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race or skin tone or anything like that. In fact, we're all made of the same old stardust. I just happen to delight in the idea that we're not only stardust, but also Starbucks
This user values the quality of Wikipedia articles over the quantity and thus supports the merging of related content and deletion of articles that violate policies and guidelines.
Many of my contributions have been to year-related articles. My concrete goals are to help standardize, clean, and add to this ever-growing, ever-revised, and potentially endless set of articles. More abstractly, I enjoy the challenge of judging historical notability from an encyclopedic, "neutral" point of view.
By the way, those rectangles you see above, on the left, are called Userboxes. I wanted to make it easier for less experienced users to access them in general, but I ran into some peculiar obstacles. So, for those of you who might like to add some Userboxes to your own user page, here is my own link to the Userbox Gallery.
Contributions
I feel that I have contributed in useful or important ways—whether through copy-editing, content-addition, or criticism—to the following articles, among others:
featured
status. I have also been involved with several article-deletion discussions.
This editor is an Experienced Editor and is entitled to display this Service Badge.
For your work on the years articles.
talk
) 00:41, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
The Editor's Barnstar
For first-rate copyediting and cleanup of the article 20th century. Groupthink (talk) 13:36, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
A great defense. Whole argument--including ending with a concern over a probable
WP:DGFA violation--shows you to be a great defender of wikipedia policy. --Firefly322 (talk
) 11:04, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
I hereby award Cosmic Latte this Flaming Joel-wiki for going through wiki-hell for six weeks and coming out the other side...always remember rule numero-uno, don't edit unless you don't mind having your material ruthlessly edited, and keep on smiling. Cheers, Casliber (talk·contribs) 05:38, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
Philosophy
Overall
Before you read further, I ask that you forgive me in advance for sounding off about the pitfalls of...well, sounding off. There is, alas, no easy way to speak about the benefits of silence.
I mention above that I take a
detection for far too long, because such activity simply contributes to the wealth of information in which importance is obscured in the first place. Others add their birthdays and anniversaries to year and date pages. (Evidently the ability to encapsulate one's identity into an absurdly customizable cell phone, and then to alert everyone to that identity with, say, a Klaus Nomi ringtone, still leaves people wanting more. Curious, isn't it?) This sort of activity actually bothers me more than "witty" vandalism, because the latter vandals are at least aware that they're tagging a quantitatively ridiculous amount of information with some qualitative baloney. The "vanity vandals," in contrast, are dishearteningly oblivious to the fact that this is what they're doing. So, I think we will do ourselves a favor to take a relatively exclusionist, and maybe even a deletionist
, approach to editing, in the belief that as mere information is winnowed from true knowledge, we'll begin to gain a sense of which ideas really matter and, in so doing, of why and how we matter.
Time-related
Because an encyclopedia is a compendium of knowledge, and because most of what we know concerns the past--after all, it's been around for quite a while--most encyclopedic material deals with prior people, events, and discoveries. Due to my interest in time-related material, however, I've found myself working with an unusual quantity of knowledge that is either unfolding or expected to unfold sometime in the future. So, in addition to the general views noted above, I've done some thinking about how to handle present- and future-related material.
For some of my thoughts about current events, here is part of an entry that I made on an article's talk page:
Since this is Wikipedia and not
freshness in memory
. In any case, when dealing with completely new material, it's always a good rule of thumb to add information and (good) references simultaneously.
As for writing about the future, here is a discussion that occurred on my own talk page, followed by an afterthought of mine (also left on the talk page) for other editors for whom it might be beneficial. Briefly, I think that a literal and straightforward, but close and careful, reading of the
WP:FUTURE
policy is enough to guide future-related writing on Wikipedia.
Hello Cosmic Latte. I'm not trying to be cute, concerning mentioning of the
United States presidential election, 2008. If Bush dies, resigns or is removed from office before his term expires? Cheney would be the 44th President. This time - I've replaced 44th with next. GoodDay (talk
) 14:58, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
I've also changed 44th President to next President, at the 2009 article. PS- Though I disagree with using 44th, I won't revert (again) if you guys prefer to keep it. GoodDay (talk) 19:00, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
I'll leave it up to other folks, too. Seems like both of us have pretty much stated our cases on the matter. Cosmic Latte (talk) 10:33, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
[A.] Individual scheduled or expected future events should only be included if the event is notable and almost certain to take place. [...]
[B.] Articles that present extrapolation, speculation, and "future history" are original research and therefore inappropriate.
To assume that the next presidential election will be the 44th (or that the human race and Planet Earth will be around tomorrow) is to meet condition A, whereas to recognize the possibility that it will be the 45th (or that Armageddon is just around the corner) is to meet condition B. Thus the former assumption is, in my view, acceptable, whereas the latter recognition is not.Cosmic Latte (talk) 03:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
RfA criteria
The sociologist
bureaucrats
have an exceptional degree of (technical) authority; IP users and registered users have a respectable degree of equality, insofar as they can edit most of the same articles. Adminship is, to me, a middle ground, where a potentially enormous group of users (equality) can share a special set of tools (authority, at least in a technical sense). When I participate in RfA's, I will generally support, as long as it appears that the candidate will not overmphasize authority at the expense of equality or solidarity. This means that I will tend to support as long as the candidate does not meet criteria such as:
Demonstrating an elitist attitude.
Acting as though adminship were a trophy. (
It's not.
)
Showing signs of racism, ageism, sexism (ism ism ism), etc.
Because I haven't found (or made) a userbox for it yet (although, interestingly, I've come across a userbox for the opposite idea): This user thinks that
biological reality, but strongly denies the popular idea that racism
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