User:SMcCandlish



Self-convenience: – User:SMcCandlish/Status – – . [[File:SMcCandlish 248x248 profile pic.jpg|thumb|center|I keep being told I look like various celebrities:1. Matthew Rhys

2. Robert Downey Jr.

3. Steve Buscemi

4. Rachel Maddow

5. Jeffrey Dean Morgan

6. Steven Tyler

7. Colin Farrell

8. The Edge (like 20 years ago)

9. Robert Carlyle

10. Gary Oldman

11. ...]]Coincidentally, I was briefly a tech roadie for Aerosmith (Tyler's band) in 1994; they were probably the first band to do live online chat stuff with fans backstage at shows. A colleague and I were in charge of that.



Hi!
I am Stanton McCandlish (often referred to as just SMcC here and some have nicknamed me Mac, which I don't mind). I am a Web developer, IT consultant, nonfiction author, civil liberties activist and nonprofit executive, as well as amateur pocket billiards (pool) instructor, genealogist, former online news editor, policy analyst, archivist, independent publisher, and also an amateur artist, among other things. I have been among the most active, avid Wikipedians. I have a B.A. in anthropology and communication (a custom minor that combines linguistics and broader human communication, including journalism, PR, and media criticism). I am a US citizen, but have lived in England, Ireland, and Canada for extended periods, and learned to read and write in the UK (and I use something of a form of Mid-Atlantic English consequently). I have competence in an odd assortment of topics, like Celtic mythology, English grammar and usage, Manx cats, New Mexican culture, US law in certain fields (freedom of expression, privacy, and intellectual property), salamanders, Web standards, UI usability, albinism, pool and billiards, online media, Art Nouveau, post-punk subcultures, Mac OS X, Highland dress, and various fiction franchises (though about 95% of my reading time is non-fiction), among other subjects. Being an autodidactic polymath, my interests shift over time and are intense. Some of my latest passions are the history of tartan, interface of zoology and anthropology, especially the history and nature of domestication; and shifting patterns of English usage.

My current local time is.

What I'm working on now...
...when time permits:

Incomplete articles

 * American snooker (draft)
 * Lots of cue sports articles; see WikiProject Cue sports for an overview.
 * Lots of articles related to Highland dress
 * Lots of articles related to breeds of cat

Wikipedia-namespace pages

 * Manual of Style (glossaries) (nascent proposal)
 * Sports naming conventions and manual of style (draft)

Projects

 * WikiProject Cue sports – for articles on cue sports, including pool, snooker, carom billiards, and obscure billiards-related games such as bagatelle and bumper pool.
 * WikiProject Inline Templates – for maintenance of inline citation, dispute and cleanup templates, such as ref label, fact and fixPOV.
 * WikiProject English Language – for articles on the language's history, linguistics, grammar, style, etc.

Articles
I devote most of my mainspace time to improving poor articles to be encyclopedic quality, rather than "polishing the chrome" on already-good articles. Both kinds of work are necessary, but I find working on Stub, Start, and C-class articles, to move them toward B, A, and Good class, is a higher priority for the project. (To date, I have little interest in Good-to-Featured improvement; that's a wiki-subculture all its own.)
 * Stats on the articles I have edited the most
 * ACUI Collegiate Pocket Billiards National Championship – created article, as a 5-source stub verging on Start-class.
 * Albinism and Albinism in humans – originally a single article, it was already not-bad when I got there, but I worked on the material a lot, especially sourcing the science, and defending it from frequent vandalism. Most of my work on it has been surpassed by now, but it was important back in the day (late 2000s).
 * Albinism in popular culture – was a narrow AfD survivor in the form of Albino bias and an AfD failure as Evil albino stereotype when I got to them; it's quite solid now, after a lot of mergin' & purgin', reliable sourcing, and frequent shepherding and cleanup.
 * Persecution of people with albinism – a later split, and a significant amount of the content was from my work in the above articles.
 * Antebellum architecture – mostly based on material split from Antebellum South.
 * Caffè d'orzo
 * Crystalate Manufacturing Company – an early plastics manufacturer.
 * Eight-ball pool (British variation) – mostly my work, building on skeletal, unsourced material originally interpolated into Eight-ball.
 * English in New Mexico – along with several others, have been working to develop this into a proper article (it's more difficult than it sounds; most of the source material is on paper at the UNM library, or behind journal-archive paywalls). It later merged to Western American English – with most of the content now gone, which is disappointing. Win some, lose some.
 * Five-pin billiards – Article about the carom billiards game popular in Italy and parts of South America. I wrote it from scratch after someone posted a (terrible) machine-translation of the (good) Italian article; mine is now more extensive than the original Italian one, though may yet suffer from translation problems. Help wanted from someone fluent in Italian.
 * Folgerphone – an experimental musical instrument. Someone's disputed a major fact, on the Talk page.  Help wanted from anyone who knows anything at all about Folgerphones.
 * Galfrid – a major disambiguation page (it existed before but had very little in it); this took a considerable amount of work, hunting down all the notable and probably-notable Galfrids (many of whom were also Geoffreys, Godfrieds, Gruffydds, Goffredos, etc., and not at titles with "Galfrid" or "Galfridus" in them), and looking into the origin of the name and its variants, and their relation to other names.
 * Ground billiards – written from scratch.
 * IBSF World Snooker Championship
 * International Open Series – a snooker tournament.
 * List of professional sports – mostly based on material split from Professional sports.
 * List of U.S. Open pool championships (begun as a disambiguation page).
 * Logorrhea (psychology) – mostly based on material split from what was Logorrhea (rhetoric) and now at Verbosity.
 * Mythology (fiction)
 * Persian onager – a beast.
 * Pleonasm – article on redundant expressions in language. About 70% or so of that text is mine.
 * Relatedly, I also shepherded various other language articles like Verbosity, Redundancy (linguistics) and Calque, until they became stable.
 * Pool Hall Blues – an episode of TV series Quantum Leap.
 * Pro–am – mostly based on material split from what is now Amateur professionalism.
 * Regimental tartan – written pretty much from scratch, originally as a section of Tartan.
 * Sandbox (software development) – a coding safety process. Created this article.  I crack up when someone mistakes it for the Sandbox.
 * Shrew (stock character) – I did a WP:TNT total rewrite to a B-class article, and wiping out various WP:NPOV and WP:NOR problems.
 * Three-ball – article about the poorly-documented modern pool (pocket billiards) folk game, about 95% my material. Sourcing help wanted!
 * Triple deity – started this, originally as a list article.
 * Turkmenian kulan – a creature.
 * Valley-Dynamo – a gaming table manufacturer (especially pool, foosball, and air hockey).
 * Valley National 8-Ball League Association – a pool league (actually international now despite its name).
 * – written from scratch.
 * – written from scratch.

Overhauled
Pre-existing pages I've done a lot of work on (over time or all at once); new list started January 2018, so very incomplete:
 * Girls Under Glass – band article which I redid top to bottom, from a broken-English list of bullet points into a comprehensive article (with some help from the German Wikipedia page on them). This cleanup and expansion (about 23K more material) saved it from WP:AFD.
 * Godwin's law – I informally shepherded this page for quite some time, before other editors got more involved in keeping it encyclopedic. (I have a potential conflict of interest, since I worked at the same organization as its namesake back in the 1990s.) I've more recently (2023) returned to cleaning it up, as it started to get crufty again.
 * Jeannette H. Lee – Korean-American businesswoman article. I originally nominated this for deletion, but after it was kept as (marginally) notable, I significantly worked up the article so it will be properly encyclopedic.
 * Khes – iffy article on an Indic fabric type and garment, written by a non-native English speaker, and with poor sourcing. Was already slated for AfD by someone, but I managed to massage it into passable shape (a quality edit more than a quantity one). Still had issues (as of December 2020), but I drew attention to the page at the wikiprojects and noticeboards for India- and Pakistan-related topics.
 * Lynette Horsburgh – British amateur cue-sports champion. Was AfDed, so I improved it (diff includes a few intervening edits by someone else), and it was kept. Not a massive overhaul, but a qualitative one.
 * Mora, New Mexico ; Mora County, New Mexico ; First Battle of Mora ; Second Battle of Mora – were palimpsests of confusing drive-by edits, so I re-did them all with everything where it actually pertains, copyedited, and with some new sources.
 * Nithyananda – a controversial modern guru of India. For a long time, this article was veering back and forth between a WP:BLP-violating attack page and a shameless promotional advertisement by his followers (whom I attempted to dissuade from further WP policy violations, both on-wiki and by contacting his organization directly). I overhauled it repeatedly, and watchdogged it for months until sufficient attention from other neutral editors was drawn to it. (Problems still arise, but they are much more manageable now.)
 * Tartan – totally overhauled from top to bottom, using pretty much every available reliable source.
 * Splits so far include Regimental tartan, with Tartan design and manufacture next, to be followed by Clan tartan (presently a redir to main article).

Wikipedia policies, guidelines, essays, and proposals

 * Stats on the "Wikipedia:"-namespace pages I have edited the most
 * Notability – policy – I was deeply involved in the debate over the future and form of this when it was a proposed guideline, especially from Nov. 2006 through Feb. 2007, until it stabilized (it was much more controversial back then than editors today might realize).
 * Gaming the system – guideline sub-section – I popularized the concept on WP; someone else added it to the guideline, though most of the wording is mine at this point.
 * Manual of Style, Manual of Style/Dates and numbers, a many other MoS pages – guidelines – Along with various other "regulars", I have spent a lot of time shepherding the MoS, and have written substantial portions of it. I often move on to other stuff, so as to not get overly focused on it, then return to it periodically, mostly to help keep it stable.
 * Manual of Style/Biography – WP:MOS sub-guideline – major 2018 overhaul, merging in material from MOS:LEAD, MOS:ABBREV, and MOS:CAPS
 * Manual of Style/Capital letters – WP:MOS sub-guideline section – principal author
 * Manual of Style/Cue sports – WP:AT/WP:MOS sub-guideline – principal author
 * Manual of Style/Glossaries – WP:AT/WP:MOS sub-guideline draft – principal author
 * Manual of Style/Icons – WP:MOS sub-guideline – one of the principal authors (I wrote most its key provisions)
 * Manual of Style/Organisms – WP:MOS sub-guideline draft – principal author
 * Naming conventions (ice hockey) – did a total rewrite (combined diff), so that it makes some kind of sense, and actually follows site-wide policies and guidelines; not sure how much of that will stick.


 * Naming conventions (sportspeople) – WP:AT sub-guideline – principal author
 * WikiProject Cue sports/Notability – WP:N sub-guideline draft – principal author
 * Notability (breeds) – WP:N sub-guideline draft – one of the principal authors
 * WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming conventions – WP:AT sub-guideline – much of the prose and most of the structure is my work, though none of the major ideas are; I simply took a palimpsestuous mess and made a parseable document out of it.

Major templates

 * rp (The template that kept us from doing awful things when citing the same source many times in the same article. Came to me in a flash after User:Fuhghettaboutit bemoaned how many lines were created by citing the same book for so many entries at Glossary of cue sports terms. For many years it was probably the most widely used of the "support" templates for our source citation system. Later improvements to MediaWiki's handling of the ref system, with the addition of the ref parameter, eventually made this template obsolete. (See this diff for a crash course in using ref.)
 * compact TOC as we now know it (There were many radically different templates of this sort, and I merged all of them and their features and added many new ones.)
 * glossary, term, defn (See also MOS:GLOSSARIES.)
 * em, strong, var, kbd, samp, dfn and most of the rest of Category:Semantic markup templates
 * ' ", " ', " ' ", -', '-, -" and "- (quotation-mark kerning templates)
 * hatnote inline (and Module:Hatnote inline) and its derivative crossreference (crossref, xref)
 * cue sports navbox
 * WikiProject Cue sports, WikiProject New Mexico, and several others
 * TfR, TfR2, TfR notice
 * fake heading – Built a flexible, unified template out of code originally at that page and at and, with new features added.
 * sfnref inline
 * page range – accessibility/utility template (temporary, i.e. intended to be subst'd)
 * Loads more, I just fire and forget (literally – I'm often surprised to look in a template's history and see that I created it and don't remember).

Categories

 * (I created and have been one of the most active maintainers of most of its subcategories.)
 * (I didn't write the articles in it, I just noticed they were scattered about and not categorized sanely, so now they are.)
 * (No category for this for years for some reason; I organised the articles and have been working on them intensively, starting with Tartan and History of the kilt.)
 * Lots that I'm forgetting.

User scripts
These are internal user scripts (for use by logged-in editors in their Special:Mypage/common.js), not external scripts as used by Tampermonkey, Greasemonkey, etc.
 * User:SMcCandlish/TidyRefs – Clean up inconsistent  formatting. All-new script (2024); has some pretty incredible regex in it, and more is forthcoming when I get back into this project.
 * User:SMcCandlish/TidyCitations – Clean up inconsistent  formatting. Based on earlier scripts by Sam Sailor, Zyxw, Meteor sandwich yum, and Waldir, development of the latest of which ceased in 2018.
 * User:SMcCandlish/MOSNUMdates.js - Convert dates to DMY or MDY. Forked from original version by Ohconfucius (still being developed as of January 2024); mine avoids cluttering the left menu with options that are almost never needed, and enables one that is needed often enough.
 * meta:User:SMcCandlish/userinfo – Show some basic user info underneath usernames at the top of user and user-talk pages. Based on a script by PleaseStand, development of which ceased in 2019.

Non-admin closures
Just started tracking this in September 2017 (and then forgot until early 2020). I sometimes do non-admin closure of discussions (RfCs, RMs, etc.) and push right up to the boundary of what a non-admin can do, with that I believe are positive results.
 * Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Toy portals (2020-01-30)
 * Disruptive-turning RfC on whether the US dollar "really" is a fiat currency: permalink – someone barnstarred me for this one. (2017-09-30)
 * Nationality of Jose Antonio Vargas: permalink to discussion and closure (2017-09-10)

Misc.

 * Some shortcuts that seem like they should have been there forever weren't, and were created by me. I usually forget, but a few important ones are WP:ARCA, WP:AEIS , and WP:SANCTIONGAME / WP:SANCTIONGAMING ,.

Gallery of contributed images
Some of the images I've contributed under GFDL/CC (and sometimes PD) are displayed as thumbnails in my Gallery Page.

To-do list
Honestly, I no longer maintain or even look at this; there's so much to do, I just do whatever grabs my attention first.

What I'm up to in general on Wikipedia
On Wikipedia, I mostly do the following in lieu of large-scale article authorship (though I do have some major ones planned and three under my belt):
 * 1) Resisting poorly-thought-out attempts to change the WP:Manual of Style and other policies and guidelines
 * 2) Neutralizing (sometimes subtle/crafty) PoV-pushing by tagteams of editors with a conflict of interest who try to bend Wikipedia into a promotional or advocacy outlet
 * 3) More broadly, reverting and repairing vandalism and other intentionally anti-encyclopedic edits, especially those by religious or other zealots, slanderers, the foul-mouthed, and the discriminatory
 * 4) Making substantial contributions to existing articles (and sometimes creating new ones) on topics I know a lot about
 * 5) Shepherding the growth and health of some particular articles that need it (and, in some but not all cases, about which I care a lot)
 * 6) Correcting typos, grammar errors and readability problems
 * 7) Weeding out unverifiable, or incredible and unsourced, claims
 * 8) Adding missing salient information
 * 9) Moving articles that violate the WP article naming conventions
 * 10) Correcting outright factual errors
 * 11) Improving cross-references, categorization, etc.
 * 12) Improving consistency of formatting
 * 13) Removing redundant wikilinks
 * 14) Removing pointless (Wikipedia is not a dictionary!) wikilinks – everyone already knows what "eye" and "the sun" mean, in most contexts in which they appear
 * 15) Removing minor, childish quasi-vandalism (smart-aleck remarks in articles, etc.) – I like to document these in the Talk pages, since they often are actually funny
 * 16) Tagging outright vandals' talk pages with countdown-to-blocking warnings
 * 17) Repairing semi-vandalism edits in the form of deletions of long-standing passages without explanation, or the inexplicable addition of large chunks of questionably relevant or unsourced alleged facts, especially attacks against living article subjects, fanwanking and crackpotism.
 * 18) Copyediting, encyclopedizing and formalizing any juvenile, colloquial, non-neutral or poorly thought out language in articles
 * 19) Fixing miscellaneous "bad stuff" - vanity/marketing language, crystalballing, etc.
 * 20) Proposing (and sometimes performing) merges of redundant articles
 * 21) Adding obvious missing redirects and making sure they go to useful places
 * 22) Educating misinformed arguments (per logic or Wikipedia policy) on talk pages
 * 23) Trying to resolve circular disputes on talk pages
 * 24) Defending articles from AfD when the reasoning for the deletion is specious, especially "NN per nom" me-tooism.
 * 25) Nominating truly atrocious crap for AfD (or for SD, or just prod'ing them)
 * 26) Learning a lot concerning things I didn't know about, on all sorts of topics
 * 27) Having a good time!

Where I am in Wikispace

 * SMcCandlish at the MediaWiki Bugzilla server

Potential conflicts of interest
Just as a matter of full disclosure, there are certain articles I should not heavily edit (i.e., other than to revert vandalism, provide sources, or otherwise adjust in an entirely neutral manner), because of unintentional potential for conflict of interest or non-neutral point of view. Other editors may wish to examine carefully any edits I ever make to any of the following topics:
 * Stanton McCandlish – Me; while I might conceivably pass WP:GNG and WP:BIO, I have no article, have never had one, and - that would be a bit creepy to me, and friends with articles say they just cause trouble for them (personal attacks, misinformation, etc.), and I helped one get theirs deleted to protect their privacy. McCandlish Consulting is also me (d/b/a) and also non-notable.
 * Protecting Yourself Online – I co-authored a book by this title, ISBN 9780062515124; it has no article and is surely not notable enough to have one.
 * Wilcox–McCandlish law – something amusing that a colleague (Bryce Wilcox) and I came up with in the 1990s. Someone else created an article about it here, before I even became a WP editor; it was subsequently deleted on notability grounds, and should probably stay that way, though it might make a good WP:Essay, as it applies to talk pages here.


 * Things I could vaguely, conceivably have a conflict of interest on, due to past connections:
 * Too many clients to individually list here (and some are covered by NDAs anyway); I know better than to edit articles about them.
 * CryptoRights Foundation (CRF) – I was their volunteer CCO/Communications Director for several years, starting 2003; it bugged me somethin' fierce that it did not have an article until recently, but it seemed grossly inappropriate to even start a "just the facts" stub on it, and someone else finally did)
 * Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – Held various job titles there, including Program Dir., Communications Dir., etc., and was editor of their EFFector newsletter, and the webmaster of eff.org, 1993–2002.
 * Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign – This was largely my brainchild, as a part of my professional life at EFF; it was an EFF project not a personal one.
 * University of New Mexico (UNM) - Alma mater, 1991–1993 and 2007–2010; former employer, 1992–1993.
 * Double Rainbow (ice cream) – Former employer, 1991.
 * Wal-Mart – Former employer, late 1980s.
 * Cannon Air Force Base, United States Air Force – Former employer, late 1980s; I was a civilian worker, not military personnel.

Funniest things I've seen on Wikipedia

 * &#91;emphasis added when salient&#93;

The content itself isn't funny, but the fact that more than 50% of the content of the page is a huge navbox is hilarious. An edit summary from Village pump (policy). Needless to say, the next editor's summary read "deleted spam". Someone upset about grammar flames that were wasting people's time and being a distraction (plus a second shorter one!), all in support of the grammar flaming of the starter of the grammar flame; in the process, re-opening debate to yet more grammar flaming in the pointless sub-thread being complained about (dormant for over a day), and to which the poster was not even a party to begin with. I couldn't make this stuff up! An edit summary in response to "no, don't delete the barnstars!" panic replies to a TfD on a useless template simply relating to barnstars. I awarded Gracenotes a Barnstar Point for that one. A song parody by various Wikimedians (to the tune of The Eagles' "Hotel California"). I hate filk, with a passion, yet I somehow loved this. I think I was channeling Ancient Finnish or something. in Animal Farm, as of 13 January 2010 version (we all know that Marxism was of course founded by Marxus Aurelius, right?) Rather remarkable definition of "watch your language". Perhaps the funniest real article name on Wikipedia. (It's a real math/physics theorem, and not intrinsically funny, though a bit amusing.) Someone concerned about overlinking in articles actually used the Professional wrestling article as alleged smoking-gun "proof" of rampant overlinking across Wikpedia, requiring (naturally) much more stringent anti-linking wording in WP:LINKING. Of course that article in particular would have overlinking, along with just about every other noob error, except when periodically cleaned up by experienced, neutral editors who don't believe in fairytales. The article is clearly indicative of nothing but the nature of that topic's fanbase (and thus its most frequent editorial pool). A comment posted at WP:COUNCIL/P, on a proposal for a "WikiProject Life on Mars"; if you don't get why this is hysterically funny, just move on – it's an old-school sci-fi geek thing. Did you know ... that there are not just regular vandals but ones with really, really weird agendas lurking in Wikipedia? I'm not sure Wikipedia's account-creation CAPTCHA database should include every word... &gt;;-)
 * Not everything needs a navbox
 * "WP:ANI is like a huge orgy. It's fun to watch, and sometimes it's fun to join in, but like any orgy, the larger it gets, the greater the chances are that someone will eventually try to stick a dick in your ass."
 * 11:07, 26 March 2007 83.253.36.136 (Talk) (→Performance of FAT 32 - moved spam down )
 * A diff that must be seen to be believed
 * contribs) (→Template:Barnstars - *stabs kittens* )
 * "Hotel Wikipedia"
 * Possibly the worst ever of my own typos. (See edit summary used.)
 * "Karl Marx, founder of modern Marxism ...."
 * From the "unclear on the concept" department
 * Hairy ball theorem
 * Unbelievably selective evidence
 * "Presumably we're talking about Life on Mars (TV series) here? John Carter 20:56, 13 April 2007 (UTC)"
 * Very strange font activism vandalism of my sig at a talk page
 * http://www.well.com/~mech/WP/FunnyWikipediaCaptcha.jpg

Smartest things I've seen on Wikipedia
Just a few particularly well-thought-out bits by other editors. They aren't necessarily mindblowing or anything, just insightful and well-put.

Passed 9 to 0."
 * 1) "We must always do what is best for the readers, without exception. Per WP:IAR if a 'rule' prevents you from improving the encyclopaedia, ignore it ... and if you put your personal preferences above the readers then Wikipedia is not the project for you."
 * 1) "My impression is that we shouldn't allow users going against a policy to affect how it is written. People going around changing articles against policy isn't a good reason to have that policy be rewritten"
 * 1) "Unless you can reliably and usefully tell editors how to identify a problematic case, it's generally not helpful to mention it in a policy. It ends up backfiring, as editors make up their own, mutually incompatible definitions and proclaim that their interpretation is the true one."
 * ", your writing guides were what prompted me to start getting articles up to GA back in mid-2012. I've done over 100 since (still waiting to actually get a FAC passed solo, maybe next decade) ...."
 * 1) "I ... had no problem whatsoever learning wikicode when I started writing and improving encyclopedia articles in 2009. I do not want to learn new software features that are less productive and less intuitive than old software features. I welcome any upgrades that are entirely intuitive and non-disruptive to existing editors. I will oppose ill-conceived and poorly-implemented make-work projects for professional programmers. This is not an employment program for coders. It is an encyclopedia created by volunteers, who are article writers and researchers."
 * 1) "I reverted to the version before the diff you cited [i.e., the addition of disputed material], but was reverted. Changes pushed through without consensus are likely to be ignored or constantly disputed, so there's actually no point in doing this."
 * 1) "Revert rules should not be construed as an entitlement or inalienable right to revert, nor do they endorse reverts as an editing technique.
 * 1) Perhaps the most cogent explanation to date of what wikiproject banners are really for (and it's not advertising projects) by, at WP:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement, 06:00, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * 2) Roughtly 95%-accurate Observations on Wikipedia behavior by, 12 March 2016 (may have been revised since then)
 * 3) "A small group is more likely to develop a self-reinforcing delusion that their position is reasonable, even when a large number of people outside the group are telling them otherwise."
 * 1) "Nearly all our policies are driven by the need to prevent ... abuse of Wikipedia. Policies on biographies of living people are driven largely by those who would abuse Wikipedia for purposes of defamation. Policies on neutrality and verifiability have been largely driven by the need to address those who were here to push a political agenda or promote their fringe viewpoints. What Wikipedia is not is pretty much a chronicle of all the things that people have tried to use Wikipedia for that the community has decided are detrimental to a quality encyclopedia. ... This isn't censorship, it's curation."
 * 1) "&#91;C&#93;onsensus is an outcome of discussion, not a type of discussion. Editors' comments contribute to the consensus-building process."
 * 1) "If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the wiki, then ignore them entirely and go about your business."
 * 1) "Any pile of bullshit decomposes naturally."
 * 1) "Removed older logo. One logo is sufficient. Logos are copyrighted and Wikipedia should not serve as a gallery for logos."
 * 1) "Anyone who adds material to an article, but cannot be bothered to cite any sources, is being discourteous to the other editors who later have to try to find reliable sources."
 * 1) "Of course, the point of style is to give coherence and consistency, deviations from which can detract from the publication's voice (in this case, an encyclopedic voice)."
 * 1) "Show the door to trolls, vandals, and wiki-anarchists, who, if permitted, would waste your time and create a poisonous atmosphere here."
 * 1) "[N]o need for bullet points – detail here is no more important than others"
 * 1) "While the title should be recognized as a reference to the article topic by someone familiar with the topic, for the uninitiated, it is the purpose of the article lead, not the article title, to identify the topic of the article."
 * 1) "The reason Wikipedia has policy pages at all is to store up assertions on which we agree, and which generally convince people when we make them in talk, so we don't have to write them out again and again. This is why policy pages aren't "enforced", but quoted; if people aren't convinced by what policy pages say, they should usually say something else. The major exception to this stability is when some small group, either in good faith or in an effort to become the Secret Masters of Wikipedia, mistakes its own opinions for What Everybody Thinks. This happens, and the clique often writes its own opinions up as policy and guideline pages."
 * 1) "If a high-profile [Wikipedian] poll is conducted that brings in widespread participation from editors who had previously stayed away from [the] venue, and the holdouts who had been stonewalling and preventing progress merely slouch, stuff their hands in their pockets, and walk away, then that proves that they knew full well that their arguments were not sufficiently persuasive, or didn’t have sufficient numbers, or both. ... Trying to now torpedo the current consensus by stating that certain people somehow didn’t have an opportunity to participate is nothing but sour grapes .... On Wikipedia it’s called ‘wililawyering’ which is disruptive and mustn’t be rewarded."
 * 1) "Some editors seek to be totally neutral, which means they invariably catch the most flak from everyone else."
 * 1) "[C]onsensus does exist absent an administrator to interpret it."

Smartest Wikipedia-relevant things I've seen from off-site
"For me, pronouns are always placed within context. I am female-bodied, I am a butch lesbian, a transgender lesbian—referring to me as "she/her" is appropriate, particularly in a non-trans setting in which referring to me as "he" would appear to resolve the social contradiction between my birth sex and gender expression and render my transgender expression invisible. I like the gender neutral pronoun "ze/hir" because it makes it impossible to hold on to gender/sex/sexuality assumptions about a person you're about to meet or you've just met. And in an all trans setting, referring to me as "he/him" honors my gender expression in the same way that referring to my sister drag queens as "she/her" does."
 * Transgender activist Leslie Feinberg, 2006:

Allegedly sensible or clever things I've come up with here
(At WT:Don't bludgeon the process, in a "guidelines vs. essays" thread; 23:31, 30 November 2020 (UTC) .     It's a nutshell version of something I've said, in various words, many times since the late 2000s.) (The bulk of the math is from User:Tompw/bookshelf/assumptions, but at the time it only calculated how many volumes of EB would be filled by WP.) (In an essay/tutorial at WT:Categorization, 15:39, 9 June 2018 (UTC) . Someone suggested framing it on their wall! The idea eventually developed into the essay WP:Race and ethnicity.) (At WT:Manual of Style, 16:49, 24 December 2017 (UTC) . This was in the context of readers wanting to verify our content with claim-by-claim inline citations not "general references".     Someone else nominated it as a mot juste and "a gem" .      It was later quoted on someone's user page  along with one by Stephen Fry and another by Neil Gaiman.  Pretty good company; I'm honored.) (I say this frequently. I'm not aware of anyone quoting me on it verbatim, but I've seen a rise in the same argument made in other words, and it is having the desired effect on article titles debates at WP:Requested moves.      (Included as a corollary at EEng's "If MOS does not need to have a rule on something, then it needs to have a rule on that thing" essay. (Summary of what I've said in variant wording probably 100 times in style disputes. No one ever tries to refute it.     This awareness is what keeps our MoS from being a nightmare of editwarring about specific rules, over-inclusion of rules we don't need, deletion of ones we do just because someone doesn't like them, and pretense that no rules are needed.) (In particular, if you say "TL;DR" to refuse to respond to a cogent argument because it takes work to do so, you are at the wrong site – this one consists almost entirely of millions of pages of detailed and particular text, so if you can't parse a few paragraphs you are incompetent to work on this project.) (A quasi-Taoist response to cranky complaints that relate to incidents so long ago no one should care any more. Compressed version: "Grind axe too long: no axe.") (A response to angry accusations of wrong-doing that self-evidently apply at least equally and usually much more accurately to the ranter.     More recently, I've used it as a mantra for myself, when I feel wikistressed.  It eventually led to the WP:HOTHEADS essay.)
 * Wikipedia policies are what are required for the project to operate at all; guidelines are what help it operate smoothly; high-acceptance essays are what help its operators not make fools of themselves; and miscellaneous essays are part of the community mindshare that helps shape all of the above over time.
 * As of right this moment, Wikipedia (the encyclopedic content, excluding other material like talk pages) is calculable to be approximately times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica.
 * "WP is a bad place to engage in labelling that isn't absolutely integral to international public perception of the subject."
 * "[O]ur articles are palimpsests stirred together by a global assortment of geniuses, crackpots, and everyone in between, sometimes citing great stuff, sometimes poor stuff, and sometimes nothing".
 * "An attempt at disambiguation that introduces another ambiguity is a failure."
 * "If MoS does not already have a rule on something, then it almost certainly doesn't need one."
 * "No line item in our Manual of Style is supported by 100% of editors, and no editor supports 100% of its line items. The same situation is true of all style guides and their scopes and audiences in the wider world. The purpose of a stylebook is to set some ground rules (often arbitrary) so that the ballgame of writing can continue instead of the players standing around on the field brawling about trivia."
 * "The next-to-last resort of someone who cannot muster a rational response to an opposing argument is to wave away that argument as something impossible to respond to (the last resort being ad hominem attacks)."
 * "If one grinds an axe long and hard enough, there is no axe any longer, just a useless old stick."
 * "Two words: tea pot. ~ "

Nifty Wikipedia tools
Kind of hard to find unless you already know about them:

Resources

 * Wikimedia Labs at Mediawiki.org, for general info.
 * The Tool Labs at WikiTech.Wikimedia.org, where anyone can create an account to develop tools.
 * This page indicates lost tools and other problems after the demise of the old ToolServer.
 * OAuth applications list

Stats tools

 * Xtools-articleinfo at WMFLabs (general page stats, by year and month, with charts, etc.)
 * editorinteract.py at WMFLabs – analyzes your interaction with one or more other users
 * Aka's Page History Stats Tool – edit-related stats on any article or other page
 * TDS's Article Contribution Counter – get stats (with some accuracy lag, usually a few weeks) on who the top editors of an article are
 * Interiot's StubSense - what stubs are being used in a category
 * Interiot's Related Changes Watchlist – makes "Special:Recentchangeslinked" pages behave like watchlists

Internal tools

 * Special:AllMessages – track down any system message/notice (e.g. copyright warnings you are tired of seeing and want to exclude in your WP:USERCSS.)
 * Advanced Search of Wikipedia

Editing tools

 * WP:WikEd – syntax-highlighting WP editor (integrated, not external)
 * WP:RefToolbar 2.0 – reference citation tool

Coding tools

 * Special:ExpandTemplates – get raw HTML output of arbitrary wikicode with templates and parserfunctions
 * Lua programming and Scribunto modules:
 * Lua
 * Module:Arguments
 * meta:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions – the hard-to-find ParserFunctions (template code) documentation

Cleanup tools

 * Reference citation consistency checker (use in sandbox or talk page):

Visualization tools

 * vCat – a tool to generate Graphviz diagrams of Wikipedia category relationships. Examples:
 * – Show the entire parent and other "ancestor" category tree structure of Category:Cue sports (up to the maximum of 250 nodes)
 * – Show just the immediate parent and grandparent categories of Category:Cue sports
 * – Show four levels but as node clusters instead of a tree
 * - Show the immediate child subcategories of Category:Cue sports (this function does not recurse and show child sub-sub-categories, etc.)
 * - Show the same, but as a ring graph instead of a tree
 * - Show a node-cluster ring graph of the parent and grandparent categories of the article William A. Spinks
 * There are various other options, such as: creating links in the graph to the categories shown, or to new graphs starting at those categories; specifying output image format; outputting a text Graphviz  file with no node limit, for local rendering; choosing a different wiki, like French Wikipedia, or Wiktionary (example), or Commons; etc.

Help and info

 * WP:Editor's index to Wikipedia
 * channel at FreeNode

Editor interaction analysis

 * Editor Interaction Analyzer by Sigma, compares the edits of two to three specified editors to see which articles overlap, sorted by minimum time between edits by both users. Only works on the English Wikipedia. Speed: slow.
 * Intersect Contribs, compares the edits of two to eight editors at any WMF wiki to see which articles overlap. Speed: fast.
 * Intertwined contributions, merges the contributions of two editors at any WMF wiki into a single list. Speed: fast.

Unsorted additions

 * Help:Labeled section transclusion – comparatively new feature that most of us don't know how to use yet
 * How to ping people: "The keys are: max 20 pings per edit; and do an edit to clean before before trying a new ping, so the system sees a clean diff; and of course always new four-tilde signature. Dicklyon (talk) 03:45, 15 December 2014 (UTC)"
 * CatScan category analysis tool
 * CatScan Quick Intersection
 * TimedMediaHandler - a-v in articles
 * Find which Wiki pages link to a particular site
 * List changes made recently to pages linked from a specified page
 * Readability meter
 * Wikichecker
 * Emoticons
 * Tools for analysis of local MediaWiki installations (not directly relevant for en.wikipedia)
 * Magnus's Reference Generator – auto-format several kinds of source citations


 * Search through a page's history for edits made by a particular user
 * List contributors to an article, ranked in order of activity
 * Find images for a given article, using interwiki links
 * What pages have you and another edited?
 * User's across-projects contributions
 * Who wrote that? (Wiki blame)
 * Fix bare url reflinks
 * X!'s edit count
 * 3RR tool
 * Soxred93's thorough edit counter
 * Snottywong's tools – an array of user & editing statistics and search tools
 * Snottywong's tools – an array of user & editing statistics and search tools

Search sites

 * https://www.refseek.com – more than a billion sources: encyclopedias, monographs, magazines, etc.
 * https://www.worldcat.org – catalogue of 20,000 libraries. Find the nearest rare book you need; get it through inter-library loan at local library
 * https://link.springer.com – over 10 million scientific books, articles, research protocols, etc.
 * https://www.bioline.org.br – library of bioscience journals published in developing countries
 * https://repec.org – 4 million publications on economics and related subjects
 * https://www.science.gov – 2200+ scientific sites; more than 200 million articles indexed
 * https://www.pdfdrive.com – the largest website for free download of books and other works in PDF format; over 225 million titles
 * https://www.base-search.net – over 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them free

Interesting layouts
It's possible to do some nice layouts with CSS – carefully – inside the "shell" that MediaWiki provides. Just of use on project and user pages, of course. We don't do stuff like this in articles.
 * User:Logical Premise/admincrits

Systemic mega-dramas of 2020 onward

 * Community Wishlist Survey 2022 – How will WMF spend its development money and time next year?
 * Universal Code of Conduct/Draft review – devils in the details, and just about the longest talk page in history
 * Arbitration Committee/Anti-harassment RfC - more detail-devils
 * WP:FRAMGATE – relates in part to this, though the above item is more closely related to the one above it
 * Requests for comment/Should the Foundation call itself Wikipedia
 * wmf:Resolution:Publication of proposed Bylaws changes, 2020 – mostly just legalese tweaks, but a few are non-trivial
 * Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/October 2020 - Proposed Bylaws changes – diff view of the above
 * meta:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/October 2020 - Proposed Bylaws changes – feedback page for that
 * Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/October 2020 - Board candidate evaluation form – draft "Board candidate rubric"
 * meta:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/October 2020 - Board candidate evaluation form – feedback page for that
 * Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Global Conversations – not even sure what this is yet, but they used the system-wide banner system to "advertise" it for community input
 * Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Discuss – not sure what this is either, but it showed up on WP:CENT

ArbCom

 * Archive of stock statements of principles: Arbitration/Index/Principles 2
 * Old version now marked as historical: Arbitration/Index/Principles
 * Next year's election-prep RfC will probably appear here: Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2022
 * And the ElectCom one should appear here: Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2022/Electoral Commission

Some of the more nebulous WMF bureaucracy

 * Trust and Safety – a.k.a. the cancel-culture enablement system
 * Trust and Safety/Case Review Committee – at least there is one, though I'm sure it'll be as opaque as the above
 * Ombuds commission – this actually looks interesting for something ...
 * Interestingly, ArbCom members are now required (on the en.WP side, not the WMF side) to not be on either of the above bodies, as a conflict of interest (after the WP:FRAMGATE fiasco).

Buh-bye!
Thanks for visiting!
 * —  SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs.