User:Wham2001

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This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other thanWikipedia,you are viewing amirror site.Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other thanWikipedia.The original page is located athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wham2001.

This page originally readI'm an occasional editor, making small changes as I pass through.,which was true at the time but is less so now.

About me

I prefer to edit psudonymously, but I find it helpful to have some idea of who the people I am interacting with on Wikipedia are; hence, a brief biography. I was born, grew up, and live inNorthern Europe.English is unfortunately the only language that I understand with any useful degree of fluency. I studied the physical sciences at university, and have a science-related job, though these days I spend more time in Zoom meetings than in a lab. I don't edit articles related to my job much, since doing so feels like work. I'm fortunate enough not to be very concerned which pronouns other people refer to me by, buthe/himorthey/themwould be the obvious choices. I'm not the only internet user who calls themselves "Wham2001", and I only call myself "Wham2001" here. I'm notnotable,but I do appear in a photograph in at least one Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia editing

I love reading, but am not very good at writing (you can tell from the preceding paragraph, no?) Perhaps as a result most of my Wikipedia time is spentgnomingaround articles others have written. I often patrolrecent changes,in particular focussing onarticles about living people.I feel strongly that we have a duty not to invade the privacy of the subjects of our articles, particularly those who are mostly out of the public eye.

In the pre-plagueera lot of my editing was done with a smartphone from public transport, in particular most of the anti-vandalism work. I find thatTwinkleworks well on a smartphone in desktop mode, though I have it set to require confirmation to avoid mis-clicking rollback links. I likethis essaythough I suspect that the author is a lot more patient than I am! One small tip is that the syntax highlighting feature causes the wikitext editor to behave eratically on my (cheap Android) phone; you can disable it by tapping the icon that looks like a lipstick in the bar above the edit box. I operate a second account,Wham2010,so that I can have different preferences set on my phone.

Days of the year

I don't like, although I understand the reasons for, the consensus that it's OK for ourarticles on days of the yearto be mostly unsourced but that new unreferenced edits added to these articles should be reverted. I think this isunfairon the (often new) editors adding to these articles in good faith, who are effectively being told that the existing unsourced content, written by insiders, is of more value than their equally unsourced work. The best way out of this situation is for the articles to be fully sourced, so I started to add references to those articles. This is a large task with only a few editors working on it, which would benefit fromyourassistance; seeherefor instructions and style guidelines. On a typical day roughly 60 000 readers look at a Day of the Year article – half of those at the article for today and half at all the rest put together – so your work will not go unread.

Useful resources for birthdays etc.

WP:RSN– Reliable sources noticeboard andperennial sources
User:Wham2001/DotY RSP– Notes on infrequently discussed sources which crop up repeatedly when looking for "Days of the year" sources
Library of Congress authority search

Cats for herding practice

Ordered kittens to lions:

Stuff I have to search for every darn time

ReFillfor lazily fixing bare URLs
{{Columns-list}}puts lists into multiple columns
{{reflist-talk}}- I always expect this to be called reflist-section...
{{diff||prev|oldid|waffle}}or{{diff||next|oldid|waffle}}for linking to diffs (or use{{URL_to_diff|url=|label=}}).
{{wikicite}}– creates anchors to allow{{harv}}/{{sfn}}to point to hand-made references
{{cnf}}/{{Incomplete short citation}}/{{fcn}}– grumble about broken citations
{{para}}|para=vs.{{param}}{{{param}}}
Template:Cite archive– how many more "secret" citation templates are there?!
Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects– does what it says on the tin
Articles requiring cleanup aboutSwedishandDanishtopics
Swedish newspaper archives

And finally

If you have a question or concern about one of my edits, please contact me onmy talk page.I appreciate feedback and try to reply to all posts there, other than obvious trolling. Please don't email me unless you feel it really necessary, but if you do please let me know on my talk page; otherwise the chances of me reading – let along replying to – your email are very small.

TODO

Find references for the many unsourced statements inLund–very slow progress
Translatesv:Romeleåsenand find references for it –largely stalled
Re-read Harris (2005) and use it to improveStuart Restoration–summer project?
Pages needing more extensive reference work:
- History of Algeria– piles of no-target errors, mishmash of sfns and{{rp}},article needs some severe trimming
- Yom Kippur War– mix of sfn formats, talk page note left 2024-07-04
- Banu Qurayza– mix of sfn formats
- Ajuran Sultanate– mix of reference styles
- Bar Kokhba revolt– would benefit from some reference systematising
- British Raj– multiple sfn formats, some conversion to sfn also needed