User:NapoliRoma

Some specimens of one of my namesakes

"Probably right, but incomprehensible!"[1]

NapoliRoma isn't a place; it's a couple of types of tomatoes. I have no particular affinity or aversion to tomatoes of any kind, but I had coined this as an account name for (what else?) Rotten Tomatoes at about the same time I climbed on the WP bus, so it got recycled. It's also no particular hint as to my gender, although the fact that I point this out probably is.

I seem to spend most of my time on the history of computing, especially that related to open systems (one of the first articles I overhauled). Oh yeah, the Solaris thing, too. I am also predisposed to wikignoming, such as untangling previously-impenetrable dab pages.

I would describe myself as a "rational inclusionist", characterized by an interest in preserving that which has a fighting chance at notability and being informative, tempered with a recognition that not everything has a fighting chance at notability and being informative.

Pet peeves

• Factoid-insertion vandalism
• "Temporal float": use of terms such as recently, soon, and so on, which very quickly lose their meaning. I just discovered the {{when}} tag, which I will probably now proceed to overuse.
• Multiple Editor Personality Disorder
• "Cleaning up white space": Huh? White space is good. Lackofwhitespaceisoftenconfusing. The specific "cleanup" of annoyance to me is taking fields in an inline citation template that have been laid out one-field-per-line (so-called "vertical formatting") and mooshing them into one line.
  Maybe I can't convince you to use white space yourself (in which case I'm guessing you probably were never a programmer), but please don't unilaterally delete white space that another editor has gone to the trouble of inserting for clarity and ease of maintenance.
  (Note that this has nothing to with removing blanks at the end of sentences or collapsing multiple blank lines where only one is called for. Clean away and feel the pride!)
• "Simplifying" links by avoiding redirects, often by adding or changing a pipe. If this is at all tempting to you, please read Wikipedia:Redirect#Do not "fix" links to redirects that are not broken. The proper approach is to use the valid link that best matches the (presumably correct) text being linked—which could very well be a redirect. This often results in not having to use a pipe at all (simplification!).
  BOCTAOE; for example, using a pipe that expands an abbreviation upon mouse-hover isn't a bad thing at all.

Is Wikipedia a vast wasteland?

Alarmists abound, but to paraphrase Newton Minow (from the same speech that "a vast wasteland" came from): When Wikipedia is good, nothing—not the encyclopedia, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.

(Of course, there are a lot of places it just plain sucks out loud.)

I mention this ("good", not "sucks out loud") because of the gem I ran across today^{[kind of annoying, innit?]}: the name of the S. S. Minnow turns out to have been chosen by Sherwood Schwartz as his own little protest/commentary/revenge against Minow. And there's a citation and everything. This is the kind of serendipitous discovery that keeps me coming back to Wikipedia.

Thingies

• User:NapoliRoma/ref-templates
• User:NapoliRoma/Repaired dab pages
  • Disambig page style repair: ([[Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation|you can help!]])
• Tags I've managed to forget in the past:
  • {{tl}} for linking to a template
  • {{dn}} to indicate disambiguation needed
  • {{weasel-inline}} (RZZZZZ!)
  • {{you}} for person issues
  • {{articleissues}} for multiple issues
  • {{distinguish}} "Not to be confused with..."

This user contributes using Solaris

This user plays the trumpet.

’sThi's user know's that not every word that end's with s need's an apostrophe and will remove misused apostrophe's from Wikipedia with extreme prejudice.