User:Uglinessman

At this point in time, I have very little to say in relation to Wikipedia, but I wanted to create some sort of userpage because I was tired of sseeing my name in red at the top of every page. Aside from the George Carlin album Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, I haven't actually created any new articles, but I've tried to contribute to several articles in a variety of different categories. I made some significant contributions to the Devo 2.0 article, and look forward to seeing that project gain momentum in the future. I also devote myself to reverting vandalism when I spot it, and I occasionally have to deal with net kooks who really just don't understand how Wikipedia works. While I doubt that I will get nominated for adminship at any point, I just want to nip it in the bud now and say I am not interested.

update: March 30, 2007

Today I completed one of my most ambitious tasks on Wikipedia to date. Last week I noticed that when I typed "Tom Wilson" into the search field and hit "Go", I was taken to the page of a legendary record producer by that name. At the time, I was looking for the article on the Back to the Future actor. Further investigation showed that there are several different people with that name, but the disambig page was only assigned to "Thomas Wilson", and "Tom Wilson" was assigned to the producer. Given that the actor has made a name for himself, and given that it's also the name of the creator of the Ziggy cartoon, I wondered if the producer should be the "primary" article for the name.

I discussed my points in the talk page for the producer's article, the Thomas Wilson disambig page, and even over in the village pump. On the suggestion of Noroton, I did some Google searches to see how valid my claims were, and the results seemed to support my position. After nearly a week, there were no further responses opposing or supporting what I had to say, so I decided to be bold and make the necessary changes.

This involved not only renaming Tom Wilson to Tom Wilson (producer), but I also had to edit the redirect that was automatically created, so that Tom Wilson would redirect to the Thomas Wilson disambig page. Then I had to look up all the articles that linked to Tom Wilson and disambig the links appropriately. About 75% of them were referring to the producer, but many of them were referring to other people by that name, including the aforementioned actor and cartoonist, as well as the former Junkhouse member, some sports figures, and a politician. It was not a simple or "light" undertaking, but I feel it was a positive contribution.

Favourite articles:
 * MC Frontalot
 * Devo 2.0
 * Calvin and Hobbes
 * South Park
 * George Carlin
 * Badger Badger Badger
 * Fuck
 * O RLY?
 * Plastic Spoons

Resources etc:
 * sign your comments
 * general editing help
 * editor's "cheat sheet"
 * picture tutorial
 * creating redirects
 * Disambiguation link repair
 * userboxes (those neat things on the right)
 * The German userbox solution
 * Lorem Ipsum (potentially useful for test edits)

I created a personal sandbox to test out edits and such, but if you feel like using it for your own tests, vandalism, silliness, or anything like that, please feel free. I mainly used it to test the new layout for this page, with the two lists above as columns, and got invaluable help from the Esperanzian Tangotango.