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.
What's not to like?
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 (Always out of date.)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.
found 544 articles in May 2024. There's work to be done!
London Underground
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.
Do not put spaces between parameters. The other parameters are optional and can be placed in any order. Some infoboxes do not require the brackets. Keep parameters in lower case. The other parameters are:
Type
'thumb' / 'thumbnail' or 'frame'. This causes image to be displayed with specific formatting. "thumb" is normally preferred.
Location
'right', 'left', 'center' or 'none'. Determines placement of the image on the page. "Left" or "right" is the norm, but large
panoramas or timelines can be displayed in the center.
Size
{width}px or {width}x{height}px (e.g. 50x40px, would limit width to 50
pixels and height to 40 pixels). Normally only one variable is used. Use common sense when determining the sizes; you can use the "Show preview" button if you need to. If thumb or thumbnail is chosen, size should normally be left out, so that the size defaults to the size set in a user's
preferences.
alt=
(keep it lower case). This is the "alternate image" parameter used to describe the image for
screenreaders or for people with low-vision. It should be more descriptive than the caption alone. Do not use this for another copy of the caption or of the article title, as the reader will already be aware of these.
Caption
Any element which cannot be identified as one of the above is automatically treated as
caption text. It is traditional to put this last. The caption should identify what the image is, and ideally be a complete sentence that adds to the article by pointing out something a casual reader would not have noticed otherwise, or add information the pertains to the image. Full sentence or multi fragment captions require
full stop punctuation.
If you have created a picture that is not already in Wikipedia's image collection on the
Commons that you want to include in an article, you will need to upload it first. Bonus tip: Similar formatting is used to insert basic audio or basic video clips into articles.
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.
What's not to like?
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.
found 544 articles in May 2024. There's work to be done!
London Underground
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.
Do not put spaces between parameters. The other parameters are optional and can be placed in any order. Some infoboxes do not require the brackets. Keep parameters in lower case. The other parameters are:
Type
'thumb' / 'thumbnail' or 'frame'. This causes image to be displayed with specific formatting. "thumb" is normally preferred.
Location
'right', 'left', 'center' or 'none'. Determines placement of the image on the page. "Left" or "right" is the norm, but large
panoramas or timelines can be displayed in the center.
Size
{width}px or {width}x{height}px (e.g. 50x40px, would limit width to 50
pixels and height to 40 pixels). Normally only one variable is used. Use common sense when determining the sizes; you can use the "Show preview" button if you need to. If thumb or thumbnail is chosen, size should normally be left out, so that the size defaults to the size set in a user's
preferences.
alt=
(keep it lower case). This is the "alternate image" parameter used to describe the image for
screenreaders or for people with low-vision. It should be more descriptive than the caption alone. Do not use this for another copy of the caption or of the article title, as the reader will already be aware of these.
Caption
Any element which cannot be identified as one of the above is automatically treated as
caption text. It is traditional to put this last. The caption should identify what the image is, and ideally be a complete sentence that adds to the article by pointing out something a casual reader would not have noticed otherwise, or add information the pertains to the image. Full sentence or multi fragment captions require
full stop punctuation.
If you have created a picture that is not already in Wikipedia's image collection on the
Commons that you want to include in an article, you will need to upload it first. Bonus tip: Similar formatting is used to insert basic audio or basic video clips into articles.
