User:Drat

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Drat en This user is a native speaker of English. This user comes from Australia. This user's time zone is GMT+10. This user contributes using Mozilla Firefox. G This user uses Google as a primary search engine. 8000+ This user has over 8000 edits vanity This user supports the removal of Vanity pages with extreme prejudice. linkspam This user despises linkspam, and will terminate it on sight, as well as any other spam by the contributor. _ This_user_hates_seeing underscores_in_Wikilinks ATS This user believes real articles don't need trivia sections This user is addicted to computer and video games. This user contributes using Microsoft Windows XP. This user prefers to play games on a personal computer. System Shock This user remembers Citadel. Deus Ex This user wears sunglasses during night operations. @ This user plays NetHack. Nin This user is a Nintendo gamer. fan trekkie trekker This user is a Star Trek fan, but refuses to be labeled as a Trekkie/Trekker. mach This user watches machinima. This user is a member of the Machinima WikiProject. rvb This user is a Red vs. Blue fanatic. Caboose This user likes food-nap time. This user helped promote Red vs Blue to featured article status. Durnt This user lives on Strangerhood Lane. Dr. Who "I say...would you like a Jelly Baby?" RD This user knows that "they're all dead, Dave". This user wants egg, bacon, sausage, and Spam without the Spam! Goody Goody Yum Yum This user is a fan of The Goodies. Needle Nardle Noo This user listens to The Goon Show. This user rejects your reality and substitutes his or her own! ath This user is interested in atheism.

Contents 1 Subpages 2 About me 3 Some guidelines for editors 3.1 Check your edits 3.2 Should you make a new page for something related to a bigger topic? 3.3 Dealing with vandals 4 Pages I have started: 4.1 Templates 4.1.1 Adapted from others 4.1.2 Self-made 4.2 Pages that need work 4.3 Better pages 5 Significant contributions to other articles 6 To do: 7 Pet hates: 8 Extra-special pet hates:

[edit] Subpages

• User:Drat/Images - Images I have uploaded.
• User:Drat/Image resizing - Help reduce unnecessary white space in infoboxes that contain images.
• User:Drat/Listen to the article - You'd be surprised how easily a speech synthesizer can help you pick up article errors. Not to be confused with making voice recordings of articles.
• User:Drat/Userboxes - Userboxes I make. At the moment, just new ones. Later I guess the old ones will have to got here per WP:GUS.

[edit] About me

Well, I'm 25 years old, male, and I like computer games. I'm from Gosford, Australia.

You can check my personal site here. A lot of the content on there is pretty old though.

I particularly like Doom, Doom II, System Shock, System Shock 2, Quake, Quake II, Thief, Thief II Deus Ex, Half-Life, NetHack and the Flight Unlimited series, etc. If I ever get a chance to play Half-Life 2, I guess I will like that too. Graphics have no real effect on me, and I almost never use graphical enhancement mods for games. Gameplay is everything.

I like video game music and remixes centred on my favourite games.

I have an interest in Linux, but need to get around to putting it back on my computer.

I registered on Wikipedia under the name DooMDrat in late November, 2004. Almost exactly a year later, I had my username changed to Drat. I would have gone with Drat in the first place, but I could have sworn it was taken at the time. Must've been my imagination. The name Drat came from an assumed (and incorrect) spelling of a character's name from the kid's show The Trap Door, which I liked as a kid (and still like).

I AFD the odd article I find to be severely non-notable. If you can only realistically write two lines about something, its not really worth dedicating a seperate page to it. Of course, once an article starts to get quite large (eg. Red vs Blue), it can be a good idea to split up some sections. Take for example RvB episode guides and the character pages.

I'm also somewhat of a mergist. I feel that one large article is better than several crappy little ones. It's easier to edit one article than it is to edit eight. That's part of the reason I merged all the of the Doom enemies into one article.

I've also got this real big thing about optimising image filesizes. In fact, most of my image uploads are files I've done some sort of optimisation on. I may write a section with some image optimising tips.

[edit] Some guidelines for editors

Some of this is pretty obvious, but there are some things people don't think of.

[edit] Check your edits

The preview button is there for a reason. Use it. Be sure to check any wikilinks and external links you create or modify, that you are unsure of. This will help eliminate unintentional redlinks and redirects, and bad external links. It can also cut down on having to do multiple edits to make the same amount of changes. This makes things easier for people doing version comparisons.

[edit] Should you make a new page for something related to a bigger topic?

For example, an item or enemy in a game.

Weigh up the following:

• How big (filesize) and/or long (vertically) is the main article? Can you write about the "thing" there without making the article too big or long?
• How much can realistically be written about the "thing"? I don't mean necessarily right now, but where do you see the article in six months? If you can only really write two sentences without waffling, is it really worth putting it in a separate article?
• Is it important enough to the topic to justify a separate article? Also, is it important enough to other topics? A topic related to more than one subject may warrant a page more than a topic related to just one subject.
• How many other of these "things" are there? Maybe you could make an article covering all the items or enemies. One big article is better and takes less time to read and edit than twenty little ones.

[edit] Dealing with vandals

When you spot vandalism, revert or fix it. Be sure to warn the user. Check the vandal's contributions for other vandalism, and revert/fix them if needed. If there are lots of contributions, you don't need to check them all, just recent ones. If it is an IP user, edits made a few weeks ago or earlier are much less likely to be the same person, and any really old vandalism has likely been spotted and fixed (not always the case, of course). If you have to revert multiple instances of vandalism, only warn the user again for vandalism they cause after you previously warned them.

[edit] Pages I have started:

[edit] Templates

[edit] Adapted from others

• Infobox machinima
• Looking Glass Studios topics
• MythBusters topics
• User is a Red vs Blue fanatic userbox
• User is a fan of Red Dwarf userbox
• User plays nethack userbox
• Deus Ex fan userbox
• Machinima WikiProject member userbox
• The Strangerhood fan userbox
• User hates linkspam userbox

[edit] Self-made

• The Goodies userbox
• The Goon Show userbox

[edit] Pages that need work

Still essentially stubs, or not far past stubs.

• Irrational Games - Improving, thanks in part to a mystery contributor, whom I have good reason to believe works for Irrational.
• Ken Levine
• Eric Brosius
• Terri Brosius - The voice of SHODAN, responsible for striking terror into the hearts of many a geek.
• Tribe (band)
• Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers
• Bioshock - Hopefully to be a true 'spiritual successor' to System Shock 2.

[edit] Better pages

I (and/or others) have worked on these more, and the articles are much better for it. That said, like with any article, if you think you can improve them, go ahead. That's what Wikipedia is all about!

• Flight Unlimited - Started before I registered.
• Flight Unlimited II
• Pilot Controlled Lighting
• Seamus Blackley - Mostly the work of Justin Hall though.
• Poko - Bizarre kids program. Teaches good anger management strategies though.
• Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds - The RTS computer game based on the musical based on the book.
• Jets'n'Guns - Tough as nails side-scrolling shoot-em-up.
• Dark engine - I merely started this off. Most work is by people from the Thief forums on www.ttlg.com.
• List of enemies in Doom - I didn't technically create this page. I merged all the individual articles on enemies from Doom and Doom II together into "Doom enemies". I made some changes to all entries though, and added some pictures. Still needs some work to make the entries consistent in style. The article was later moved to "List of enemies in Doom".
• ILL Clan - machinima group
• The Seal of Nehahra - Longest single-piece machinima ever, and one of the best.

[edit] Significant contributions to other articles

• System Shock - a few edits were done before I registered.
• System Shock 2
• Perfect Dark
• Red vs Blue - Now a featured article, thanks to several others. If you want to single out one user though, TKD has probably made the greatest contributions.
• Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri
• The Many

[edit] To do:

I'll get around to these eventually, but I'm really lazy.

• Make article on the engine used in the games Ultima Underworld I & II and System Shock. The alien technology that things' got running under the hood...
• Tyrian (game) article needs work.
• Augmentation system section for Deus Ex article?

[edit] Pet hates:

• Religious extremists, particularly right-wing christians, most particularly Fred Phelps.
• People who make new topics on message boards to ask questions that already have been asked and answered 3+ times on the main page alone. I mean, not searching is bad enough, but use your bloody eyes for crying out aloud!
• People who judge old games purely by comparing their graphics with today's games. Same goes for movies.
• Compaq and Hewlett-Packard. Crappy, shitty, cheap, faulty bundle systems.
• A lot of modern popular music. Mainly modern rap/hip-hop where the singers never stop talking, brain-dead pop and no-talent techno (especially the "DOOF-DOOF-DOOF-DOOF-DOOF" variety).
• Gimmicky, ultra-flashy program interfaces and web sites, especially when they get in the way of efficient use.
• Anime. I really frigging hate it. I consider it a curse and a disease. And I can't stand the fans, the extremist ones, that is. In other words, the stupid, ultra-obsessive ones, especially the ones who never shut up about it, or use those creepy emoticons. Get a life, you dorks. Just because it comes from Japan doesn't mean it has to be worshipped.
• cartoon pornography. Anyone involved in its creation must be locked up. Or better yet, killed. Slowly. In public. Same goes for people who watch said vomit.
• Idiotic marketing execs. You know, the kind who come up with stupid, intelligence insulting slogans, advertisements and product names. 56K E-Modem, anyone? And can those Lynx commercials get any more blatantly sexist?
• Companies like Electronic Arts. Their lust for profit is driving companies, workers, and gaming franchises into the ground. Good thing they never got all the rights to System Shock 1 and 2.

[edit] Extra-special pet hates:

I'm a pacifist, but there are people who must die (violently, if need be), for the good of humanity.

• Anyone involved in the sexual abuse of children, or who makes material that involves or promotes such practices. That includes cartoon material (and I don't give a flying fuck whether its legal in your country). Anyone who makes or is into such material must be hunted down, arrested, given a fair trial, and executed if found guilty. If you think I sound a little extreme, ask yourself this: If you knew that someone was into that sort of shit, even if they had never done anything to a child, would you trust them around children? Somehow, I doubt you will.