User:Finlay McWalter

All New: (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=0) 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=500) 10 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=1000) 15 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=1500) 20 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=2000) 25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=2500) 30 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=3000) 35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=3500) 40 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=500&offset=4000) Orphaned: (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Lonelypages&limit=500&offset=0) 500 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Lonelypages&limit=500&offset=500) 1001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Lonelypages&limit=500&offset=1000) 1501 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Lonelypages&limit=500&offset=1500)

This content comes from wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org). If you're reading this on any other website then it's certainly old and probably wholly outdated. Unfortunately most of the sites that (quite legally) mirror wikipedia's content seem to be run by a variety of ethically-challenged lowlives, wackos, and the occasional bigot or two. If you want the only trustworthy version, unladen with ads for herbal viagra, get-rich-quick-schemes, or propaganda for some outlandish fringe group, then visit wikipedia itself and forget the scummy cloners.

This is the homepage of Finlay McWalter at wikipedia (yes, that's my real name - who would make up something so outlandish?). My real homepage is mcwalter.org (http://www.mcwalter.org). You can email me there. Please don't message me on this page - I'll just revert you - instead, use the proper talk page: User talk:Finlay McWalter. Thanks.

You might notice that I seem to make changes it little chunks, and thus tend to flood the changelog a bit. I apologise for this; I get my broadband connection via a rather unreliable wireless link, so I generally can't trust it to stay up for long enough for a complex edit (particularly in case of an edit conflict). I do try to leave a sensible changenotice for each increment.

Missing image
Utah_teapot.png

Life's not easy when you're green

Contents

1 Favourite wikipedian quotes

2 Boilerplates

3 Personal sandboxes and other stuff

4 Bugs

5 Proposed wikipedia mottos

6 Wiki philosophy

7 The balance problem, and its solution

8 Chicken soup for the troubled Wikipedian

9 Brag sheet (sigh)

10 Images and other media

10.1 Images I took/created myself
10.2 Images I uploaded that others took
10.3 Other media

Favourite wikipedian quotes

"stop vandalising this article you dickhead" : User:Adam Carr fighting vandals on Jim Cairns
"It is not insulting to trees to say that their study comes under botany, not zoology" : User:Adam Carr in Talk:History of Australia
"I hate this fucking site, you are all snobbish twits" : User:Kenneth Alansson, reverting himself in Talk:Duchy
"It may be a teapot, but its a famous teapot" : User:Morwen on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion
"I am a crap expert" : User:Vudujava on Talk:Body fluid
"Finlay McWalter (real name?) is one of the best names i ever saw. Looks like a detective smoking a pipe." : User:Muriel Gottrop on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship
"Autobiography of a nobody. Delete." : User:Salsa Shark on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion
"Horrible vfd place ... temple of the deletionism to its uggliest form." : User:Anthere on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion
"Oppose. Martin is already a bit Ann-Robinsonish" : User:Muriel Gottrop on m:Developer access [1] (http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Developer_access&diff=28931&oldid=28927)
"Hi, kettle. It's me, Gene Poole, the pot. You're black!" : User:Wik on Wikipedia:Village_pump [2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump&diff=3358984&oldid=3358916)
"The evilness of bots is not a topic for VfD." User:Angela on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/User:Rambot [3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/User:Rambot&diff=5267638&oldid=5267503)

Boilerplates

my boilerplates | Wikipedia:Boilerplate text

Personal sandboxes and other stuff

User:Finlay McWalter:sandbox | User:Finlay McWalter/crosses | Finlay McWalter/Gently handling newbie autobiographies | my meta page

Bugs

~~827160 Cologne Blue displays old links in browser colors (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=825774&group_id=34373&atid=411192)~~
~~856267 superscript 2 in article names confuses database (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=856267&group_id=34373&atid=411192)~~

Proposed wikipedia mottos

Wikipedia: where lack of people-skills is an asset, not a liability
Wikipedia - also known as Unemployed Ph.D Deathmatch

Wiki philosophy

If an article is bad but unimportant this is not a problem, as few people will see it. If it is bad and important this is not a problem either, as some proportion of the visitors will be motivated to fix it. The worse it is, or the more important, the more quickly it will improve. The rate of such edits is asymptotic to its perfection.

The balance problem, and its solution

Folks often say "the wikipedia is unbalanced - there's too much american stuff in it". This is true. But it's not the end of the world.

Analogy time: You have a see-saw (that's teetertotter, you yanks). On one end is little Evette. On the other is Cletus, the fat kid (yes yes, he's the american, and before y'all complain this is wicked stereotyping, have y'all been to Walmart lately?). Cletus is big, Evette is little, so the seesaw is unbalanced and no see-sawing occurs. There are two possible solutions:

Find more kids like Evette and add them to her end. Find, oh, say twenty five or so (even little tiddlers) and they'll more than balance Cletus (yes, they'll fight a bit, and claim the others smell of garlic, but life isn't perfect). Now you have balance, and lots of happy kids.
Take a big knife and slice chunks off Cletus, until he balances Evette.

Which would you do?

Chicken soup for the troubled Wikipedian

If you're annoyed, or angry, or depressed by wikipedia, take a week off and chill. Exposure to real life will cure you.
If you're getting into frequent pointless edit and flame wars in controversial subjects like abortion and zionism, spend some time instead editing something else you care about - your home town, your favourite band, the last excellent book you read.
If you only want to edit controversial topics like abortion and zionism then, well, you're the architect of your own hypertension.

Brag sheet (sigh)

I very rarely author a new article (generally only when I feel it's needed to bridge a gap between articles I'm copyediting). Instead, I much prefer to polish, reorder, edit, and generally grind to dust others' work. I seem in particular to have a weakness/talent for saving potentially worthy articles from the slavering jaws of VfD. Some articles which are hopefully better for my ministrations include:

(and if you can see any pattern whatever in that lot, you win a prize)

But mostly I fix links, move commas around, and rearrange sentences so they don't begin with conjunctions (like this one). I sometimes unsplit infinitives (deliberately), but if I change english to american spelling or vice versa, that's just an accident (not some sinister policy).

Images and other media

Images I took/created myself

I've uploaded a few of my photos to wikipedia (mostly from around Scotland). More (non GFDL ones) can be seen in the gallery (http://www.mcwalter.org/images/) on my homepage (http://www.mcwalter.org).

Images I uploaded that others took

Other media

Ballblazer (ogg) | Ballblazer (mp3)

de:Benutzer:Finlay McWalter

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