User:Alecmconroy

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The barnstar is hereby awarded for major contributions to the new featured article BSA Membership Controversies.

[edit] Wikipedia Interests

• Wikipedia:Requests for comment. Ever since I did an RFC that got only 1 comment, I've been trying to make a concerted effort to comment on other people's RFCs. You should too.
• The Bible as Literature & History. I enjoy trying to walk tight rope of conveying biblical content without making assertions about its authenticity.
• Taking requested articles that do not exist, researching their subject, and writing a stub about them. Usually judical precidents, scientific effects, or mathematical theorems.
• Philosophy of Mind. Taking complex debates and trying to make them Neutral and Simple.

[edit] Wikipolitics and other nonsense

• I like weasel terms. When properly cited, a limited amount of weasel words can help us make articles easier to read. So I wrote an essay to explain my point of view: Wikipedia:Embrace weasel words.

• When I was just a wee one, I hated hearing "No". But most of all, I hated hearing "Because I said so". So, I try hard to explain the reasons behind the polcies to people, and to talk about how they can do things in ways that would comply with Wikipedia policies. I wrote an essay about a good way to do that: Don't Just Say No!

• Don't link just because you can. A link is a suggestion from the editors that a reader might want to click on the link. If that's not the case, e.g. dates, don't link.

• Definitions are bad. Humans learn through Induction. Don't teach me what a dog is by defining EXACTLY what dogs are. Point to a dog and say "Doggy!". The lead section of an article should "clearly convey the gist", not try to "define precisely and definitively".

• Don't trouble me with names I don't need to know. Everyone has an opinion-- just because I need to know someone's opinion doesn't automatically mean I need to know their name. By all means, I need to be able to find out their name for the sake of verifiability, but that's why they invented footnotes.

• For a controversial article, there are more than 2²⁶²¹⁴⁴ different potential articles that we COULD choose to put up. 2²⁶²¹⁴⁴ is a very big number. It has more than 78,000 digits. Those are a lot of potential articles. It is my belief that somewhere, hidden with that multitude of potential articles, there is at least ONE article that everyone would be happy with. It's our job to find it.

• Benevolent Dictatorships are bad. I don't care how wonderful Jimbo is, no one person deserves special authority over the will of the people. "Supreme executive authority derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical status as founder." Every policy that reads "Jimbo can" should be changed to read "Chief Executive" or "Board Chairman" something not linked to one specific human being. History shows us time and again that organizations revolving around one central charismatic individual just don't work-- eventually the monarch dies, goes mad, becomes senile, or gets abducted and turned into a Manchurian Candidate. And even it if DID always work, I still wouldn't vote for it, cause it's just plain wrong. Liberté, égalité, fraternité! However, I can't emphasize this enough-- On wikipedia, "Jimbo" now refers to both a man and a title-- just like Caesar. Just because I dispute the nature of the current position of "Jimbo", that doesn't mean I have anything at all against Jimbo the person, or the way Jimbo the human has served as Jimbo the position. I don't. If we were going have an election for Jimbo the position, Jimbo the person would get my vote. :)

• The "BC/AD" dating system is POV and is also confusing/contradictory since Jesus was theoretically born ~4 BC. Some day, the world should switch to "BCE/CE". That said, wikipedians have not reached a consensus on that, and as such, I pride myself on not having changed the dating scheme on even one single article.

• No Original Research is my least favorite of the content policies. This doesn't mean I disagree with it-- it's a very important idea. It's just that I tend to think of it not as a "given", but rather as a natural consequence of other more fundamental rules like NPOV, Verifiability, Wikipedia is not a soapbox, reliable sources, notability, and Vanity guidelines. The situation is similar to the problem posed by Euclid's fifth axiom-- The first four axioms were obviously true and easy to accept as axioms. The fifth axiom, however, was much less obvious, and many people believed it was somehow a natural consequence of the other four axioms, rather than an obvious fact that could be accepted as an axiom. I quote NOR all the time-- Original research is a convenient sub-type of non-verifiable, non-notable, or non-neutral information that does not belong in our encyclopedia. But-- original research is bad because it's not verifiable, notable, neutral, from a reliable source, or some combination thereof-- it's not bad just because it's original. If there is a sentence in the encyclopedia that was 100% universally agreed to be verifable, notable, neutral, from a reliable source, and indeed, factually correct-- should we really remove it based on it being original? In practice, I do not believe this case has ever come up, nor do I expect it can ever come up under any circumstances.

• Argument from authority doesn't hold a lot of sway with me. There may be many people who say something, but if my own logic disagrees, I probably won't be swayed.

• I blank messages from my user talk page when I'm done with them, rather than archive them. Wikipedia is automatically archiving every message I get-- under the history button.

• In informal communication, I use hickish words like "Y'all". I don't enjoy it. Don't blame me-- English doesn't have a second-person plural. Speaking of which, I also use "they" as a singular neuter third person-- don't blame me--- what else can I do? call people "it"?

[edit] Biases I've been accused of having

I try very hard to edit without letting my own personal beliefs affect my editing. If I'm doing a good job at that, then no one can detect my biases through my editing. As such, I take special pride in how many different biases I've been accused of having. For me, this is sort of like a Bingo game-- eventually I hope I can get all major political and religious biases on the list.  :) . So far, I've been accused of being: