Northernhenge is mainly a WikiGnome and thinks he's been here for quite a while. His main interest is how the value of the information contained in Wikipedia – features that make it better than other encyclopaedias – can be maintained. He believes that this is supported by wikilinks and categories. He is probably guilty of overlinking, may tend to be an inclusionist regarding categories, and was disappointed when date linking was dropped. He certainly needs to know more about Wikidata and should use Citation bot.
When he was a more active editor Northernhenge made an effort to take policies and guidelines into account though this is not his natural inclination. He might have sometimes referred to Biographies of living persons, Neutral point of view, No original research, Verifiability or What Wikipedia is not. He always intended to leave edit summaries but didn't always do so. He was particularly negligent with minor edits and talkpage edits. He probably still imagines that editors read their own talkpages in any case and that minor edits are self-explanatory but that's not really an excuse.
In two-or-three words, drive-by tagging. If you have time to tag “Cleanup bare URLs”, you have time to clean them up. Don’t demand that other editors do things you can’t be bothered to do yourself. Also, they’re a problem for new editors. Someone sees a drive-by tag and feels good about applying what they think is a quick and effective fix, for example deleting text that could have been rephrased, or adding a reference to a YouTube video or Facebook page. They now also think they’re helping by adding their own drive-by tags in similar situations across Wikipedia. Drive-by tags take up other people’s time and mislead new editors.
Ownership of articles is a tricky one. We need enthusiasts but editing an "owned" article can be frustrating and drive editors away from the page and maybe Wikipedia itself. But how many articles would not exist if it wasn't for their !owners? To use some very old examples (he should move on really!), CLANNAD and Yodeling have probably illustrated both sides of the argument at one time or another.
Don't get Northernhenge started on the whole Wiki Loves Monuments fiasco from quite a few years ago now. Essentially a mass-destruction of numerous editors’ hard work, just to standardise a load of pages to (wait for it…) enter a competition.
What's to like? (Current favourite page.) (Always out of date.)[edit]
Northernhenge isn't quite sure what an edit count actually measures. (See also Editcountitis, AfD statistics and his edits in the wikipedia namespace.) When – despite this – he looks at his total number of edits, he includes his Commons edits on purpose, and other namespaces because he’s too lazy to think about which should be be included.
Northernhenge wonders if articles such as these could be brought together more clearly. It’s a shame that category pages can’t be used as articles on this wiki. Maybe a family tree would work.
One of Northernhenge’s early efforts (June 2010) was recreating the Whitland and Cardigan Railway using edits like this one, either to the railway station articles or the towns if they had no article. The town links were a bit controversial, though most of them survive as of August 2022. Since 2010, someone has created all the remaining station articles and added their own versions of the “rail line” links to the new pages, so Northernhenge’s original edits are redundant really. The original idea was to do the same thing elsewhere to recreate other vanished railway lines but, to avoid controversy, every former station would need its own article and it would be hard to demonstrate notability in many cases. Maybe navboxes would have worked better than “rail line” links.
A redirect is a page that has the sole purpose to automatically redirect readers to a differently named page; to take the reader where they really wanted to go. Redirects allow a topic to have more than one title. Redirects are used for synonyms, abbreviations (initialisms), acronyms, accented terms (diacritics), misspellings, typos, nicknames (pseudonyms), scientific names, etc.
To create a redirect for the term "Oof":
Type Oof in the search box, press ↵ Enter
Click on the redlink for Oof that it presents
In the edit window that appears, type #REDIRECT [[Foo]] on the first line to make it lead to the article Foo
Redirects should be organized in to categories too. Each redirect can have up to seven redirect categories. Categories go on the third line of the redirect. (Note: Plant has a subcategory within the category of scientific name; enter plant after a pipe).
Here are two examples of a redirect category using a category template:
{{R from birth name}}
{{R from scientific name|plant}}
Preview your new redirect before saving it. Make sure:
There is a big right-facing arrow to the left of the bolded name of your target page name.
That your target page is bolded in blue (if it is red, go back and double check your target name in the edit window).
That your redirect category has rendered properly and that the boilerplate it presents makes sense.
