User:RGTraynor

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Hello! I'm a forty-something paralegal living in the Boston area. My Wikiactivity centers around hockey -- I'm a longtime statistician and sometime member of SIHR -- but I'm interested in everything from military history to politics to roleplaying games (and no, not in the console games that marketing departments insist on calling "RPGs").

PET PEEVES:

• I am not interested in "putting myself over" (to borrow a useful pro wrestling term). Who really gives a damn how many contributions I've made, what articles I've started, what credentials I have (or claim, anyway) with which to beat you over the head with the implication that I am so much cooler than you, or anything other than whether I can prove I know about what I'm talking? I'm more into editing stubs into real articles than creating new articles (of which I've done not many more than a couple dozen). What Wikipedia needs more than sheer page count is improved quality of articles. (See below)

• I am extremely particular about grammar, spelling and the non-use of diacriticals. I see no reason why time-honored grammar usages are invalidated just because today's typists are lazy sods, and if you have a burning desire to put umlauts and diacriticals over proper names, go over to the foreign language Wikipedias where such usages are proper -- this is the English Wikipedia, last I checked. (And don't bullshit us; they don't use diacriticals on non-North American en-language websites any more than in Canada and the US.)

• I care strongly about documentation. If you assert it, you should be prepared to back it up, with a non-Wikipedia verifiable source. If you can't, you should retract it.

• That being said, computer verification isn't the be-all and end-all of everything. An AfD was filed sometime ago against an author who had jack for Amazon.com sales ranking and not many Google hits. No kidding, folks, he wrote several popular books in the Seventies and early Eighties, pretty much nothing since, and his stuff's gone out of print. Any number of prominent Victorian authors have Amazon rankings which aren't anything about which to write their descendants.

• Subjects that should be prima facie grounds for CSD: dorm buildings, bands or wannabe auteurs with Myspace pages for lead Google hits, game/fan/mediacruft that received less than ten minutes of screentime or ten pages of action, MMORPG gaming guilds, elementary schools ... gods, I could go on for a bit.

• Finally, I care about research. This is an encyclopedia, and not only do we have an obligation to know about what we're talking, we have no right to vote or make edits in willful ignorance -- if you insist on being ignorant, go hang out in a blog instead. It drives me nuts to see AfDs filed on articles where the nom could -- and should -- have taken five minutes to follow up a few Google hits and realized the genuine notability of the subject.

"But the biggest worry is that the great benefit of the open-source approach is also its great undoing. Its advantage is that anyone can contribute; the drawback is that sometimes just about anyone does. This leaves projects open to abuse, either by well-meaning dilettantes or intentional disrupters. Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality."

-- The Economist, 3/18/2006