User:Android79

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Howdy. Welcome to my user page.

In real life, I'm a software engineer from Forest Lake, Minnesota. As you can probably guess from my username, I like science fiction and was born in 1979. My personal life is generally rather dull, but if you want to know more, just ask.

I made my first edits as a registered Wikipedian on July 23, 2004, forgot about it for awhile, then came back and started editing regularly on February 18, 2005. I've made no significant contributions as an anonymous user, and have never used another username. I have registered the username 79 androids for future use as a bot, if and when I ever decide to use it.

JIP kindly and unexpectedly nominated me for administratorship on September 5, 2005. After a pleasantly surprising amount of support from voters during my RfA, I was promoted on September 12. Many thanks to all who supported me.

I have the "E-mail this user" feature turned on but I cannot reliably access that email account during the daytime. My talk page is the best way to get in contact with me. If you simply must use email, my address is my Wikipedia username followed by @gmail.com.

As an editor, I concentrate on "janitorial" tasks, such as: nominating, discussing, and making final decisions on articles that end up at AfD; fighting vandalism; and doing new page patrol. My contributions to articles are pretty random, though I have focused in on Major League Baseball as an area in which I'd like to improve Wikipedia's article quality and quantity. Other areas of interest include Minnesota, computer science, and science fiction.

Books

Music

Movies/TV

  • Constantine wasn't bad, but I never read the comic book.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy didn't match the book(s) for entertainment value, but of course there's no way that it could have. It didn't translate well from page to screen, but was still entertaining.
  • Lord of War is very well-made and very depressing.
  • zOMG serenity is best movie EVAR!!1!one!
  • Lost is an amazing show; I'm frantically trying to watch all of the first season and catch up with the second season so far before it comes back from hiatus.
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Wikiphilosophy

This section is a work perpetually in progress.

I am generally a mergist. Context and organization make the encyclopedia better.

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Administrators

I'd been participating in the administrator selection process long before becoming one myself. I have a set of loose guidelines for candidates.

I echo Jimbo's statement that adminship ought to be "no big deal." My requirements are these:

  1. Experience. I won't set a hard limit and say "editing for x months" or "y edits in article space" but I will want candidates to have been around long enough to "get it" and to have contributed enough to article space to indicate that Wikipedia is more than just a passing interest for them. In other words, x and y are probably a bit lower for me than they are for other voters, but they aren't zero, either.
  2. Willingness to do the "dirty work." Candidates should already be doing the kinds of things that naturally would lead to the desire to become an admin, such as participation in Votes for Deletion and its counterparts, vandalism reversion, or policy proposals, to name a few things. Significant contribution in at least one of these areas is a must.
  3. Pleasantness. Candidates must exhibit the ability to remain cool under fire, even when the "other side" chooses not to. A lack of conflict indicates a lack of experience – if you haven't pissed anyone off yet, you're likely to be a little too green for adminship. I must admit that this is the area that I am most deficient in, though I have improved significantly.
  4. Good Faith. I will vote to oppose anyone with more than a small amount of vandalism or revert-warring in their history. A tiny bit of silliness is just fine, especially if confined to April Fool's Day, to user pages, or otherwise inconsequential areas.
  5. Familiarity. This is the least important of the criteria, but if I feel I "know" a candidate from our interaction, and the interaction has been mostly positive – disagreements are okay, as long as there's no shouting – then that will be in the candidate's favor.

These criteria are, of course, subject to change without notice.

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-cruft

Fancruft is not a dirty word. It is not an insult. It is a recognition of the fact that there is a near-infinite amount of information available on nearly every pop-culture topic known to man, and that there is a line beyond which such information becomes trivial to all but the most hardcore fans of that particular phenomenon. That line may be in different places for you and me and the average Pokémon fan, but the line is there, and it needs to be there; otherwise, Wikipedia will cease to be an encyclopedia and become an unmaintainable mess of pop-culture stubs, lists, and trivia.

All but the most egregious cruft ought to be merged into larger articles; Wikipedia:Fiction is an excellent guideline.

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Schools

The always-eloquent Uncle G summed up my feelings on the secondary school issue quite well in this discussion on the deletion of an article on the integer 11111:

Verifiable. NPOV. Capable of (infinite) organic growth. Entirely composed of padding made up of trivial, contrived, and unedifying data, in a desperate attempt to justify the existence of a separate article on a thing which is just like a huge list of other things, when the encyclopaedic approach would be to have general articles on the aspects of all of the things in the set, presenting knowledge, rather than individual entries for each one, presenting mere data. Hmmm. Where have I seen this before?

Secondary (and primary) schools are not inherently notable, though many of them deserve a well-written encyclopedia article. Unfortunately, most school articles are not encyclopedic; they are merely lists of facts, and the worst offenders are lists of facts padded with trivia. School stubs are better off as part of articles on the municipalities or school districts in which they reside, unless they become suitably large to be spun off into their own articles.

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Contributions

I've spent the majority of my time on Wikipedia pulling weeds at AfD, formerly VfD. AfD gets a bad rap by some, but spend some time there and you will learn to appreciate it. It has its flaws, but we need some way to deal with the ever-increasing volume of pure crap that gets added to the 'pedia every day. I'm not talking about microstubs or the always-controversial notion of notability; I'm talking about throwaway vanity articles, hoaxes, and other stuff that doesn't quite meet the speedy deletion criteria. In the same vein, I do new page patrol as frequently as I can stand it.

Aside from that, there are a few stubs I've written, and a few articles I've copyedited, but I have yet to do a major article or set of articles. Nothing's inspired me yet, but we'll see.

I have made this many edits. I don't obsess over my edit count, but it's interesting to see.

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Current Projects

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Personal Cleanup Tasks

  1. Lost Soul. Needs merger into List of Doom enemies or somesuch.
  2. Sigint (Metal Gear). Minor character, should be merged into Metal Gear or somewhere.
  3. Victoria Junior College. Bubbly/promotional language is constantly being added to this one.
  4. Whizzinator. Not sure what to do with this one.
  5. List of places in A Song of Ice and Fire
  6. Garth Iorg. Should add baseball player infobox, general cleanup.
  7. Interpersonal skills. cleanup since July 8. Might be duplicated elsewhere. Someone removed both tags I applied without doing either of the actions suggested by the tags, so I'll leave this one be for a while longer.
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If any of these links are blue, they shouldn't be

Serial vanity artist Jason Frost continues to re-add these articles to Wikipedia:

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Important stuff

Quote from Jimbo on banning users who persistently misrepresent the source or copyright status of uploaded media.

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