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Tip of the day - Ask Jimbo Wales
Many users feel the need to pester User:Jimbo Wales with their problems. It is not immediately clear why this is, as this user has less than 3000 edits, and edits are more important than anything, even your children. In any event, if you feel you are being persecuted by the Cabal, would like to report Admin abuse, want to complain about the image/page/userbox that was just deleted, have a paranoid theory, or would like some money, he is, for whatever reason, the guy to go to. When making your request, it is very important to be beligerant, use all capital letters and useful HTML tags, and ignore all proper wiki formatting. If you do not get an answer immediately, feel free to repost the message to his talk page several times, as well to Talk:Bomis, Talk:Wikipedia, Talk:Jimmy Wales, and to every Village Pump. If that fails, then it is necessary to corner him in an airport bathroom, and shake vigorously until an answer appears. Then you shall achieve enlightenment and wealth!
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I’m Rob Kennedy. I hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science from UW–Madison, and I’m working on a master’s degree in the same field at UW–Milwaukee. I participate in numerous Delphi-related mailing lists and newsgroups, and I run a Web site called Delphi Q&A. Most of that has little relevance to my activity on Wikipedia.
My Wikipedia interests lie primarily in copy editing and wikifying articles, as well as policies in the Manual of Style. In college, I was the copy chief and Web manager of The Daily Cardinal.
These are links I want to keep handy.
[edit] Soapbox
I have some opinions about how things should be done around here. Not all of them are well formed, at least not here on this page.
[edit] Editing style
[edit] AP style
Like I said above, I used to work for The Daily Cardinal, a student newspaper in Madison, Wis. There I learned to appreciate some of the Associated Press’s style rules, including those for abbreviations and spellings. Among Wikipedia’s style rules is that U.S. state abbreviations should be spelled out, but I prefer most of the AP abbreviations instead. It looks stilted to always spell out state names. The idea is that non-American readers won’t know what the abbreviations stand for, and while I appreciate the concern, I don’t think it’s quite the problem some make it out to be. For one thing, when a city-state combination appears in an article, it will probably be wikilinked, so readers can see the full name either by following the link or by pausing the cursor over the link and reading the tool tip or status-bar message that shows the link destination. Readers with Navigation popups installed will get an even better hint. At the same time, readers who are familiar with the abbreviations will get tighter writing that looks more like what they read in other venues, such as newspapers and magazines.
One style I think is inappropriate is U.S. Postal Service state abbreviations. Those abbreviations are for postal workers. The AP abbreviations are usually more indicative of what the state’s name is. The exception that comes to mind is Pennsylvania, which the AP abbreviates to Pa. I would have expected Penn.
[edit] Singular they
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This user considers singular they substandard English usage. |
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It’s well established that the “singular they” is not a new phenomenon. That doesn’t mean it should be embraced as perfectly acceptable in the formal style of Wikipedia articles. It does not take much effort to recast a sentence to avoid using they to refer to just one person. It usually consists of making other single references plural, in which case they no longer sounds awkward. In limited quantities, the phrase “he or she” will do as well.
[edit] Serial comma
My preference on the use of the serial comma is one place where I disagree with AP style. I think the comma is a better reflection of the cadence used when reading lists, silently or aloud.
[edit] Typographer’s quotes
I like curly quotation marks and apostrophes. I also like to see other characters that don’t generally appear on keyboards, such as the ellipsis, the long (em) dash. Web browsers today are sufficiently advanced that they are capable of understanding those characters, so even if there is not a font available for some of them, the browser can still display an approximation.
[edit] Citations
More important than using the Cite.php <ref> style of citations, I consider it essential to use the citation-related templates like {{cite news}} and {{cite web}}. Use those instead of simply linking a bare URL. This has two advantages. First, in the list of references at the end of an article, the citation looks nice, with text describing the reference so that readers can judge it without having to follow the link. Second, that additional information is helpful when a link goes dead. When a URL is the only thing identifying a source, then the source becomes useless when the link no longer works. With the additional information that the citation templates afford, replacing a broken link becomes easier. It also helps when sources aren’t publicly available.
See Wikipedia:Footnotes for style guidelines on using <ref>. In particular, note that there should be no space before the <ref> tag, and it should come after punctuation such as periods and commas. The {{reflist}} template comes in handy when first adding references to an article.
[edit] American English
I have something to say here, but I’m not sure what, yet.
[edit] Capitalization style
I have stuff to say regarding Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters), but I haven’t quite figured out how I want to organize it.
[edit] 
Ooh, userboxes, shiny!
[edit] Things I might know something about
| C++ |
This user can program in C++. |
[edit] Personal information
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This user lives in or is from the State of Wisconsin. |
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This user has a website, which can be found here. |
| This is a Wikipedia user page.
This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rob_Kennedy.
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To do
