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.
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.
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.) (Always out of date.)
Northernhenge isn't quite sure what an edit count actually measures. (See also Editcountitis, AfD statistics and his edits in the wikipedia namespace.) When – despite this – he looks at his total number of edits, he includes his Commons edits on purpose, and other namespaces because he’s too lazy to think about which should be be included.
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.
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.
Lists are a valuable presentation format, especially the structured list. Examples include lists organized chronologically, grouped by theme, glossarized, or annotated.
Navigation:
If a user is browsing without a specific research goal in mind, they would likely use the See also lists embedded in articles. If the user has some general idea of what they are looking for but does not know the specific terminology, the general topics lists (outlines and indices) would be most useful.
Development:
Outlines and indices give an indication of the state of the 'pedia, the articles that have been written, and the articles that have yet to be written (shown by red links).
Like categories, lists are great for keeping track of changes to subject areas, using the Related Changes feature. Unlike categories, lists are centralized, providing direct control over the contents. Lists also allow detection of deletion of pages from them (the list item will "red link"). Another advantage of a list is that changes can be tracked in the page's history, while changes to categories cannot.
