User:Yunshui/About

Userboxes

Hi, I'm Yunshui. I've been on Wikipedia for about 14 years, and am currently an administrator. I've been a member of the site's Arbitration Committee (never again!), and as a hangover of those heady days retain checkuser and oversight permissions; I am also a global renamer.

I generally spend my time here clearing admin backlogs, helping new users and creating articles on anything that happens to catch my interest; very occasionally I'll try taking something to Good or even Featured status. I'm particularly interested in the fields of martial arts and East Asian history in general (although despite my choice of username, my grasp of East Asian languages is limited to a smattering of words and phrases in Japanese and a few odd bits of Mandarin).

I don't often edit at weekends (it happens, but it's not common). If you ask me something on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, be prepared to wait until Monday for a response.

Alt accounts
I have an alternate account at User:Yunshui-tester, which I use to get a "regular editor's" view (without all the bells and whistles available to this account) from time to time. User:Yun Shui redirects here, and is a doppelgänger account. The rest of these are not mine, unsurprisingly...

My username
It's Yunshui, folks! Y-U-N-S-H-U-I.

I should have chosen a more easily-spelled username - here are a few of my favourite misspellings: Tunshui, Yunshu and Yanshu (in the same comment, no less), Yunshi, Yunshuior, Yenshui, Yunshiu, Yanshui, Yuneshoshi, Yushuni, Yuhshui, Yunshuil. Yunshai, Yihaiul, Yunshoi, Yushui, Yunahui, Yunsui, Yungshui, Yamla, Ynushui (more than once...), Tanushi, Yahshooey, Yunishui, Yunhui... I daresay there'll be more. Incidentally, the Chinese pronunciation is closer to "yoon-shway" than "yun-shooey", should you ever need to verbalise it.

And, since I occasionally get asked, it means "clouds (and) water" and can refer to a Taoist hermit or a neophyte practitioner of Zen or martial arts, depending on whether you read it in Chinese or Japanese.

Essays
Every now and again I get the urge to write about some aspect of Wikipedia:

For beginners
Some even-simpler-than-the-simple-versions explaining Wikipedia processes:
 * Article creation for beginners
 * Deletion for beginners
 * References for beginners
 * Images for beginners
 * Templates for beginners
 * Anti-vandalism for beginners
 * Twinkle for beginners
 * Sockpuppet investigations for beginners

General

 * How not to get unblocked, an essay on the best ways to screw up your unblock appeal.
 * Give a man a fish..., an essay on helping new users.
 * Wikipedia is not rocket science, an essay on how editing Wikipedia is basically just common sense.
 * Don't be too keen to help, why new users probably shouldn't try to be helpful.

Unblock appeal templates
To deal with some of the more common unblock requests we deal with, I created a few templates to use when responding. Admins who respond to unblock appeals should feel welcome to call these userpages as templates, or copy them and adapt them in their own userspace.
 * Spam username block, no new username, no undertaking to avoid writing about company: User:Yunshui/decline promo
 * Spam username block, appropriate new username selected or already renamed, no undertaking to avoid writing about company: User:Yunshui/decline promo renamed
 * Copyright violations block, no demonstration of copyright understanding: User:Yunshui/decline copyvio
 * Sockpuppetry block, outright denial of sockpuppetry: User:Yunshui/I am not a sock
 * Edit war block, user claims their edits were correct but does not address edit warring: User:Yunshui/decline ew
 * "I understand the reason for the block," with no further explanation: User:Yunshui/decline understand
 * Account or IP is not actually blocked: User:Yunshui/not blocked

Typos
Whilst I try my best to avoid typos, they do slip through ocassionnaly. I don't mind people fixing my spelling, but if you do so, make sure you get it right - I use British English, and woe betide anyone who tries changing "licence" to "license" or "organise" to "organize" in my posts! Generally I'll be grateful to you, but I reserve the right to restore my own spelling for whatever reason.

Admins
I've nominated the following users at Requests for adminship, and am proud to have done so whether they passed or not.
 * (rfa)
 * (rfa)
 * (rfa)
 * (rfa)
 * (rfa)
 * (rfa)
 * (rfa)

Wiki-addicted? Judge for yourself...
Some things I've noticed that may suggest I spend too much time on Wikipedia:
 * I sign my emails - even my business emails - with four tildes.
 * I use wikimarkup in Microsoft Word, and get frustrated when it isn't recognised because I can't remember Word's actual commands for the things I want to do.
 * When I see a breaking news story or learn a new fact, my first thought is never, "How terrible!" or "How fascinating!", but invariably, "Do we have an article on that yet?"
 * My CV mentions my work on Wikipedia. More than once.
 * When I see a suspicious fact in a newspaper or on a website - or even on an advertising hoarding - I also see a little [citation needed]  tag in my mind's eye.
 * I wish I owned a better camera - not to record the lives of my family, but so that I could produce decent panoramic pictures for Wikipedia articles.
 * I get genuinely angry when people question Wikipedia's reliability, and will aggressively cite studies at them to demonstrate its veracity.
 * I'm secretly pleased when my infant son wakes up in the night, because it means I get to edit whilst waiting for him to go back to sleep.
 * Everything I write as part of my job conforms to the Manual of Style.
 * I don't read blogs anymore, because they aren't reliable sources; what's the point?
 * I know more about copyright law than I ever thought I'd need to. More, in fact, than I ever thought a copyright lawyer would need to.
 * I treat the Civility policy as a moral guideline for real-world interactions (rather than applying real-world morality to Wikipedia interactions).
 * I was recently asked what the proudest moment of my life had been. My graduation, the births of my children, my wedding, various promotions - all took second place to my successful RFA.
 * I lecture my friends in the pub on the finer points of Wikipedia policy. None of them edit here.
 * If I need to dress up, I consider my Wikipedia-branded polo shirt before any other item of clothing.
 * Pursuant to the above, I also own more than one item of clothing from the Wikimedia Shop.
 * If I hurriedly close my browser when my wife walks into the room, she assumes I've been looking at Wikipedia rather than porn. She's usually right.
 * I use wiki-abbreviations in speech - "Reckon we'll need a 3O on that," "Yes, but I'd like to see an RS;" both phrases that have left my mouth in recent days (to the confusion of my colleagues...).
 * On at least two separate occasions I have seen an article on some non-notable character put up for deletion, thought, "Hey, even I've heard of them!" and started hunting for sources. After a long and fruitless trawl through Google, I've then realised that I'd only heard of them because I'd deleted a previous version of the page.
 * Apparently I am unable to retire, despite my best efforts to do so.