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User:Northernhenge

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This user has Cornish ancestry.

Northernhenge is mainly a WikiGnome and thinks he's been here for quite a while. His main interest is how the value of the information contained in Wikipedia – features that make it better than other encyclopaedias – can be maintained. He believes that this is supported by wikilinks and categories. He is probably guilty of overlinking, may tend to be an inclusionist regarding categories, and was disappointed when date linking was dropped. He certainly needs to know more about Wikidata and should use Citation bot.

Policies

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delThis editor is a deletionist.
inclThis user is an inclusionist.

When he was a more active editor Northernhenge made an effort to take policies and guidelines into account though this is not his natural inclination. He might have sometimes referred to Biographies of living persons, Neutral point of view, No original research, Verifiability or What Wikipedia is not. He always intended to leave edit summaries but didn't always do so. He was particularly negligent with minor edits and talkpage edits. He probably still imagines that editors read their own talkpages in any case and that minor edits are self-explanatory but that's not really an excuse.

What's not to like?

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  • In two-or-three words, drive-by tagging. If you have time to tag “Cleanup bare URLs”, you have time to clean them up. Don’t demand that other editors do things you can’t be bothered to do yourself. Also, they’re a problem for new editors. Someone sees a drive-by tag and feels good about applying what they think is a quick and effective fix, for example deleting text that could have been rephrased, or adding a reference to a YouTube video or Facebook page. They now also think they’re helping by adding their own drive-by tags in similar situations across Wikipedia. Drive-by tags take up other people’s time and mislead new editors.
  • Ownership of articles is a tricky one. We need enthusiasts but editing an "owned" article can be frustrating and drive editors away from the page and maybe Wikipedia itself. But how many articles would not exist if it wasn't for their !owners? To use some very old examples (he should move on really!), CLANNAD and Yodeling have probably illustrated both sides of the argument at one time or another.
  • Don't get Northernhenge started on the whole Wiki Loves Monuments fiasco from quite a few years ago now. Essentially a mass-destruction of numerous editors’ hard work, just to standardise a load of pages to (wait for it…) enter a competition.

What's to like? (Current favourite page.)

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Activites

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This user has pending changes reviewer rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify)
This user has new page reviewer rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify)
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than 15 years (17 years, 9 months, and 29 days).
This editor is a Grand Tutnum and is entitled to display this Book of Knowledge with Coffee Cup Stain.
Music of the common peopleThis user enjoys folk music.
Special pages (maintenance) Information
Broken redirects
Dead-end pages Dead-end pages
Dormant pages Forgotten articles
Double redirects Double redirects
Lonely pages Orphaned articles
Long pages
New pages New pages patrol
New pages feed Page curation
Protected pages Protection policy
Short pages
Uncategorized pages Categorization
Uncategorized categories
Uncategorized templates
Unused categories
Unused files (images)
Unused templates
Without interwiki links
Most interwiki links
Wanted pages
Most-wanted articles
See also: Maintenance departments

Cataloguing fairy tales

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Obvious punctuation errors

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For example, searching for

insource:/[,;][;,]\<ref/

found 544 articles in May 2024. There's work to be done!

London Underground

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Northernhenge wonders if articles such as these could be brought together more clearly. It’s a shame that category pages can’t be used as articles on this wiki. Maybe a family tree would work.

Search tools

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SQLThis user uses SQL queries to locate their car keys.

An idea on-hold for a long time

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One of Northernhenge’s early efforts (June 2010) was recreating the Whitland and Cardigan Railway using edits like this one, either to the railway station articles or the towns if they had no article. The town links were a bit controversial, though most of them survive as of August 2022. Since 2010, someone has created all the remaining station articles and added their own versions of the “rail line” links to the new pages, so Northernhenge’s original edits are redundant really. The original idea was to do the same thing elsewhere to recreate other vanished railway lines but, to avoid controversy, every former station would need its own article and it would be hard to demonstrate notability in many cases. Maybe navboxes would have worked better than “rail line” links.

Other wikis

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Tip of the day etc.

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  1. Useful citation tool
  2. Don't forget Wikipedia:Database download
  3. Explore Category:Lists based on Wikidata
  4. Tips...
How to create a category

Let us say you have thought of a new category you want to place some articles in. To create this new category, go to one of the pages that you wish to put there, and add a category tag naming the new category to the end of the article, like this:

[[Category:Category name]]

...where in place of category name you type the actual name of the category. When you save the page, the category should appear on the bottom line of the page. If it is indeed a new category, it will turn up in red. But this does not mean there is no such category: it might exist but with a slight difference in naming. Before you create a new category, make sure it does not already exist. In a new browser window, click on Special pages in the toolbox menu on the left side of your screen. Then click on All pages. Pick Category from the Namespace dropdown menu, and then enter the name of the category. Look over the index for synonymous categories.

Once you are sure your new name is good to go: Click on the redlink, and then click on the article creation link provided in the instructions that appear on your screen.

You will need to put a parent category on the new page, and then save the page. Going forward you can put your newly named category at the bottom of pages that you wish to add your new category to. Categories with too few pages in them are usually nominated for deletion.

To add this auto-updating template to your user page, use {{totd}}


Use {{#section-h:Wikipedia:WikiProject Folklore|Monitoring}} to embed on a user page

Did you know

Articles for deletion

  • 22 Jul 2025 – Shirt of Flame (talk · edit · hist) was AfDed by PanagiotisZois (t · c); see discussion (9 participants; relisted)

Proposed deletions

Requested moves

Articles to be merged

Articles to be split

Articles for creation

Watchlist
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