Cedders

I didn't often log in until April 2006, but made several random additions and corrections anonymously from 2004 onwards. I'm most interested in history of ideas, politics, science fiction, and artificial intelligence. --Cedders^talk /Toolbox /Proposals /...

Mission

Please don't take offence if I mark a page that you have started for deletion or speedy deletion. Instead please see What Wikipedia is not, Wikipedia:List of bad article ideas, and whichever is appropriate of the following guidelines for notability:

• People and autobiography
• Corporations and organisations
• Bands and musicians
• General non-notable non-encyclopaedic promotional pages

I do a bit of new changes/pages patrolling and may start helping with one or more of the following tasks:

• Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit
• Category:Articles that need to be wikified
• Category:Wikipedia articles with style issues
• Category:Wikipedia articles needing rewrite
• Category:Category needed, Special:Uncategorizedpages, Special:Uncategorizedcategories, Category:Underpopulated categories
• possibly Wikipedia:Pages needing attention
• possibly Wikipedia:Cleanup
• Keeping an eye on Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and Category:Proposed deletion for what I think might become a useful article or stub. Eclectic examples of articles I have written or rewritten in order to prevent deletion are Alexander Vampilov, Rob Buckman and Orang Minyak.

My IRC name on freenode.net is 'Ceddrs'.

Editing philosophy

Wikipedia by definition is not adding to the sum total of human knowledge. The most it can hope to do is present some existing knowledge in a convenient, concise form. However, a major part of that must be summarising paper sources which are not already available through the web - perhaps the best web commentaries and summaries should still be in static pages outside Wikipedia along with original research.

Is Wikipedia reliable? No, I would not rely on it for anything at all important. Of course all editors are hoping it will tend towards accuracy, but because of vandalism and inexperienced editing article will always vary in quality.

I tend towards inclusionism, although would prefer the coverage of Wikipedia to be a bit more even - there is a lot of information about current TV programmes, say, but much less about 20th century writers. Therefore I am also attracted by mergism.

One exception to erring on the side of inclusion is where an article or insertion obviously has a public relations or promotional provenance. Attempts to remove point-of-view are usually only partially successful even if most of the article is deleted. I believe this kind of abuse of Wikipedia should be strongly discouraged by deletion, as in fact usually happens if the new pages patrollers are alert enough. Please see my /Proposals that there could be more structured referral of these editors to other Wikis where NPOV would not be an issue.

The obligatory userboxes

This user tries to do the right thing. If they make a mistake, please let them know. theyThis user considers singular they standard English usage. mankindThis user supports the use of gender-neutral language. A, B, and A and BThis user prefers to use the serial comma only when its omission can be confusing. no adsThis user is against commercials in Wikipedia.

enThis user is a native speaker of the English language. eo-1Ĉi tiu uzanto povas komuniki per baza nivelo de Esperanto. This user studies or studied at Durham University.

This user provides information using user boxes for statistical reasons. This user's time zone is GMT. This user has no understanding of time and does everything at the last minute. INTPThis user has an INTP personality per the Myers–Briggs typing system. This user is male. This user is straight but not narrow.

Disclaimer: Political and religious userboxes are discouraged at Wikipedia and may be deleted in future. Those included here are intended to be descriptive of this editor's background, rather than confrontational, campaigning or divisive. Userboxes may refer to interesting articles, but editors always aim to produce fair and objective Wikipedia articles on contentious subjects. GPEW This user supports the Green Party of England and Wales = This user supports the Make Trade Fair campaign. This user supports peace in space. This user is opposed to online censorship. This user supports aviation fuel taxation.

C-2This user is an intermediate C programmer. Perl-3This user is an advanced Perl programmer. This user is a Pirate. Arrr! This user is a Doctor Who fan. This user is a Citizen of the Galaxy‡ and nothing else matters. This user prefers using userboxes to fill up their user page instead of actually writing something useful.