Steve Magruder is a dork-savant, good-natured subversive, hacktivist and obsessed follower of the splendiferous power couple Filliam H. Muffman seeking to reformat American culture to bow to the needs of the commons and an open, smart society.
I have often thought about what the Wikipedia's raison d'être really is beyond how it is commonly promoted. Ultimately, in my humble opinion, the Wikipedia and derivative efforts are about:
Creating a future (not so far away) where everyone on Earth has the right and access to know everything. Everything.
Destroying knowledge-based elitism in all its forms.
Creating a global expectation of radical transparency in government, business and all other walks of life.
Dedicating one's time to the development of anything positively useful by humankind is the highest moral act, especially because these kind of contributions tend to keep on giving past one's existence.
Stevie made his first contribution to the Wikipedia on March 20, 2004, adding a self-promotional link to direct democracy (note: he realized not much later that this wasn't appropriate). Ultimately, though, he actually added worthwhile content to this and many other articles related to the subject of democracy.
Stevie contributes to many articles and discussions, especially related to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, as well as politics and computer science. Stevie has to date completed more than 24,000 edits, over 14,000 of which are directly to articles! See his full list of contributions.
Stevie believes in making positive changes to articles in a very bold manner, but whenever a change dramatically alters the content of a well-established article, he tries to seek consensus first from other contributors to the article.
When it comes to editing articles, Stevie addresses obvious spelling, grammar and structural issues. But that's not all. As an editor, Stevie always takes a strong look at:
Blatant advertising, esp. of unrelated products/sites, but also of related entities that could eventually get out of hand (e.g., under Internet forum, listing all forums on the web).
"Brochure-itis", where the content looks it came from some corporate marketing department. Glowing, flowery language of a subject simply does not belong in an encyclopedia.
Lack of encyclopedic relevance — For the subject of an article to have encyclopedic relevance, there must be provable common knowledge and reverence of the article's subject within the subject's expected natural sphere of influence. Further, all references provided for proof should rest outside the direct influence of the subject itself as well as intricately linked parties or organizations. Neither the volume of Google hits nor a subject's ranking in Alexa (if it's a website) provide sufficient evidence for these purposes.
Egos of contributors in their promotion of original research and pet ideas that don't belong here.
Elitism — Stevie supports a very non-elitist Wikipedia and thus takes a dim view of stuffy, highfalutin wording as well as self-appointed experts who claim dominion over a particular article.
Quick radical rewrites — Oftentimes when a long-established article (esp. one related to politics) is virtually redrafted in a short period of time without any discussion beforehand, it is a victim of POV-pushing. As a rule, Stevie reverts these radical rewrites and asks the author of those rewrites to explain their changes and get consensus approval before making them.
Whitewashing — Sometimes a contributor loyal to the subject of an article or a discussion within an article will remove inconvenient facts that they believe make their subject look bad.
Lack of edit summary — When content is changed significantly and especially if content is removed, the edit needs to have a summary. If it doesn't, Stevie will normally revert.
Unwikified unfactored text dumps — On occasion contributors take free content from other sources and dump it into existing articles without wikifying it or factoring it into the article so that the article flows as well as it did before. These contributors seemingly expect others to clean up their shit. This is unacceptable and Stevie challenges these text dumps.
Non-adherence to standard reference formats — Some people seem to think they can invent their own style of reference, or go with an off-beat style, when we have easy-to-use templates that enforce reasonable standards. Readers normally expect consistency across a single work, such as an encyclopedia; therefore, all references should have a common appearance.
Stevie adheres to the idea that policies are law in the Wikipedia and should be strictly followed. However, he believes that guidelines are just that, guidelines, and are not sacrosanct. Guidelines should only be used to guide in one's contributions and to serve as weighted points in the determination of the correctness of content or its structuring. In some cases, strict adherence to guidelines over common sense or usability has been a bad thing for the Wikipedia. Further, while most guidelines are sensible and well-considered, Stevie every now and then comes across a guideline and thinks "Who wrote this shit?".
When it comes to disagreements over the content in articles, Stevie is a strong adherent to seeking honorable compromises that maintain factuality above all else. However, there are times when some other contributors descend into game playing, personal attacks, muddying tangential discussion or repeated circular argumentation rather than faithfully discussing content disputes and answering straight questions (usually, "Do you have evidence or sources for your position?"). These folks are usually dealt with via consensus of the other involved contributors.
Probably one of the most misunderstood edits Stevie makes in the Wikipedia is when he changes [[Louisville]] to [[Louisville, Kentucky]] or [[Louisville, Kentucky|Louisville]]. Some may think this is "anal", but it's not really.
The reason Stevie does this is because on a regular basis, editors use the link [[Louisville]] when they really mean to use [[University of Louisville]] or [[University of Louisville|Louisville]]. Searching out these misuses become increasingly difficult as uses of [[Louisville]] (for any reason) accumulate. Therefore, preventing this accumulation is necessary for the continual seeking out of misuses.
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:Stevietheman.
