User:Finlay McWalter

Life's not easy when you're green

This is the homepage of Finlay McWalter at wikipedia (yes, that's my real name - who would make up something so outlandish?). My real homepage is mcwalter.org. You can email me there. Please don't message me on this page - I'll just revert you - instead, use the proper talk page: User talk:Finlay McWalter. Thanks.

You might notice that I seem to make changes it little chunks, and thus tend to flood the changelog a bit. I apologise for this; I get my broadband connection via a rather unreliable wireless link, so I generally can't trust it to stay up for long enough for a complex edit (particularly in case of an edit conflict). I do try to leave a sensible changenotice for each increment.

Favourite wikipedian quotes

"stop vandalising this article you dickhead" : User:Adam Carr fighting vandals on Jim Cairns
"It is not insulting to trees to say that their study comes under botany, not zoology" : User:Adam Carr in Talk:History of Australia
"I hate this fucking site, you are all snobbish twits" : User:Kenneth Alansson, reverting himself in Talk:Duchy
"It may be a teapot, but its a famous teapot" : User:Morwen on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion
"I am a crap expert" : User:Vudujava on Talk:Body fluid
"Finlay McWalter (real name?) is one of the best names i ever saw. Looks like a detective smoking a pipe." : User:Muriel Gottrop on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship

Boilerplates

my boilerplates | Wikipedia:Boilerplate text

Personal sandboxes

User:Finlay McWalter:sandbox | User:Finlay McWalter:sandbox2 | Finlay McWalter/Gently handling newbie autobiographies

Bugs

Proposed wikipedia mottos

Wikipedia: where lack of people-skills is an asset, not a liability
Wikipedia - also known as Unemployed Ph.D Deathmatch

Wiki philosophy

If an article is bad but unimportant this is not a problem, as few people will see it. If it is bad and important this is not a problem either, as some proportion of the visitors will be motivated to fix it. The worse it is, or the more important, the more quickly it will improve. The rate of such edits is asymptotic to its perfection.

Chicken soup for the troubled Wikipedian

If you're annoyed, or angry, or depressed by wikipedia, take a week off and chill. Exposure to real life will cure you.
If you're getting into frequent pointless edit and flame wars in controversial subjects like abortion and zionism, spend some time instead editing something else you care about - your home town, your favourite band, the last excellent book you read.
If you only want to edit controversial topics like abortion and zionism then, well, you're the architect of your own hypertension.

TODO list

Ken Kutaragi | Jim Blinn | free running

Brag sheet (sigh)

I very rarely author a new article (generally only when I feel it's needed to bridge a gap between articles I'm copyediting). Instead, I much prefer to polish, reorder, edit, and generally grind to dust others' work. Some articles which are hopefully better for my ministrations include:

(and if you can see any pattern whatever in that lot, you win a prize)

But mostly I fix links, move commas around, and rearrange sentences so they don't begin with conjunctions (like this one). I sometimes unsplit infinitives (deliberately), but if I change english to american spelling or vice versa, that's just an accident (not some sinister policy).