User:R. fiend

For those who care, these are pages I started or wrote most of (more for my own purposes than anyone else's):

Irish topics (no, I'm not Irish)

• Tom Clarke (Irish republican) (my first article?)
• Sean MacDermott
• Eamonn Ceannt
• Thomas MacDonagh
• Joseph Mary Plunkett
• Willie Pearse
• Thomas Kent
• Denis McCullough
• Cornelius Colbert
• Liberty Hall
• Sean Heuston
• Michael O'Hanrahan
• Michael Mallin
• Edward Daly
• George Noble Plunkett
• National Volunteers
• Kevin Barry
• St. Enda's School
• Saint Enda of Aran

Music topics

• Radio-ballad
• The Dubliners
• Citizen Fish
• Child Ballads
• Sandinista!
• A.L. Lloyd
• Patrick Clancy
• Tom Clancy (singer)
• Deems Taylor
• John Alden Carpenter
• Foggy Dew
• Sir Patrick Spens
• Fifth Beatle
• Barry Sadler
• The Daemon Lover
• Andy Irvine
• The Bonny Earl of Murray
• Lamkin
• Below the Salt
• The Baltimore Consort
• The Cherry-Tree Carol
• No One Is Innocent
• Hell's Ditch
• The Wife of Usher's Well
• Rock the Casbah
• Prosperous

A few topics I'm a bit surprised no one got to before me

• The Clancy Brothers
• Tawana Brawley
• Solid South
• Wall Drug
• Ivan Albright
• Harry F. Byrd
• Kitchen Debate
• Sidney Street Siege

(OK, not too surprised about a bunch of them)

A couple films (one of which I like alot, one of which was pretty damn bad)

• Straight to Hell
• The Warriors

I like these articles; they don't go into an unnecessarily long recount of the plot, but give some noteworthy information without simply watering down their IMDb entries.

I guess I can take credit for the Dolemite article too, not that there's much credit to be given.

Peanuts

• Charlie Brown
• Snoopy
• Linus van Pelt
• Lucy van Pelt
• Peppermint Patty
• Sally Brown
• Pigpen
• Franklin (Peanuts)
• Violet (Peanuts)
• Patty
• Roy (Peanuts)
• Frieda
• Shermy
• Spike (Peanuts)

Actually I think there are a few of these I had little to do with.

Other stuff

• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Bible errata
• Great Books of the Western World
• Icicle hitch (my only knot article so far; maybe I should do some more)
• The Burghers of Calais (inspired by a Final Jeopardy! clue that wikipedia couldn't answer)
• Yitzhak Zuckerman
• Peekskill Riots
• Peter the Painter
• Michael Malloy
• Checkers speech - almost all mine
• Childe Rowland
• Classic Malts of Scotland
• Campbeltown Single Malts
• Springbank Distillery

And my only article ever to appear on VfD

• Watson and Crick

Not the most useful article, but you can't make a redirect to 2 separate pages.

• I guess I can include Belsen Was A Gas too, as it was mostly mine.

Look! My verbosity actually got me a barnstar!--->

shorter articles and stubs; some could be expanded

• Fianna Eireann
• River Kwai
• Clifford Irving
• Jeff Nelson (rock musician)
• The Mescaleros
• Boz
• Rote
• Yacht people
• Poulter's measure
• Pork pie hat
• Halve Maen
• David Rappaport
• Guantanamera
• Churchill Downs
• Ciaran Bourke
• Thomas Watson (inventor) (initially on the Watson disambiguation page, but later moved to its own article.)
• Christy Moore (made a stub from a subsubstub)
• Abadan Crisis
• Eero Aarnio
• Lycidas
• Barry Moser
• Henry Foster (doctor)
• Lowland Single Malts

...a bunch of others too, I'm sure.

Other articles I've added alot to

• Easter Rising
• Irish Volunteers
• Irish Republican Brotherhood
• Patrick Pearse
• James Connolly (nationalist)
• Thomas the Rhymer
• Angelo Siciliano
• Roger Casement
• Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa
• Bulmer Hobson

The number of articles I've contributed to in more minor ways is too numerous to list.

I've also been attempting to make helpful redirect pages for articles that are otherwise somewhat difficult to find.

To do

• John Devoy
• The O'Rahilly

I think these have been on this list since I first created this page.

I'm also thinking Cloudcuckooland deserves its own article separate from The Birds, as it's the sort of thing than can be referenced independently, and I think there's a bit than can be said on it. Maybe I'll look into it.

F.E.C.E.S.

With people constantly complaining about the use of the word "fancruft" as belittling, I have come up with a new term. Fiction and Entertainment Compiled with Extreme Specificty (not the best acronym, but it'll do). If people think this is worse, well, I guess that's the point. I call it as I see it.

Wikipedia is not paper. But that doesn't stop people from wiping their asses with it.

A note on deletion

I'm sure many people have noticed that I tend to vote "delete" considerably more often than "keep" on VfD. Some might be inclined to call me a "deletionist" for this, but I'd consider that somewhat misleading. While I tend to vote delete more often on VfD, if one were to put all articles on wikipedia up for deletion, I'd vote overwhelmingly for keep. Most (but certainly not all) entires that appear on VfD are legitimately posted as being of dubious value; pidgeonholing someone as a deletionist because they tend to vote to delete many of this minute fraction of wikipedia articles is ridiculous. It's true I tend to have a slightly higher bar for what should be in an encyclopedia than many, but it is still substantially lower than the bar for inclusion in probably any other encyclopedia. Also, with so many people having lower inclusion standards, and with the deletion process being weighted towards inclusion anyway, most articles I would vote to keep would stand little chance of deletion whether I vote or not. Since I cannot vote on every article, I tend to skip over these, unless it's something I have a particular interest in, or requires comment. With many users pa-trolling VfD voting keep on just about anything that appears to contain real words, deleting all but the most egregious of vanity and nonsense can be difficult. Some wonder why we "deletionists" don't work to improve wikipedia, rather than working to delete articles, and to them I can only say that flushing the toilet when necessary will certainly only improve the value of one's house, considering the alternative. Such is true of wikipedia. Besides, I think I have a pretty decent output of articles under my belt, which have worked to "improve" wikipedia. Add to this the hundreds of articles I've done both major and minor work on and I'd like to think my presence here has been beneficial. You are, however, prefectly free to disagree.

A little experiment

There has been a little talk about getting rid of the random search option to counter the argument against fancruft taking over wikipedia. The logic being that you won't ever have to see it unless you actively search for it. I'm not really striken with this idea, but I thought I'd take a page from another user's book and see what happens when I hit the random link a couple dozen times. This could give me some idea of what a new users impressions might be, based solely on the e-quivalent of flipping through pages. I've added some of my impressions and opinions of the articles:

1. GOST - Article dealing with cryptology. I'm interested in cryptology, but I don't know too much about the technical elements of it. I find this article confusing. I prefer it when articles like this are written slightly more in layman's terms.
2. Chinkapin oak - Stub. Not a bad one though.
3. Federalist Papers - Obviously an important subject, and looks like a well-written article (to be honest this experiment is supposed to go quickly so I'm not reading all the longer articles in full). And it appears it's not an adapted EB 1911, which is always a plus.
4. JDBC type 2 driver - Computer stuff which means nothing to me. Could probably use more links to explain some of the terms. Also not a great layout, as the diagram takes up the first half of the page.
5. Kafr ash Shaykh - Almost a substub on an area in Egypt. Better than nothing I guess. At least it has a map.
6. Battle of Hastings - Looks good. Part of it at least is EB 1911. Could maybe use a few links in the latter part, which has none.
7. China Eastern flight 5210 - An airline crash last year. The title should probably have the word "accident" or "crash" in it. The article was laid out in the one sentence per paragraph style, but I fixed most of that.
8. Seamanship - Tagged as needing attention, and I guess it sort of does. For something that's bound to be little more than a dicdef it has enough links to realted subjects to make it worthwhile.
9. Performance problem - Looks pretty good. Perhaps some unnecessary bolding though.
10. Frosting spatula - Very short article, but I'm not sure how much more can be said on a frosting spatula.
11. Cana (unit of length) - Another very short article. Sort of interesting though.
12. Fields Medal - Looks good. I'm impressed that all the winners have their own articles (though I haven't checked to see how good any of them are; I suspect some are sub-par).
13. H.M. Walker - Short article; minor guy. Looks fine.
14. SABMiller - Brewer. Not terribly interesting article. Chairman, CEO and CFO are redlinks, and they probably shouldn't be linked at all. I'm wary of even mentioning them in cases like this, as I'm unsure if anyone bothers updating these things ever.
15. Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity - Article on a book. I often wonder where the line is drawn in including books, as we certainly can't have an article on every book ever written. This seems notable enough, I suppose.
16. Guillaume Durand - Another from EB 1911, which I'm not a huge fan of. I think an advantage of WP over EB is it's readability, in general, and cut and pastes from EB don't help that. Still, the article is pretty good.
17. John Hayes (harness racer) - Pretty good article. Doesn't go into absurd details.
18. Miscellaneous Space Marine Chapters - I remember this discussion on VfD. These chapters previously had their own articles, and the compromise was to list them here. I still maintain that they're subtrivial and deserved a sentence each in a Warhammer or Space Marines article. Really needs cleanup.
19. Nick Cannon - OK article. Not terribly well-written.
20. Duc de Noailles - You don't think of French Dukes being around any more, but I guess they are.
21. Fallout - disambig. Seems to me it should redirect to nuclear fallout with a link to the game at that article.
22. In Which We Serve - Pretty good movie article. I'll add an IMDb tag later.

Well, WP isn't co-operating all of a sudden so now is as good a time to end as any. Pretty good run. No real embarassments.