Cannabis Ruderalis

SEMI-RETIRED
This user is no longer very active on Wikipedia.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Martin Luther King.


Projects founded and move towards quality

I first arrived here in early 2005, although I didn't join formally and become very active until June 2006. I'm the founder of the Actors and Filmmakers project and the Historic Houses project. Fascinated in the Himalayas, Buddhism and the Far East, I started the Tibetan project and also made the Slovenian project an independent one, one of the last European projects to do so. In 2009 I started WikiProject Intertranswiki, a project intended to work towards translating articles from dozens of other language Wikipedias and ensuring that the English version has an article. Given that there's nearly 60 million unique articles covering all Wikis, it is a project on a massive scale and one which really needs to be pursued long term if we are to fully counteract systematic bias. The idea is to translate a missing or poorly developed article from the best version of it in another language, and where possible re-reference it and fully verify it. Sadly there are not many editors working together on it and it's barely used as a project but it is the project I've created with by far the biggest potential for growth and activity. In August 2015 I started Women in Green, a project intended to focus on improving the quality of existing women biographies, particularly core articles, and getting them to Good Article status.

Though in my early days on here I was a prolific stub builder, intent on trying to reduce systematic bias worldwide by identifying missing topics and blue linking them, I gradually came around to believing that as a creator of an article you need to take responsibility in writing it at least to a reasonable standard upon creation. Since the mid 2010s I've been heavily invested in improving the quality of our articles and not placing much emphasis on quantity, even though I believe there are over 1 billion potential articles which could be written. The problem is just that, there's still a staggering amount missing, every article you destub, in expanding it you'll typically create at least three new red links, if not up to a dozen. Often surprising omissions. It is exhausting work trying to fill in the red links and create every one to a reasonable level of quality (often several days hard work needed to blue link them decently from a single article). It can only be done in a short time frame by creating short stubs to blue link them all, which in turns defeats the object of doing the destubbing in the first place to try to reduce the overall stub count! So I tend to leave most links red these days, even though I still feel obligated in a way to start them! However unsightly they are though, it is VERY important that notable missing articles are red linked, regardless of how many because one missing article created will in turn root out many more missing red links, a chain which needs to be in place if the encyclopedia is to reach its potential. Unfortunately many of our editors are ignorant about missing content or short stubs and assume that if an article is missing or short then it's probably not notable and should be deleted.

Contests and challenges

I am interested in improving the quality of the average article in the encyclopedia. I've staged contests, with the support of Wikimedia UK, with mechanisms which produce an extraordinary amount of article improvements and creations within just weeks. Awaken the Dragon (April 2016) and The Africa Destubathon (October-November 2016) produced well over 3000 articles combined. In August 2016 I established the The British and Irish 10,000 Challenge and The African 10,000 Challenge, which I've since broadened out to cover most regions globally, functioning under the umbrella 100,000 Challenge. As it's often difficult to get editors to focus as a group on expanding existing articles, in March 2020 I ran The Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon, covering all 134 counties of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland as well as Jersey, Guerney and the Isle of Man in an effort to improve the average quality of articles, and ended with over 1000 articles expanded. Time permitting, I am considering running shorter one-two week contests in the future to target different areas of the UK, Europe and elsewhere, aiming for 200-250 improvements in a week as part of The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge, started in April 2020 which aims for 50,000 expanded stubs by 2030.

Featured content


Good article content
26 articles
James Bond films
Dr No trailer.jpg
Dr. No
From Russia with Love
Goldfinger
Thunderball
Casino Royale (1967)
You Only Live Twice
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Diamonds Are Forever
Live and Let Die
The Man with the Golden Gun
The Spy Who Loved Me
Moonraker
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy
Never Say Never Again
A View to a Kill
The Living Daylights
Licence to Kill
GoldenEye
Tomorrow Never Dies
The World Is Not Enough
Die Another Day
Casino Royale (2006)
Quantum of Solace
Skyfall
Did You Knows?

Did You Knows? - 1667 articles - I've not contributed to this feature much since 2015 but I'm still one of the most prolific contributors to it. We set a World Challenge to cover the whole A-Z of countries and entities, but it was never completed. Nowadays I prefer to just put up articles on my talk page.

Awards

I've not received many of these since 2017 but I currently have 296 awards.

Useful stuff
Drafts

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