User:Xiong/Brag

Awards
  For the creation of a handy-as-heck tool and your evenheaded comments on Wikipedia talk:Infobox standardisation, I award you the first and only Barnstar In A Box. - A Man In Black 00:08, 14 August 2005 (UTC)



Outright brag
My contribs speak for themselves -- to anyone with time enough to dig through the entire mess. For the curious others, here's my brag:


 * Up to date you've talked to other users 557 times but only made 143 edits to articles. A bit unbalanced eh? (those stats are way off, but what the hey)

I have contributed substantially to a few article mainspace pages; I like my work on Wendy B. Lawrence, Seven Bridges of Königsberg, Flat file database, all of which are now well-developed.

Not all of us contribute in the same way, and one edit here is not "equal" to one edit there. Mel Etitis makes huge numbers of article edits, but most of them are just fixing typos -- perhaps in bulk, work as useful as any other, but I can't value any one such very highly. Ed Poor (among other activity) deleted VfD with one click of the mouse -- and although many may not agree he was right to do so, he gathered in 5 barnstarsfor that one edit.

I don't like to brag about the work I've done; if it's to be recognized, someone else will do it. But since you raise the question, let me say that I'm quite pleased with some of it. I've created a number of very general templates, some of which are starting to gain acceptance -- tilde, divbox (and most of its styles), and doctl. With the help of the latter, I've been leading the way in documenting new and existing templates.

I've been busy creating and uploading images; and for me, that often means creating them, not uploading something I grabbed and tagged. In one case, I didn't create the image at all -- I saw Isaac Asimov lacked a decent picture of the Good Doctor and spent about a week corresponding with the famous SF artist Rowena Morrill, which led up to her licensing the image you see here. A single edit in article space, to insert the image tag; but does it not do the subject justice?

Take, if you will, such a simple photo as Image:Red (color).jpg. May look easy, but it took me well over an hour to stage and another couple of hours to Photoshop. Worst, I think, was figuring out where all of that stuff came from in my house, so I could put it back.

I do spend a lot of time in one talk space or another. I think this Community has gone awry and this Project is in trouble. (For the Cliff-notes version of my concern, let's say I think there are way too many editors for our primitive social organization and that we lack an adequate foundation, constitution, or charter -- whatever you would call it.) I spend a lot of my time trying to glue our world together, opposing the forces that would tear us apart. I don't think I can do it alone, but I put my shoulder to the wheel.

Some of my work has been incredibly exhausting and time-consuming. I'm put in mind of Xlsc/0001, merely the first baby step toward an objective, meaningful statistical analysis of Wikipedia. I really have no idea any longer how many weeks I worked on that. Yet the entire visible result is that one page. Is it of any value? I honestly don't know.

If you saunter around to |CafePress, you'll see I've managed to make available Real Barnstar teeshirts -- something glaringly missing from the standard WMF line. Why? Well, it's really quite simple; nobody in this entire community had a real barnstar. The little images you see all over the place were all copied and modified from a single image on MeatballWiki; and SunirShah made that from an image he grabbed off of the Barnstar Subterfuge page of DCN -- a clique of graphic designers somewhere in the Netherlands who thought the whole thing up as a practical joke. Although (long ago) the things were cast out of iron by the thousands, some have rusted away, others are lost, and many are still holding buildings together. (And of course the vast majority of barnstars in general do not match our barnstar. I managed to track one down and paid Cash Money for it. Poor fool that I am, I thought somebody might actually want a barnstar teeshirt (or teddy bear, mousepad, or thong). I'm still wondering how long it will take before I recover costs.

But when all is said and done, the work I point to with the most pride is the steady stream of honest, uncompromising talk I put out. Our Community has many good editors, but also a number of fools and gangsters, and many of them do not hesitate to lie boldly and do all they can to pervert our goals, advance petty agendas, and seek personal power. They bully their opponents and cheat process and, if men of good will do nothing, will destroy all we have. I am all the more proud of my unflinching stance on controversial issues because I often fear there is no hope -- yet somehow, I still manage to make another effort.

If I've avoided extensive article editing, perhaps that's in part because I know only a little about most subjects. At least I have the good sense to know I don't know, and refrain from messing things up. &mdash; Xiong&#29066; talk* 04:52, 2005 August 17 (UTC)