User:Thespian

To see what things I think I want to work on (which rarely overlaps with what I actually wind up working on), check my to do list.

There is no method to my madness
I am either interested in nothing, or interested in everything. That sort of depends what you think. My current goal is simply this: as 'payment' for every use of a Wikipedia article, I try to clear up at least one 'citation needed' within that article (I might do more if I have the time, but it takes about five minutes for me to find a cite for 90% of these 'citation needed' flags, and I think that's a fair trade considering I usually read a page on a complete whim). Oddly, I have not contributed anything to articles on subjects that I know a fair bit about, though I wrote a decent one on Peg Bracken that got deleted by accident before posting.

Things whut bug me
Currently, things that bother me:
 * People confusing 'original research' and 'unattributed' (the one is not proof of the other). If you state 'Xxxxx is original research!' and I enter Xxxxx into Google and find three pages about Xxxxx on the first page, I'm likely to tell you you're a twit. I don't care if you don't want to do the citations, but take a second and see whether there's a reason to really believe it's original research, as opposed to just someone overassuming the extent of common knowledge, or believing that internal linkage was enough (on the Hidden Track page, many of the examples of hidden songs linked to the album pages, which also mentioned the hidden songs, however some editors of the page felt, without doing anything about it, that since the hidden songs were mentioned by method, linking to the albums, which often just said, 'oh, there's a hidden track', was insufficient. That's not original research, that's just requiring a better contextual citation).
 * There've been a LOT of people of late wandering around who never seem to contribute anything to the site except to walk around with a big yellow marker adding 'citation needed' (and frequently in places where its completely unneeded). I wouldn't mind it so much if, I didn't spend piles of time adding cites that were available in seconds on Google to Wiki articles where people have been threatening to delete things in the :Talk pages. Deleting always weakens an article, and there's been so much of it going on on citations that would have taken less time to find than for the people threatening 'cite this or I'll start deleting!' took, that its really starting to bother me. (this taken near verbatim from Talk:Hidden_track, after someone did just that and it took me less than 15 minutes to cite half the article)
 * is NOT the only tag available to you, and lots of them are far more helpful for those of us doing the work of getting your pesky citations. Please go and READ all the things that are available to you at WP:TD the next time you decide you want to just scribble all over something. Telling me you think something is will give me a lot more to work with. You have no idea.

Did I remove something you wrote?
I don't, very often, but for the last 2-3 weeks, I've been reverting and undoing an insane amount of articles, repeatedly, because of self-promotion. Oddly, if you contribute something to an article, even if you're treading on original research, I'm unlikely to delete your additions. I think that people who are involved the subjects they're contributing to often have things to add that are of interest and use. However, if I've deleted something of yours, before you complain about me/to me, please make ensure you weren't just directing people at your own self. Please check WP:NOT (Wikipedia is Not a Soapboax), and WP:COI (Conflict of Interest) to brush up on things before saying my edits were improper or incorrect.

Certain of you might also want to check up on the parts of WP:ATT (Attribution) that discuss self-published books, and recognize that even if your page is a 200-page e-book, with "lots of information!", that would still count as self-publication.

Currently working on
I keep an eye on Administrators Noticeboard/Incidents as a quick way of keeping up to date on problems. Really, I'm a janitor; I don't do a lot of creation, but instead, I go and I read articles and copyedit them. It's slower work, since it involves really reading the article, noticing contradictions, syntactical messes, inconsistant uses (ie, 4th Brigade in one part and Fourth Brigade in another), and of course, spelling, spelling, spelling.

Also see: Thespian's To Do List


 * Flybase: I know nothing about fruit flies, really, except that I don't want them in my house. My roommate, though (who agrees with me on that, btw), is a curator of Flybase, and was disappointed in the single sentence that it was, so I've been slowly adding to it.
 * TV: I've gotten rather involved in editing The Riches. And for no reason I can name (because I don't like any of them much), I've done a fair bit on Michael Landon, Dustin Diamond and Adam Sandler.

Pages created

 * Side Order of Life

My Next Iron Chef challenge
I noticed this week that, except for Traci Des Jardins none of the rather notable chefs on The Next Iron Chef had Wikipedia pages. So in an Iron Editor challenge to myself on my food blog, I spent the past few days researching and creating the following seven pages.
 * Chris Cosentino
 * Michael Symon
 * John Besh
 * Jill Davie
 * Gavin Kaysen
 * Morou Ouattara
 * Aarón Sanchez
 * Andrew Knowlton

Pages substantially added to/modified

 * Orange Whip (my expansion was enough to get a DYK? article)
 * Hidden track
 * MediaWiki_talk:Spam-whitelist
 * Scott Bateman
 * Mark Sandman
 * Ratsy
 * Two Fat Ladies‎

Signpost articles

 * IP unwittingly predicts death: "Awful coincidence"
 * Book review: The Cult of the Amateur
 * Ars Nova and The Wikipedia Plays - interviewed producer, authors

Helping bring the Shiny Light of Wikipedia to the World
On May 28th, the national CBC-3 show, R3-30 read a 'long-range request' from me to Bearcat, a shout out to him for working to save The Western Investor from a request for deletion. It also went out to all the editors who voted 'keep', and maaaaaaybe had a little fun with the guy who nommed it. You can download the podcast version of it here. My letter and the Western Investor stuff starts just after 12:30.

Awardy things
This is Corinna Fugate. You have helped me in the past. I have legally changed my name to Rose Mercury and am trying to update and transfer the information from the Corinna Fugate Wikipedia page to a Rose Mercury page but it's up for deletion. I am so overwhelmed and don't know what I am doing. Please intercede on my behalf. I have a blog on my myspace page http://www.myspace.com/rosemercurymusic to prove it's me. I need your help, assisitance. Please help me clean up the article so it can stay. I need it. Thank you, and I am greatful for your time and energy. Rose Mercury (formerly Corinna Fugate)