User talk:Decapod73

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Hello there!
Thanks for leaving your questions; I love messages.

To answer your questions....My userpage gets vandalized largely because I do a lot of what's called "Recent Changes Patrol" (rc patrol for short). This means going to the Special:Recentchanges page and glancing at new edits as they get posted. A lot of bad faith edits come in ("justin is so gay!!" plopped in the middle of an article, for instance), and I revert the article back to the way it was before. After I roll back that edit, I leave a message on the user's talk page, hoping they'll stop. Often they don't, and the messages get increasingly testy as the spree continues. (See User talk:63.19.219.129 for an example) These are the people who drop by my user page and get creative. Often I never even see the edits, because else notices and rolls back the damage so quickly.

As for the mergists, deletionists, inclusionists, etc., if you go here there's a list of all the factions down at the bottom of the page, with links to their respective pages.

Feel free to drop me a line any time if you have questions. It can be confusing here, but it is also very fun and addictive. By the way, you can sign comments on talk pages with ~ and that will leave your name, the date, and time. Joyous (talk) 16:05, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

My personal to-do list:
expand avicularia

merge pinktoe tarantula with avicularia, as all avic. species are referred to as different varieties of pinktoe.

merge polyene into the better conjugated system article.

add explanation/link of chromophore to color

fix fluorophore and fluorophor, which are currently completely inaccurate

expand upon structural color within color

merge heterocycle, Simple aromatic ring, and Heterocyclic compound. Expand, with heavy cross-linking to:

merge Aromaticity and aromatic hydrocarbon.

fix/reorganize/expand/partially merge Chelation, Complex (chemistry), ligand

Rally to Delete Jesus Juice, beacuse, wtf?

fix cryptand

create Resiniferatoxin and Phorbol, create appropriate cross-linking between each other and from carcinogen and capsaicin. create Euphorbia poisonii.

Overwhelming!
Changes do come in quickly, you're right. And I'll admit that when I'm doing RC patrol, if someone changes a date, I don't go back and check to see if it's correct. I'm after obviously bad-faith editing ("...my granny can kick your grannys ass!"). However, there's another very powerful feature called (insert dramatic music) The Watchlist. Anytime you edit a page, you'll see a little button just below the edit screen that says "watch this page." If you click it, that page is added to your personal watchlist. That watchlist is accessible to you when you're logged in (there's a little link, probably at the top of the page) that says "my watchlist," that displays all the articles on your list that have received edits. That's how all that vandalism on my userpage gets reverted so quickly: my page is on the watchlist of probably 15 or 20 other editors, and when someone sees that a non-Joy person has edited it, it needs to be checked. Many people "watch" articles that, by their very nature, are going to attract a lot of vandalism: penis, for example, or Michael Jackson or panda. (Panda? yep. Who knows why??)  With a combination of people doing RC patrol, and people like me who obsessively check their watchlists, the obvious bad stuff usually doesn't stay around long. (There's also a choice in your user preferences that adds any article you edit to your watchlist, but I turned that off when I realized I had waaaayyyy to many pages on the list.) I manually add any article that I've started, anything that I've done major editing on, or anything that looks like it might be controversial enough to attract immature attention.

Now, for the bit that I don't know much about: finances. Wikipedia is almost entirely volunteer-run. I think there may be one or 2 salaried staff, but the huge bulk of programming and maintenance is done by really smart Wiki-addicts. I don't know how much is generated via the "donations" button, but now and again, there is a fundraiser that usually brings in lots of money. I believe over $50,000 was donated last time, in a couple of weeks. Wikipedia also receives monetary awards from various grants. Joyous (talk) 22:13, July 14, 2005 (UTC)