong is irrelevant.
 * 26) Any WP:CIVIL or WP:NPA based block of a user with at least 3 FAs will cause more problems than it solves. "Let's all move on guys and gals before this turns into another pantomime. I have an FAC to write."
 * 27) The longer the edit summary, the more likely the edit will be reverted. Nobody ever reverts "ce" or "fmt"
 * 28) On content disputes : "Often CS majors will just assume that everyone knows what Bates Theorem is or what O(log n) means. If they start doing this, stop them for a minute and say, “could you do me a favor, just for the sake of the exercise, could you please explain this in terms my grandmother could understand.” At this point many people will still continue to use jargon and will completely fail to make themselves understood. Gong! You don’t want to hire them, basically, because they are not smart enough to comprehend what it takes to make other people understand their ideas."
 * 29) In an argument involving two people, it's possible for both participants to be completely and utterly wrong, but good luck to anyone trying to convince them of this.
 * 30) "Since such a high percentage of anonymous IP editors are vandals, they are all treated like shit. Trying to make serious edits to Wikipedia as an IP editor is like blindly blundering through the countryside on the first day of hunting season dressed like a moose." Furthermore, Wikipedia has a surprising number of editors who think that openly declaring you are using an O2 4G IPv6 address is more "anonymous" than signing your posts "Dawnslayer666" which gives no clues to your identity or location whatsoever.
 * 31) "I think all new editors should be reported on ANI immediately. This would reduce editor retention to zero, and as older editors die or drop out we'd eventually have no editors at all. At that point there would be no more edit warring, no more conduct or content disputes, and no need for Arbcom. Paradise."
 * 32) "No one should cheer after a block ... doing so trivializes the most powerful tool in our toolbox and celebrates a power that should be handled with care."
 * 33) "AIV is not insert nickel, get a block - admins are supposed to use discretion."
 * 34) Wikipedia is here to create, improve, and host good articles, not to spank bad boys in new improvised ways.
 * 35) Never pull rank or throw your weight around, lest it backfire on you. "Nothing is more satisfying than winning an argument on its technical merits even when you should have lost it on political merits" and some long-standing non-admin editors love this, and a handful of IPs really love this.
 * 36) "Wait until you get the bit.  You will experience frustration on a level you've never seen.  Having the tools doesn't mean you can always use them. Wait until someone gets in a personal argument with you and starts calling you names, and then technically it might look like you are "involved" so you can't act, and seemingly every other person with an admin bit is out back taking a smoke break leaving you twisting in the wind...then two of their friends jump in, and you are just standing there getting busted in the chops, being called an "abuse adminz!" at ANI, etc.  It WILL happen, and you will run out of cheeks to turn, so you just have to take it for a while.  Sucks to be an admin sometimes."
 * 37) On !voting "keep" at AfDs : "If you think the article has good sources, then f...ing add them. They won't add themselves, you know."
 * 38) On "biased" editing - "I have strong views on Pol Pot. I'm not sure I'd want to read an article on him by people who didn't..."
 * 39) "I'm not one of those cementheads who think that filing an AfD somehow puts a freeze on the article.  If you improve it to the point where I change my mind on deletion, that's a win all around, right?"
 * 40) "If you are researching women in historical newspapers, for example Isophene Goodin Bailhache, and you search for 'Isophene Goodin Bailhache', or 'Isophene G. Bailhache' or 'Isophene Bailhache' and you find zero results and then said, 'oh well, this woman is not notable', you have just failed your entrance exam in Women History."
 * 41) "When such an editor is blocked, of course the pitchfork brigade turn up. And all too often they kind of have a point. ... Admins should always take time and care when blocking someone, but failing to do so when dealing with people who you know will have a pitchfork-bearing army behind them always strikes me as rather short-sighted"
 * 42) "Next time you think you're right and someone else is being a jerk, write whatever you were going to post on-wiki in a text file instead, or maybe in a vent email to a friend, or even, if you must, in an edit window, but wait till tomorrow to decide if it's really worth posting."
 * 43) "Blocking an IP for block evasion for nothing other than protesting their innocence should not happen . Ever. Blocking an established user for sharing an IP address with a troublesome user without supporting evidence should not happen. Ever. Blocking IP addresses that support a potentially maligned user, when there's no evidence they are a block evasion, as happened to the user at 77... on the Admin page, should not happen. Ever.  ..... Most people, especially newbies, would have walked away from Wikipedia long before being vindicated. That is not a good thing. Lessons should be learned from this. People are so pissed off at the trolls and socks that they are forgetting to assume good faith."
 * 44) "I wouldn't bother looking at Jimmy's talk page expecting anything enlightening. It serves primarily as flypaper to trap problem users".
 * 45) "I always log in to have a discussion, because it's otherwise impossible to keep tabs on who you're talking to. I don't really care if you call yourself "Shark Infested Custard Monster, Volume III" as long as the handle is consistent."
 * 46) "No matter how carefully ArbCom might work to enforce policies, no matter how delicate they might try to be in addressing an issue like this, and no matter how much they might try to clarify what happened - they'll still always get shit thrown at them."
 * 47) "It's a sign of the times that the billionth edit was to add a authority control template to a non-notable stub using AWB.  That was just busywork – gaming the system to boost edit count.  Editors who enjoy grinding naturally like using tools to amplify their activity.  Writing carefully researched and cited encyclopedia text is much harder to automate and so it's not done.  Another typical symptom of the problem is using an automated tool like Twinkle to drop a tag on an article rather than actually fixing the issue.  Such tools tend to bias activity towards brute-force fixes like deletion rather than activity that is difficult to automate such as writing and editing."
 * 48) "You realize that what happened here is that someone hurried over to ANI yelling "help, help! this guy is improving the encyclopedia in an unauthorized manner! somebody stop him!", and then somebody actually did, and now a bunch of people are nodding solemnly that yes, this was a thing that made sense?"
 * 49)  "I think many editors would like to see  unblocked! But there has always been a huge problem here; on the one hand, some editors are highly productive and it could be argued that there many positive contributions vastly out-weigh their negative ones; but on the other hand, their editing has been significantly problematic to the community. I don't believe that this is dichotomy has ever been satisfactorily resolved."
 * 50) "I do 99% of my editing on Android smartphones, using the desktop site, which is 100% fully functional on modern mobile devices. The only time I sit down at a desktop computer is to work on large image files. We would all be better off if the WMF shut down all these poor quality smartphone/mobile apps, which are an impediment to collaborative editing. I cannot imagine the amount of money that has been wasted on these crappy apps over the years, but "small fortune" comes to mind."
 * 51) "If 1.5 years, 33k+ edits, content creation (including good and featured work), solid anti-vandalism work, and interacting politely with others isn't enough [to pass Requests for adminship], I don't really know what would be.
 * 52) "Legal threat blocks (for things with often aren't anything like a legal threat) are a very popular opportunity for people to play sheriff."
 * 53) "Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too."
 * 54) "I note that threats, however veiled, that were designed to intimidate other users, are still being excused by some as acceptable in hunting down undeclared paid editors. Wikipedia is not a shooting gallery. This kind of bullying, which is what it is, is not condoned via mention of laws and not condoned via misuse of the checkuser tool".
 * 55) "The new WikiLove feature also makes it easier for you to show editors your gratitude as well. Use it very sparingly though, too many kittens ... um.. spoil the kitten-eating monsters".
 * 56) "It's essential we stop editors being nice to too many other editors. If we let Moops get away with wishing lots of us a Happy New Year, whatever next? Editors saying "well done" when someone reverts vandalism? People offering to help fix reference errors? An atmosphere of mutual support and respect? Wikipedia's core value of being a bunch of miserable ****s will be eroded, perhaps irreversibly".
 * 57) "To try and claim that "ChatGPT can spew out entire articles on virtually anything" is worrying: just as a trial I tried asking for a paragraph on an article I am writing: it fabricated two sources entirely (a book that doesn't exist and an ONDB source that goes to a completely different person). You can try and demean "bargain-bin content creation" or content creators if you like, but admins who don't understand what content is and the effort it takes to create or upgrade an article to a passable standard are not always best placed to deal with the issues at the heart of a dispute."
 * 58) "I do wonder if we should implement a Commons whitelist, i.e. everything from Commons is disallowed unless added to a list here at enwiki. It certainly might make the people at Commons who clearly don't give a shit about being a porn repository think again."
 * 59) "I'm only joking, so no one take me too seriously here, but I think writing an ALLCAPS LETTER DEMANDING IMMEDIATE ACTION is a bannable offense in and of itself."
 * 60) Civility, Competence, Diversity. Pick two.
 * 61) Domestos Reliable Sources. Kills all AfDs. Dead.

Plain and simple guides

 * User:Ritchie333/Plain and simple guide to A7
 * User:Ritchie333/Plain and simple guide to content creation
 * User:Ritchie333/Plain and simple guide to copyvios
 * User:Ritchie333/Plain and simple guide to vandalism

In mainspace

 * It's not the End of the World
 * Don't throw your toys out of the pram
 * Don't come down like a ton of bricks
 * Simple two-factor authentication - for administrators worried about somebody using their account to vandalise the main page
 * WP:ANI flu
 * WP:SQUIRREL

In here
Full list of pages (including any I've forgotten about)


 * User:Ritchie333/Annoying user, good content
 * User:Ritchie333/Don't overdose on citation requests
 * User:Ritchie333/Don't template the retirees
 * User:Ritchie333/Don't write like Ali G
 * User:Ritchie333/Favourite sources
 * User:Ritchie333/For gawd's sake, use edit summaries
 * User:Ritchie333/Hit and run editors
 * User:Ritchie333/How newbies see templates
 * User:Ritchie333/MOS for Dummies
 * User:Ritchie333/NOTCENSORED isn't just about boobies
 * User:Ritchie333/Shut up and show them the diff
 * User:Ritchie333/SPI considered harmful
 * User:Ritchie333/The Dumpy test
 * User:Ritchie333/Why admins should create content
 * User:Ritchie333/Wikipedia doesn't own you
 * Ambox humor.svg User:Ritchie333/Euphemisms
 * Ambox humor.svg User:Ritchie333/The Admin Problem - an in depth look at what makes ordinary decent people want to become admins
 * Ambox humor.svg User:Ritchie333/Any 'Dmin Will Do
 * Ambox humor.svg User:Ritchie333/As I was going to St Ives
 * Ambox humor.svg Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/SineBot

Other essays I happen to like

 * Observations on Wiki Behaviour
 * User:Beyond My Ken/thoughts
 * User:Giano/A fool's guide to writing a featured article
 * User:Giano/On civility & Wikipedia in general
 * User:GoldenRing/Taxonomy of new users
 * User:GreenMeansGo/WP:Death by template


 * User:MastCell


 * User:Moneytrees/CCI guide
 * User:NE Ent/Simple civility principle
 * User:Uncle G/Cargo cult encyclopaedia article writing
 * Maunus' laws
 * User:ThatPeskyCommoner/Essay on civility
 * User:Tom Morris/The Reliability Delusion - or, why asking "is 'x' a reliable source" is always a bad question
 * Professional opinion-havers
 * User:Valereee/RfA questions

Userboxes
These customised userboxes have gradually wound their way onto other people's pages. Feel free to "borrow" them at your leisure:

User:Ritchie333/Userbox LBMW User:Ritchie333/Userbox IAD User:Ritchie333/User VdGG User:Ritchie333/Userbox IBIO User:Ritchie333/Userbox ES User:Ritchie333/Userbox Suede User:Ritchie333/Userbox Nosun User:Ritchie333/Userbox Daily Mail

Code
Assorted Pywikibot scripts that do odds and ends:
 * User:Ritchie333/aceusers.py - dumps out all users who can vote in Arbitration Committee elections (slow)
 * User:Ritchie333/afcbios.py - looks through declined AfC biography submissions, and attempts to (crudely) print out those that might be of interest to WikiProject Women in Red
 * User:Ritchie333/dyks.py - dumps out all DYK nominations received by a user from into a list
 * WikiProject Women in Red/Drafts - script output


 * User:Ritchie333/wirblps.py - looks through unreferenced BLPs, and attempts to print out those of interest to WikiProject Women in Red
 * User:Ritchie333/Unreferenced women BLPs - script output
 * See also User:Ritchie333/unlinkedblps.py and User:Ritchie333/Unreferenced and unlinked BLPs


 * User:Ritchie333/badspeedies.py - logs any Twinkle-generated CSD request that is still in a live article ie: any one that has been declined
 * User:Ritchie333/rfatally.py - dumps out support / oppose / neutral tallies for live RfAs

One revert guarantee
If you think one of my edits makes the encyclopedia worse, revert it. Admins, if you think an administrative action (including, but not limited to protecting or deleting a page, or blocking a user) is not an improvement, just undo it. Please try and leave a good edit summary or discuss it on the talk page, though. In return, I will try and ensure that I only revert your changes once and once only, if at all. (Note, I very occasionally screw up and revert twice, if this happens - I sincerely apologise). If you revert back again, then I'll go to the talk page. Or I might decide you're correct. Either way, I have no more right to edit this place than you.