User:Bovlb

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This uiser haes Scots as a mither tung.

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1 Bio
2 Status
3 Thoughts
4 Fields I am interested in
5 Pages I created
6 Images uploaded
7 Useful links

[edit] Bio

I am a Bear of Very Little Brain.

[edit] Status

I regret that personal and business commitments leave me little time to contribute at the moment. Hopefully this will ease up in a few weeks. Bovlb 22:39, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Thoughts

[edit] Personal Attack Pages

I've been watching some of the cases on RfC and RfAr (and, to a lesser extent, VfD). The thing that leaps out at me is that these pages seem to be taken as general exceptions (and possibly reversals) of the usual rules of no personal attacks and assume good faith. People suddenly feel free to provide negative characterizations of each others' behaviour. I can see the argument that this is necessary for these pages to operate, and I guess I can see the argument that people need some outlet for this sort of thing, but I'm left with a sense of disquiet.

Typically, the bad feelings, flipping the bozo bit, and slanging matches will gradually escalate on article talk pages, and boil over into RfC's and RfAr's. However, unless they end up with one party disappearing (say by being banned), then the disfunctional editor relationships remain, possibly worse than before.

No, I don't have a magic answer.

[edit] Improving history and fighting vandalism

A couple of thoughts about what might make the various types of history page better, and help in fighting vandalism:

Put the before and after sizes (in bytes) on pages. Page blanks and radical deletions are easily spotted (but can be easily gamed).
At save time, scan previous entries to determine if the new version is identical to a previous one, and indicate the latest such previous version.
Somehow(!), on a user's contributions, indicate whether they have been reverted. This is either some function of the previous point, or involved recognizing revert actions as special.

[edit] Quorum for admin action

I notice a lot of whinging about admin actions, and I suspect that admins get made to feel very alone when they try to do the right thing. I made a brief proposal for how to fix this here, but it couldn't have been a very good proposal as nobody bothered to comment on it.

[edit] Fine-grained description of fictional works

I do a lot of New Page patrol, and I see many pages appear that describe characters or places in some fictional genre. A very common phenomenon is that they start with an assumption of context, and hence fail to mention the fictional work, or even that it is fictional. I realise that this is often because the page creator followed a red link and thus assumed that the new page appeared in some specific context.

When I see such things, I usually slap on a {{cleanup-context}}, but I can't shake the feeling that they would often be better consolidated into a single article on the work, with appropriate redirects. After all, if it's too much effort to explain the context for each place or character, wouldn't it be better to just do it once?

A related problem is that redirect pages cannot redirect to a specific section. This is a requested feature (see bug #218), but the bug has been closed "WONTFIX" for somewhat compelling technical reasons. I say "somewhat" because I have since suggested a technical fix that addresses one of the two major problems.