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User:Pcb21/What Gable said at the end

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by JackofOz (talk | contribs) at 23:20, 17 December 2003 (Some thoughts about words like "successful" when describing people). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

My name is Pete and I joined the project in mid-January 2003 started adding bits and pieces about London, where I used to live and now work. In Jan/Feb 2003 I was also 80.193.179.137 and 194.202.49.103.

Public thanks

User:Vicki Rosenzweig who has tirelessly copy edited several of my articles which were full of silly errors.
User:Cyan, User:Cimon Avaro and User:Oliver Pereira who all very kindly supported my request for adminship.
User:Fantasy and User:Maveric149 for expressions of support for some of the bits and pieces I have been doing.

Shamelessness

This next bit reads like a brag sheet but is here to help me remember especially because the Main Page changes fast, I promise. Updated 15th October 2003 : that's because it now is a brag sheet

All being well there are no links to stubs on this page... a couple of months I vowed to only start articles I could get beyond stub length. If your threshold for stub display is flagging up any of these as stubs, let me know. I've become a stubble, and also something of an anti-deletionist - in the sense that some of the stuff of the VfD should never have even considered for deletion.

Articles I started that made it to New Articles on the Main Page

Articles I contributed to very significantly to that are/were listed on Wikipedia:Brilliant prose

Pictures that my girlfriend or I took that are/were listed on Wikipedia:Brilliant pictures

Articles I've started recently

Shorter ones I also started recently

Articles I didn't start but provided a good chunk for recently

Wikipedia:WikiProjects that I started

Other Wikipedianlia I've done

  • Wrote a Python script for counting contributions that has been successfully used by at least one person who isn't me.
  • Wrote a prototype wiki-text to PDF converter

Sig hacking

3: Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 4: Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 23:11, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Code to get the above (put in nickname field in preferences)

$NICKNAME]] [[User_talk:$USERNAME|(talk)

Note the lack of opening and closing double square brackets is deliberate. I reverse-engineered this cunning trick when I saw someone else manage it - that was User:Dori - very imaginative!

Thanks. I guess who is or is not "successful" at any given point in time is very much a subjective judgment. By what yardstack is success measured? In Cherie Blair's case, is it because she has presumably high-profile clients, and charges accordingly? Or is it just to boost Tony Blair's image?. What if Cherie somehow fell from grace and was able to sustain only an average practice, enough to keep a roof over her head but no longer with high-profile clients and not particularly newsworthy in its own right? Would you still call her "successful" then? If somebody is not described as "successful", people do not immediately jump to the conclusion that they have somehow "failed", so the successful tag adds no value, and is simply unnecessary waffle. Hilary Swank won the Best Actress Oscar a couple of years ago - one can't get a much higher industry accolade than that, so she is undoubtedly "successful" in the eyes of her peers - but her public profile is so low and her films so non-box office that most people would probably say "Hilary who?". I haven't checked, but I'd bet a million dollars her entry in Wikipedia (if there is one) does not describe her as "a successful American actress", but simply "an American actress". Basically, Wikipedia is about factual information - describing somebody as "successful" (or anything else like that) is not factual, but simply somebody's opinion - and it also smacks of marketing hype which also goes against the grain in this context. I don't propose to remove it, but I still think this has no real place here. Cheers for Christmas JackofOz 23:20, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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