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User: Wnt

:Note: for the nth time a free email server I was using to keep Wikipedia emails/announcements has gone down unexpectedly, so this time I disabled it. Please give me some kind of talk page heads up if you want to email me something and I'll set something up. Wnt (talk) 19:45, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

On the internet

  • Beginners can't tell if they're reading sarcasm. The experienced can't tell if they're writing sarcasm.

On biology

  • Nothing is impossible in biology.
  • Medicine is biology, biology is chemistry, chemistry is physics, physics is math done using the metric system.

On capitalism

  • Capitalism cannot abide a free market, because there is not enough profit for anyone to invest in it.
  • Any company that is not a complete scam doesn't have a valid business model.

On war

  • In a war each side will claim awful things about their enemy, nearly all of which are true, and good things about themselves, nearly all of which are false.

... and Wikilobbying, which alas is not my forte

  • The key to winning at Wikipedia lobbying is to be the first to ask the question, have your troops lined up, and be ready to claim clear "consensus" as rapidly as possible.
  • People who are not paid to bash their heads against a wall will eventually get too depressed to continue. The ones who are paid never do, which is why they win.

On sayings

  • Anyone who quotes Hanlon's razor is either an idiot or can't be trusted -- your call!

{{quotation|There is a view that one should never be permitted to be criticized for being even possibly in the future engaged in a contributory act that might be immoral, and that that type of arse-covering is more important than actually saving people's lives. That it is better to let a thousand people die than risk going to save them and possibly running over someone on the way. And that is something that I find to be philosophically repugnant.|Julian Assange}}
{{quotation|I'll say something that's very simple: Journalism means publishing something that others are trying to hide. Everything else is public relations.|Costas Vaxevanis}}
{{quotation|There must be [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/zoe-lofgren-aarons-law-swartz_n_2483770.html reform] of outdated and poorly-envisioned legislation, written to be so broadly applied as to make a felony crime out of violation of terms of service, creating in effect vast swathes of crimes, and allowing for selective punishment. There must be reform of mandatory minimum sentencing. There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused, and consideration of motive and mens rea. The inalienable right to a presumption of innocence and the recourse to trial and possibility of exoneration must be returned to its sacred status, and not gambled away by pre-trial bargaining in the face of overwhelming sentences, unaffordable justice and disfavourable odds. Laws must be upheld unselectively, and not used as a weapon of government to make [http://wiki.par-anoia.net/wiki/Main_Page examples] of those it deems threatening to its power.|www.ussc.gov}}
{{User:Wnt/Userboxes/DownloadHelper}}

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Welcome

Note: Edits from [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=70.15.116.59&namespace=&tagfilter=&year=2008&month=2 User:70.15.116.59] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=70.15.114.2&namespace=&tagfilter=&year=2008&month=2 User:70.15.114.2] from before February 2008 are also associated with this account. Wnt (talk) 15:04, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Psychohistory of Wikipedia

Image:Edit-rank-function10-8b.png

The WP:List of Wikipedians by number of edits is an interesting test of the undiscovered science of psychohistory. From the November 2008 dataset, it is possible to calculate

  • Your number of edits from your rank. EDITS = (753000 - 71.6*RANK*)/sqrt(RANK*)
  • Your rank from your number of edits, RANK* = ( sqrt (EDITS^2 + 216000000) - EDITS)^2 / 20500

The graph above shows how much the number given here as 753000 would need to vary to fit the actual data from the original table precisely.

Note: in order to produce the nice line shown above, it is not necessary to infer the existence of a hidden Foundation of 23 editors whose edits are not logged in the database, all of whom edit Wikipedia more than all but the top half dozen editors. But RANK* in the formula needs to be your actual rank + 23. (That is, your actual rank position on the list, including all humans and bots)

See Calculating your rank for my original posting of this.

Also see Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 January 27#All WP articles lead to philosophy.

While in the past I've been very skeptical about WP:SEO, I'm currently running a crude experiment regarding Meta or cross-wiki links and SEO just out of curiosity... (Meta:User:Wnt/[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wnt#SEO_test]))

Wikipedia Trivia Quiz

No fair looking at the links first.

  1. Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands?
  2. continental shelf areas in the Indian Ocean
  3. Imaginary landscape of an independent filmmaker spoofing Fantasia
  4. France
  1. To get ready to make war with some guy.
  2. Disease had forced him to retire.
  3. The law said anyone who killed a doge had to lose 100 pounds.
  4. He promised the Vikings to lose 700 pounds.
  • Which of the following is not a type of star?
  1. Red dwarf
  2. Orange dwarf
  3. Yellow dwarf
  4. Green dwarf
  5. Blue dwarf
  6. Ultraviolet dwarf
  7. Black dwarf
  8. White dwarf
  9. Brown dwarf
  1. Ulster
  2. Dublin
  3. Ballingarry
  4. Buffalo, New York

==Fishing Expedition==

What do you suppose one would find at 39 Stillman Street?

Under construction... ;)

Articles Created

(I should update this sometime...)

Articles we don't have

"I never remember what the redlinks are I come across, and there's no way to search for them, so I'm going to try to put them here starting now" (4/12/12) .. and, well, yes, that was the last I remembered of it. Turns out I only read this page when I add something, if then.

Fun with Lua

;Module:ImportProtein

This accepts an NCBI GenPept text file and turns it into an illustration - with some customization required. See Module talk:ImportProtein/Src (gene) for sample usage:

{{Module talk:ImportProtein/Src (gene)}}

;Module:FormatTemplate

This formats a template according to parser functions, template calls and links, indenting it according to how deep it goes.

;Module:Page

This gets any of the page features available for title objects in Lua and releases them to the regular templates.

;Module:Redirect

Per request, this expands a redirect into the target name.

;Module:Sandbox/Wnt/Sprite

Displays a selected subsection of a larger image. The way this is done, inside a Wiki image frame, I have no idea if it offers performance enhancement as it would with a page background.

;Module:Sandbox/Wnt/ColorAlphabet

This implements an alphabet color code proposed by Green-Armytage, 2010 - the Color Alphabet Project (see Help:distinguishable colors).

{{Mlx|Sandbox/Wnt/ColorAlphabet|blank|This function will convert alphabet to a color code}}

{{#invoke:Sandbox/Wnt/ColorAlphabet|blank|This function will convert alphabet to a color code}}

;Module:TrainingPages

Finds where a page is on a simple index list and gives the name of pages N before or after it. (For WP:Lua requests)

;Module:Sandbox/Wnt/NewestAtTop

Reverses the order of sections on a page so that the newest sections appear first. Does so hierarchically so that newer subsections under a section show up beneath that section but in reversed order.

;Module:Sandbox/Wnt/WikiLink

This simple module returns your file with every single thing Wikilinked. Alas, that means things with spaces in them can be split into two, but you can fix that with a delete. Still, a time saver for things like Special:PrefixIndex/Module that don't have a Wiki source and can't be accessed by a Lua script directly, just to copy them. (This was for WP:Lua/Modules/Overview) Now with delink and dewiki features.

{{Mlx|WikiLinkEverything|main}}

(output not shown for space)

;Module:Xswitch

A simple switch written for WP:Lua/requests. I'm afraid I don't recall the syntax at the moment.

;Module:ConvertNumeric (decToHex function only)

{{Mlx|ConvertNumeric|decToHex|I saw 47 sheep on the way to the 7-11.}}

(I only wrote this one function of this module)

{{#invokeConvertNumeric|decToHex|I saw 47 sheep on the way to the 7-11.}}

;Module:DisplayLuaTableContents

Displays the contents of a Lua table. Used for exploring the fields of _G, mw. etc.

;Module:Sandbox/Wnt/FindAndReplace - buggy; since superseded by String and Page

{{Mlx|Sandbox/Wnt/FindAndReplace|main|find|replace|This function will find things...}}

{{#invoke:Sandbox/Wnt/FindAndReplace|main|find|replace|input=This function will find things...}}

;Module:Sandbox/Wnt/Plotter

Started as a very simple (too simple) plotter, one of my first attempts at Lua. Now with a pie chart function!

;Module:Svgedit

On test2, buggy, a good idea but written before I really knew how. Should work it up - idea was to take a complete labelled SVG text file copy-and-pasted from Commons and relabel it with a set of color thresholds.

;Module:Sandbox/Wnt

Miscellaneous

Index of Flotsam and Jetsam

Hmmm... it may be time to do a housecleaning, as is possible with [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&redirs=0&profile=default&search=prefix%3AUser%3AWnt%2F]. A third of these pages I don't even remember...

;Archive

;Essays, proposals, policy arguments

:*User:Wnt/image-blacklist Hypothetical image blacklist for the above

;Templates

  • User:Wnt/Templates (blank for some time; was a transcluded copy of the sandbox to see how displaytitle worked.)
  • User:Wnt/Templates/Sandbox
  • User:Wnt/Templates/Sandbox2
  • User:Wnt/Templates/Flags (this was some crazy notion I had, mostly as a template writing exercise, to indicate editor status/state of mind by putting up "dive flags" which, it was supposed, would take on Wikipedia-specific meanings vaguely related to their maritime use. But policy prohibits putting them in signatures, leaving their use to ... specialized locations. As in, I didn't actually use it)

:*User:Wnt/Templates/Flag

:*User:Wnt/Flag

  • User:Wnt/Templates/Birthdaycontent (This and the below were supposed to replicate some template that was on Jimbo's page at some time, but that's all I remember about it)

:*User:Wnt/Templates/Birthdaystyle

:*User:Wnt/Templates/Dateconditional

:*User:Wnt/Templates/Addrow

;Userboxes and idiosyncratic barnstars

;Other