User:David Gerard/old

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If you find this page on any site other than the English Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated, and that I may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard .

David Gerard is an utter wikipediholic. He is apparently an administrator [1] [2] and former arbitrator and helps clear the incoming spam on wikien-l. He is from Australia and lives in Walthamstow, London with his wife, and his girlfriend nearby.

My wife foolishly directed me here and I became an instant addict. Like Barney Gumble having that first beer.

My life has been spent filling my head with unbelievable quantities of trivia and rubbish. Here's a chance to get some of it out.

As a recovering editor, I can't see a grammatical or spelling error without my red-pencil hand twitching. Wikipedia provides tremendous opportunity in this field.

en This user is a native speaker of English.
en-AU This user's a native speaker a' 'Straiyan, mate. Bewdy!
BS This user is a native speaker of Bullshit.
1337-0 This user is cursed with the knowledge of what 1337 is but prefers to contribute using proper words.
du-1 This user does not wish to speak or hear dumbass, but is resigned to the necessity of at least understanding it in an environment of massive collaboration.
zomg+4 This user is an integral member of the sekret IRC cabal. Flee.

Contacting me[edit]

Put it on the article talk page in the first instance, my talk page in the second. If you email me stuff that would normally go on a talk page, I'll likely ignore it. I've also erroneously deleted such mail as spam before ...

Wikipedia press enquiries: Email me directly (wp at davidgerard dot co dot uk).

If you're inadvertently affected by a block I've made, do of course email. (Direct address: wp at davidgerard dot co dot uk.) Collateral damage is bad.

In Soviet Wikipedia, job finds YOU![edit]

These are as well as writing and editing articles. If you are accused of being in the Cabal, count how many Wikipedia jobs you have. If it's ten or more, you are.

"On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs" — me. This is because when a new task comes up, people tend to look for someone that they know already has competence and a clue. This is probably a feature rather than a bug. I think.

Oh — and whine about something long enough and you'll probably get the precise job you didn't want fixing it. "It may not be what your job or wife need, but you should have thought of that before you demonstrated sanity" — Snowspinner

I must write more articles[edit]

And not copyedit so much. And so must you. My scratchpad (for the terminally bored or work-avoidant). The Problem With Music.

Wikipedia 1.0 is my current obsession. Go to m:List of articles all languages should have and Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have and help bring all listed articles to Featured Article status.

I started WikiProject Scientology, Xenu help me. NPOV is pretty much a new approach to Web-based writing about Scientology.

The "Fix Crappy Prose" Challenge[edit]

I'd like everyone reading this who thinks they're a pretty good writer to middle-click* "Random page" twenty times and rewrite any crappy prose without sacrificing facts. Do this at least once a week.

Detail and accuracy beat eloquence when the choice arises, but that does not justify crappy prose.

If you're feeling particularly strong and have a fresh pack of Gudangs and a bottle of whisky to hand, there's a Metric Shitload of stuff on Category:Articles that need to be wikified that can only be fixed by hard editorial slog.

* or control-click or command-click. You do use Firefox, right?

My personal style guide[edit]

"It's about viral payload density." — John Hawkes-Reed

We're writing articles for someone who knows nothing about a topic but needs to get up to speed really quickly. You have ten seconds.

I sometimes picture my reader as a very bright ten- to twelve-year-old. Someone with a good reading age, but who knows nothing yet. Did you used to devour encyclopaedias as a kid?

Feature brag[edit]

That's two FA classifications (Computing and Religion and belief) ... I need one more.

Sockpuppetry and CheckUser[edit]

OH NOES!!1!
Unfocused left this thing here. I don't have room on my mantelpiece. Maybe if my mother gets a userpage she can put it on hers.

I have the 'l33t power of CheckUser, a sysadmin-level facility to match IPs to usernames on the English Wikipedia, so that the Arbitration Committee doesn't have to bug the devs. I also administer the mailing list.

I can't promise a timescale for response, even for the plausibly AC-related ones. But I will try. Ask on the talk page.

Note that I can't check Wikipedias other than the English one. For a full list of users with CheckUser access across projects, see m:Stewards. If your Wikipedia has a problem, you need to find someone who knows lots about interpreting IPs and net abuse who your wiki trusts to check this stuff out, then ask the stewards to give you permission on this page.

If you've been given this power on another wiki, you should join the mailing list. I'm very happy to help make sense of IP evidence if you can't work out what's up with something or whether an excuse seems plausible.

I also have a sock puppet of my very own: User:Querulous, my favourite example user.

Deletion and undeletion[edit]

Text recovery[edit]

If you need access to a Wikipedia article that has been deleted, ask me. If it's not a copyright violation, libel or similar, I will make the text available to you.

Note that using the text to recreate the deleted content is speedyable, and using it to keep it hanging around in your userspace has gotten editors penalized before. But that's your problem.

Expertise and deletion[edit]

If you can verify for me that you are a subject expert in a subject considered notable enough to include on Wikiedia, I will, on your say-so, close any deletion debate as "keep" within your field of expertise, and will undelete any articles within your field that you say are notable.

A note on deletions[edit]

WP:AFD's culture is widely considered somewhat problematic. That said, almost all of what appears on it does in fact deserve as quick, painful and messy a death as can be achieved. If you think you're an inclusionist, do Special:Newpages patrol some time. Oh My Goodness.

Also, if I go on IRC these days, I'm usually there for a reason. Please put Deletion 101 discussion questions on my talk page.

Wikipedia meetups[edit]

These are always really good. I recommend them highly. It's amazing what a difference it makes to your view of Wikipedia to meet your fellow editors and have a drink with them. I attend the London ones where possible.

The following users are MY FAULT[edit]

Hey, kid — your first puff of Wikicrack's free.

Trivia[edit]

Your humble editor has been inducted into the Western Australian Music Industry Association's Hall of Fame. I got in and Bon Scott didn't. User:Redcountess will never forgive me.

See also[edit]

I have logins on Meta, OpenFacts (which I mostly use to write articles during Wikipedia downtimes) Disinfopedia SourceWatch (life's so much more fun without NPOV) and Wikipedia's replacement, Uncyclopedia (where I am also an admin, and have more featured articles than I do here).

External links[edit]


I personally favour weak copylefts. Please feel free to reuse my stuff:

Multi-licensed with any Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license draft version 1.0 and version 2.0 and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.

This only applies to my work in the main article space, not talk pages, Wikipedia: space pages or whatever. It does apply to images created by me and uploaded by me to Wikimedia.

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