User:Wnt


 * Note: for the nth time a free email server I was using to keep Wikipedia emails/announcements has gone down unexpectedly, so this time I disabled it. Please give me some kind of talk page heads up if you want to email me something and I'll set something up. Wnt (talk) 19:45, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

On the internet
 * Beginners can't tell if they're reading sarcasm. The experienced can't tell if they're writing sarcasm.

On biology
 * Nothing is impossible in biology.
 * Medicine is biology, biology is chemistry, chemistry is physics, physics is math done using the metric system.

On capitalism
 * Capitalism cannot abide a free market, because there is not enough profit for anyone to invest in it.
 * Any company that is not a complete scam doesn't have a valid business model.

On war
 * In a war each side will claim awful things about their enemy, nearly all of which are true, and good things about themselves, nearly all of which are false.

... and Wikilobbying, which alas is not my forte
 * The key to winning at Wikipedia lobbying is to be the first to ask the question, have your troops lined up, and be ready to claim clear "consensus" as rapidly as possible.
 * People who are not paid to bash their heads against a wall will eventually get too depressed to continue. The ones who are paid never do, which is why they win.

On sayings
 * Anyone who quotes Hanlon's razor is either an idiot or can't be trusted -- your call!

Welcome
Note: Edits from User:70.15.116.59 and User:70.15.114.2 from before February 2008 are also associated with this account. Wnt (talk) 15:04, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Psychohistory of Wikipedia
The WP:List of Wikipedians by number of edits is an interesting test of the undiscovered science of psychohistory. From the November 2008 dataset, it is possible to calculate


 * Your number of edits from your rank. EDITS = (753000 - 71.6*RANK*)/sqrt(RANK*)
 * Your rank from your number of edits, RANK* = ( sqrt (EDITS^2 + 216000000) - EDITS)^2 / 20500

The graph above shows how much the number given here as 753000 would need to vary to fit the actual data from the original table precisely.

Note: in order to produce the nice line shown above, it is not necessary to infer the existence of a hidden Foundation of 23 editors whose edits are not logged in the database, all of whom edit Wikipedia more than all but the top half dozen editors. But RANK* in the formula needs to be your actual rank + 23. (That is, your actual rank position on the list, including all humans and bots) See Calculating your rank for my original posting of this.

Also see Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 January 27.

While in the past I've been very skeptical about WP:SEO, I'm currently running a crude experiment regarding Meta or cross-wiki links and SEO just out of curiosity... (Meta:User:Wnt/))

Wikipedia Trivia Quiz
No fair looking at the links first.


 * Where is Austrasia?


 * 1)  Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands?
 * 2)  continental shelf areas in the Indian Ocean
 * 3)  Imaginary landscape of an independent filmmaker spoofing Fantasia
 * 4)  France


 * In 882, why did Charles the Fat convoke a diet?


 * 1)  To get ready to make war with some guy.
 * 2)  Disease had forced him to retire.
 * 3)  The law said anyone who killed a doge had to lose 100 pounds.
 * 4)  He promised the Vikings to lose 700 pounds.


 * Which of the following is not a type of star?
 * 1) Red dwarf
 * 2) Orange dwarf
 * 3) Yellow dwarf
 * 4) Green dwarf
 * 5) Blue dwarf
 * 6) Ultraviolet dwarf
 * 7) Black dwarf
 * 8) White dwarf
 * 9) Brown dwarf


 * From where did the Irish Republican Army first attack the British?
 * 1) Ulster
 * 2) Dublin
 * 3) Ballingarry
 * 4) Buffalo, New York


 * Which is more dense, the largest supermassive black hole or a spring breeze?

Fishing Expedition
What do you suppose one would find at 39 Stillman Street?

Under construction... ;)

Articles Created

 * Achyranthes bidentata
 * Cāng zhú
 * Huáng bǎi
 * Sān miáo wán
 * Three minute men
 * Etekaaf
 * Tyrian shekel
 * Omar Osama bin Laden

(I should update this sometime...)

Articles we don't have
"I never remember what the redlinks are I come across, and there's no way to search for them, so I'm going to try to put them here starting now" (4/12/12) .. and, well, yes, that was the last I remembered of it. Turns out I only read this page when I add something, if then.


 * Phytobenzoar
 * Antinutritive
 * Gastrectasia
 * Ascorbic acid oxidase
 * Bangladesh National Women Lawyers' Association
 * Centre for Equality and Inclusion
 * Brodatz Texture (See, , , , )

Fun with Lua

 * Module:ImportProtein

This accepts an NCBI GenPept text file and turns it into an illustration - with some customization required. See Module talk:ImportProtein/Src (gene) for sample usage:

This formats a template according to parser functions, template calls and links, indenting it according to how deep it goes.
 * Module:FormatTemplate

This gets any of the page features available for title objects in Lua and releases them to the regular templates.
 * Module:Page

Per request, this expands a redirect into the target name.
 * Module:Redirect

Displays a selected subsection of a larger image. The way this is done, inside a Wiki image frame, I have no idea if it offers performance enhancement as it would with a page background.
 * Module:Sandbox/Wnt/Sprite

This implements an alphabet color code proposed by Green-Armytage, 2010 - the Color Alphabet Project (see Help:distinguishable colors).
 * Module:Sandbox/Wnt/ColorAlphabet

Finds where a page is on a simple index list and gives the name of pages N before or after it. (For WP:Lua requests)
 * Module:TrainingPages

Reverses the order of sections on a page so that the newest sections appear first. Does so hierarchically so that newer subsections under a section show up beneath that section but in reversed order.
 * Module:Sandbox/Wnt/NewestAtTop

This simple module returns your file with every single thing Wikilinked. Alas, that means things with spaces in them can be split into two, but you can fix that with a delete. Still, a time saver for things like Special:PrefixIndex/Module that don't have a Wiki source and can't be accessed by a Lua script directly, just to copy them. (This was for WP:Lua/Modules/Overview) Now with delink and dewiki features.
 * Module:Sandbox/Wnt/WikiLink

(output not shown for space)

A simple switch written for WP:Lua/requests. I'm afraid I don't recall the syntax at the moment.
 * Module:Xswitch


 * Module:ConvertNumeric (decToHex function only)

(I only wrote this one function of this module)

Displays the contents of a Lua table. Used for exploring the fields of _G, mw. etc.
 * Module:DisplayLuaTableContents


 * Module:Sandbox/Wnt/FindAndReplace - buggy; since superseded by String and Page

Started as a very simple (too simple) plotter, one of my first attempts at Lua. Now with a pie chart function!
 * Module:Sandbox/Wnt/Plotter

On test2, buggy, a good idea but written before I really knew how. Should work it up - idea was to take a complete labelled SVG text file copy-and-pasted from Commons and relabel it with a set of color thresholds.
 * Module:Svgedit

Miscellaneous
 * Module:Sandbox/Wnt

Index of Flotsam and Jetsam
Hmmm... it may be time to do a housecleaning, as is possible with. A third of these pages I don't even remember...


 * Archive
 * User:Wnt/Archive/1


 * Essays, proposals, policy arguments
 * User:Wnt/Personal image blocking
 * User:Wnt/image-blacklist Hypothetical image blacklist for the above


 * User:Wnt/Just Edit The Friendly Article (proposed resolution for some refdesk arguments; it actually works, apart from mentioning it to them, but the critics didn't like it at all)
 * User:Wnt/Why? in rebuttal to User:TenOfAllTrades/Why not?
 * User:Wnt/Work1 (some comments about Wikileaks; was a rebuttal to another user's page that was since deleted)
 * User:Wnt/Joint statement/santorum (historical - didn't end up getting the support I wanted; based on WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case for the santorum (neologism) thing. I'll leave it unaltered since I did get some other people to sign on)


 * Templates
 * User:Wnt/Templates (blank for some time; was a transcluded copy of the sandbox to see how displaytitle worked.)
 * User:Wnt/Templates/Sandbox
 * User:Wnt/Templates/Sandbox2
 * User:Wnt/Templates/Flags (this was some crazy notion I had, mostly as a template writing exercise, to indicate editor status/state of mind by putting up "dive flags" which, it was supposed, would take on Wikipedia-specific meanings vaguely related to their maritime use. But policy prohibits putting them in signatures, leaving their use to ... specialized locations.  As in, I didn't actually use it)
 * User:Wnt/Templates/Flag
 * User:Wnt/Flag


 * User:Wnt/Templates/Birthdaycontent (This and the below were supposed to replicate some template that was on Jimbo's page at some time, but that's all I remember about it)
 * User:Wnt/Templates/Birthdaystyle
 * User:Wnt/Templates/Dateconditional
 * User:Wnt/Templates/Addrow


 * Userboxes and idiosyncratic barnstars
 * User:Wnt/Userboxes/DownloadHelper
 * User:Wnt/Userboxes/FA (huh, then I didn't even use it. But there's something awkward about it...)
 * User:Wnt/Userboxes/The Indefinite Barnstar
 * User:Wnt/Userboxes/The Vandal's Barnstar (Some --- one with no sense of humor nominated my image for deletion, as it uses a Nobel medal image that isn't directly Commonsable, though I suppose it is easy enough to make fully-fully PD)


 * Other
 * User:Wnt/Notes
 * User:Wnt/Copyright Alliance (crap ... I got this undeleted a year ago and totally forgot about it)
 * User:Wnt/Samizdat/Differences between conservative and liberal brain (some interim version of Differences between conservative and liberal brain - alas, it looks like the rats devoured the information again, as it would appear that something unflattering to conservatives ... like repeated evidence of lower IQ ... is a violation of WP:COATRACK, Wikipedia's most important "policy")
 * User:Wnt/Python script to grab multiple files - handy Python 2.x script to get multiple files from a site; with the help of the Computing Refdesk [will add archive link] this was used to get hundreds of PD gifs to then assemble into a pdf using ImageMagick.