User:Alecmconroy
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| 5000 | This user has over 5000 edits on the English Wikipedia. |
Contents |
[edit] Articles I'm proud of helping with
- Opus Dei, far from perfect, but we made huge huge huge progress. Now a GA!
- Purgatory, coming along
- Boy Scouts of America membership controversies, now a FA!
- Ebionites, now a FA!
- Acts of the Apostles, major progress
- Lost in the mall technique, more to do here, but a start
- Cartesian materialism, pretty good.
[edit] A thousand words
Pictures are worth a thousand words. Some pictures I've made:
Euclid's Parallel Postulate. So obvious, but it turns out it's false in our universe.
Purgatory in the Roman Catholic afterlife, just like my 3rd grade parochial school teacher drew it.
Sheet music samples for the enigmatic Asian Riff
Manufactured image of a ghost using completely Free materials. Ghost kept having copyright problems, since all the "real" ghost images were copyrighted. Now it won't.
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, 
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. Diagrams that talk about the relationship between the synoptic gospels and diagrams about the synoptic problem.
[edit] The best article on all of Wikipedia
In my official opinion, the best single article on the entire english wikipedia is: 0.999... . If you're at all mathematically inclined, read it.
It completely smashed my pre-existing concepts of what an encyclopedia can be. And it's the kind of article that only Wikipedia would have. I can't imagine looking up this article in Britannica. This is the sort of place where Wikipedia really shines
I never would have believed such a great article could have been constructed on this topic, or that it could be made so accessible and, honestly, fascinating. I know a thing or two about math, but there are a lot of really creative choices made in this article that never would have occurred to me-- the page image that so perfectly illustrates the concept of string shooting off to infinity, the discussion of mathematical education, the intuitive proofs, the popular culture discussion, etc. Before reading this page, I could have written an article talking about why .999=1, but I never would have thought to make it so... comprehensive and so fun. Everyone involved should be extra proud of themselves.
I had absolutely nothing to do with this article. I wish I did.
[edit] Wikipedia Interests
- Wikipedia:Requests for comment. Ever since I did an RFC that got only 1 comment, I've been trying to make a concerted effort to comment on other people's RFCs. You should too.
- The Bible as Literature & History. I enjoy trying to walk tight rope of conveying biblical content without making assertions about its authenticity.
- Taking requested articles that do not exist, researching their subject, and writing a stub about them. Usually judical precidents, scientific effects, or mathematical theorems.
- Philosophy of Mind. Taking complex debates and trying to make them Neutral and Simple.
- Badsites is evil. See my essay.
[edit] Wikipersonality
If there's an opposite of a WikiGnome, I'm it. (A WikiMage perhaps?)
Where a Wikignome is someone who quietly makes tiny changes to thousands of articles, I tend to make deep, substantial changes to a few articles.
A Wikignome is someone who has the Organizer personality type, and is skilled at detail-oriented, sometimes repetitive tasks. I'm an Investigator, and spend lots of time on a few major projects at a time. (Some listed above).
A Wikignome makes uncontroversial edits, and a Wikidragon enjoying being bold. I'm not a particularly bold editor, but I am a particularly verbose one. Talk pages are my friend.
Once upon a time, Wikipedia was young enough and sparse enough that I could easily just pour out knowledge. Now Wikipedia is getting to smart for me and I'm having to learn just to find new information to feed it. :) . On at least three different occasions, I've returned home from the library with an armful of books which I had to read in order to learn enough about a subject in order to feed the 'pedia.
[edit] Wikipolitics and other nonsense
- I like weasel terms. When properly cited, a limited amount of weasel words can help us make articles easier to read. So I wrote an essay to explain my point of view: Wikipedia:Embrace weasel words.
- When I was just a wee one, I hated hearing "No". But most of all, I hated hearing "Because I said so". So, I try hard to explain the reasons behind the policies to people, and to talk about how they can do things in ways that would comply with Wikipedia policies. I wrote an essay about a good way to do that: Don't Just Say No!
- Don't link just because you can. A link is a suggestion from the editors that a reader might want to click on the link. If that's not the case, e.g. dates, don't link.
- Definitions are bad. Humans learn through Induction. Don't teach me what a dog is by defining EXACTLY what dogs are. Point to a dog and say "Doggy!". The lead section of an article should "clearly convey the gist", not try to "define precisely and definitively".
- Don't trouble me with names I don't need to know. Everyone has an opinion-- just because I need to know someone's opinion doesn't automatically mean I need to know their name. By all means, I need to be able to find out their name for the sake of verifiability, but that's why they invented footnotes.
- For a controversial article, there are more than 2262144 different potential articles that we COULD choose to put up. 2262144 is a very big number. It has more than 78,000 digits. Those are a lot of potential articles. It is my belief that somewhere, hidden with that multitude of potential articles, there is at least ONE article that everyone would be happy with. It's our job to find it.
- Benevolent Dictatorships are bad. I don't care how wonderful Jimbo is, no one person deserves special authority over the will of the people. "Supreme executive authority derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical status as founder." Every policy that reads "Jimbo can" should be changed to read "Chief Executive" or "Board Chairman" something not linked to one specific human being. History shows us time and again that organizations revolving around one central charismatic individual just don't work-- eventually the monarch dies, goes mad, becomes senile, or gets abducted and turned into a Manchurian Candidate. And even it if DID always work, I still wouldn't vote for it, cause it's just plain wrong. Liberté, égalité, fraternité! However, I can't emphasize this enough-- On wikipedia, "Jimbo" now refers to both a man and a title-- just like Caesar. Just because I dispute the nature of the current position of "Jimbo", that doesn't mean I have anything at all against Jimbo the person, or the way Jimbo the human has served as Jimbo the position. I don't. If we were going have an election for Jimbo the position, Jimbo the person would get my vote. :)
- The "BC/AD" dating system is POV and is also confusing/contradictory since Jesus was theoretically born ~4 BC. Some day, the world should switch to "BCE/CE". That said, wikipedians have not reached a consensus on that, and as such, I pride myself on not having changed the dating scheme on even one single article.
- No Original Research is my least favorite of the content policies. This doesn't mean I disagree with it-- it's a very important idea. It's just that I tend to think of it not as a "given", but rather as a natural consequence of other more fundamental rules like NPOV, Verifiability, Wikipedia is not a soapbox, reliable sources, notability, and Vanity guidelines. The situation is similar to the problem posed by Euclid's fifth axiom-- The first four axioms were obviously true and easy to accept as axioms. The fifth axiom, however, was much less obvious, and many people believed it was somehow a natural consequence of the other four axioms, rather than an obvious fact that could be accepted as an axiom. I quote NOR all the time-- Original research is a convenient sub-type of non-verifiable, non-notable, or non-neutral information that does not belong in our encyclopedia. But-- original research is bad because it's not verifiable, notable, neutral, from a reliable source, or some combination thereof-- it's not bad just because it's original. If there is a sentence in the encyclopedia that was 100% universally agreed to be verifable, notable, neutral, from a reliable source, and indeed, factually correct-- should we really remove it based on it being original? In practice, I do not believe this case has ever come up, nor do I expect it can ever come up under any circumstances.
- Argument from authority doesn't hold a lot of sway with me. There may be many people who say something, but if my own logic disagrees, I probably won't be swayed.
- In informal communication, I use hickish words like "Y'all". I don't enjoy it. Don't blame me-- English doesn't have a second-person plural. Speaking of which, I also use "they" as a singular neuter third person-- don't blame me--- what else can I do? call people "it"?
[edit] Biases I've been accused of having
I try very hard to edit without letting my own personal beliefs affect my editing. If I'm doing a good job at that, then no one can detect my biases through my editing. As such, I take special pride in how many different biases I've been accused of having. For me, this is sort of like a Bingo game-- eventually I hope I can get all major political and religious biases on the list. :) . So far, I've been accused of being:
