User:PhilipR

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The more time I spend on Wikipedia, the more clearly I see its warts. I'll try to develop that theme over time as I'm able.

Contents

[edit] Content versus presentation

With the 2006 FIFA World Cup going on, I've been thinking a lot about the limitations of MediaWiki, and particularly in how it fails to distinguish between data (particularly non-textual data) and presentation. On a basic level I guess you can stylesheet your third-level heading in red or something, but that's not what I mean.

For example, suppose you want to set up a wiki with a community-maintained list of every international soccer match ever held. On any given day you might want to see various views on this: all the matches between Brazil and England between 1985 and 2000, perhaps, or every game where one side scored five goals or more. The problem is, as brilliant as present-day wikis are for community-edited text, they're not brilliant for this kind of data. At least, to my knowledge they're not. You have to start a list of international football matches where the winning side scored five goals or more, and then you'll get it deleted because it's not encyclopedic, so there ya go. Or you can place these on one of those "year in ___ football" articles which, again, is just the wrong place to repeat information IMO. At the very least why should you have to maintain the score of an Argentina-Uruguay match on one page for each team?

See also my comments on Talk:2006_FIFA_World_Cup_(squads) (#Squad_sorting), Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football.

Something better is needed. Anyone wanna brainstorm with me? I should probably go to Meta and see if people have already thought of this. Feel free to add your brainstorms here:

[edit] Other wikis

Other Wikis I like, and my different identities where relevant:

[edit] My Wiki TODO

As a new Wiki fanatic/Wikipedian (and an ADD person *grin*), I know there's a huge tendency for my eyes to be bigger than my stomach. So these are my priorities in Wikidom -- not just for Wikipedia.

  • Gradually add content to PokerWiki - this month, we're adding casinos
  • Read the contentious Marla Ruzicka article so I can be an informed participant in that discussion.
  • Keep adding content to Libertarian Wiki - anything local that I find, + continuing to add states.
  • Continue my role in Wikipedia:WikiProject_Punctuation - at least get all the way through my one list.
  • Give the Christian punk article some much-needed love and attention.
  • Decide whether to WP:VFD the List_of_famous_people_with_attention-deficit_hyperactivity_disorder (talk).

[edit] lower priority

  • religion:Underground Christian outreach set up; now needs content.
  • DMCA and DRM stuff - perhaps get some background from EFF.org?
  • Ask Hadley, Massachusetts library if they want to put stuff on here.
  • Libertarian stuff -- to get involved or not get involved, that is the question.
  • Poker stuff here -- as long as it's within scope!
  • I heard Henrietta Mears mentioned in a sermon on 2005-07-03. From Google search she seems to merit an article.
  • Think more about Synchronization issues (see [1])
  • In general, be a good citizen by helping with some of the tasks found on the list at Wikipedia:Community_Portal such as transwiki, copyediting, who knows, maybe even write new articles?

(done)

  • Keep updating the Massachusetts General Court page - at this point all that's needed is to add some middle initials and delete some others.
  • LibertarianWiki: Add MA local election dates.

[edit] Draman

Text to be moved:


For example, Ghana's squad for the 2006 FIFA World Cup is listed on the following pages:
When a discrepancy was discovered regarding Haminu Dramani's surname, it needed to be corrected in all three places as well as in the title and the first sentence of the player's article.

[edit] FIFA and Montenegro

Link for future use: http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=346177


[edit] Languages

en-4 This user speaks English at a near-native level.
pt-3 Este usuário/utilizador pode contribuir com um nível avançado de português.
es-3 Este usuario puede contribuir con un nivel avanzado de español.
de-1 Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse.

[edit] test

Huntsville, Alabama