Difference between revisions of "User:Iduan"

Revision as of 19:03, May 2, 2009

I am Issac Duan of Arlington, Virginia - a suburb right next to the District of Columbia.

Conservapedia

I joined Conservapedia in late April 2007 and started seriously editing in August.

What I'm Currently Working on

Currently, I'm trying to institute a slight policy change in order to make the entire website more efficient when it comes to the protection of webpages; TK has been kind of enough to submit my proposal to his fellow administrators (see Conservapedia:Policy proposals#A Proposal Regarding Cascading Protection and Sub-page Templates). Once that minor speed bump is over with, my focus will me the sub-page-heavy Template:Officeholder. I plan on making one sub-page for it that will be able to handle every single cabinet position (all the secretaries and the Attorney General). After that, I'm thinking I'll try and work on a president sub-page. Not for U.S. presidents (they're already covered by Template:President, which is probably more extensive than what the ideal Template:Officeholder sub-page is), but for foreign presidents, like Douglas Hyde (who, last I checked, is currently the only non-U.S. president to have Template:President on his page). After this, Template:Officeholder will probably just turn into something that I (and other users) work on-and-off on; as we think of positions to add, they'll be added. Some of my plans are found on User:Iduan/sandbox, but those aren't always accurate - some are very old and I'm just keeping them on there to remind myself to eventually do it, and some aren't even up-to-date.

Additionally, probably after I do the cabinet template sub-page (which is sort of contingent on the policy change), Karajou and I are looking into making a universal team template - which would be able to be put on any sport's teams. It will be relatively difficult to get all the intricacies of the different leagues into this template, but I'm sure that we can find a way - in fact, we might even use sub-pages!

The last thing that I have on my schedule is to create a stats template for MLB players.

Highlights of work

Contest

In four contest, I have compiled 2336 points. My record is in the ongoing Conservapedia:Contest5 - where I compiled 1131.

Pages

A few of the many articles I've really worked on are Cuba, Marquis de Lafayette, Majoritarianism, Waves, Eddystone Lighthouse, XYZ Affair, Congressional Page, O.J. Simpson and HTML table formatting. I've also done many universities, including UMD, Syracuse, Arizona, UNC, UConn, Penn St., Johns Hopkins, Howard and NIU. Beyond that I like to spread my edits around - and I also vary it. Sometimes I'll be watching the recent changes and I'll do drastic clean up to a low quality article I see, a lot of other times I'll be clicking "Random page" - and fixing up simple aspects like spelling or wikilinks. I put a lot of work into Nigeria#Structure - where I described the structure of the executive, judiciary and legislature. The judiciary is probably the most detailed part I have, simply because I'm most interested in judicial aspects. Ditto with John Jay#The Jay Court.

While I have created or radically changed a few pages - as you can see on the right, many of my page edits are minor. I go through each random page and make small changes to encourage consistency - but primarily because if we just create a bunch of articles and then have a lot of crappy ones that are completely out of wack - then we'll turn into Wikipedia. To some extent, this is also why I work in the template space.

Templates

I have created a few templates, the ones I'm most proud of are: Template:Template, Baseball, Template:USState, Template:NBA, Template:NFLDraft, Template:Officeholder (and a bunch of sub-pages for that), Template:MLBTeam (which I've added to every MLB team) and Template:University (which I have put on about 131 articles so far). I also reworded the long, much-hated Template:Stub and then created with TK a larger redesign towards the goal of standardization. Most of those templates were relatively minor, but the one I'd like to talk about is Citations missing. The goal of that template was to provide a more clean/elegant version of the uncited templates, which in my opinion were over the top. Key differences are viewable through the color scheme - as citations missing keeps the background color of articles, and is separated merely by a border. Also, as far as technical aspects go, Citations missing has a few more links, some of which depend on what page it's put on. Some templates that I did not create but I did do a lot of work on are Template:Country and Template:Taxonomy.

Categories

I don't work much in this area, but I did help User:TK clean out Category:Navigation box (which was full because of missing <noinclude> tags on templates - this took a while to find everything, and I also worked a lot on cleaning up Category:Information technology - it's now much more cleaner because there are specific categories and pages are better organized.

Full list of major works

User:Iduan/Works

My editing style/preferences

Basic page format:

Body
==Notes== (if there are references not used with <ref> tags
==References==
==See also==
==External links==

The above is the same as the format in the Conservapedia:Manual of Style, and it makes the most sense. References are most pertinent to the article text itself, so they go first; see also links are internal, so they go second, and external links go last.

As far as minor edits go: I do not use French spacing, and I usually remove it where I see it (the wiki software renders it as one space anyway, so it's just an extra character); I also remove serial commas.

References always go outside grammar marks (punctuation).

Punctuation does not alway go inside quotation marks. For example, periods. If the text enclosed within the quotation marks is a full sentence - the period goes inside the quotation marks. "John said, 'My name is John.'" If not, then the period goes outside: "John said that he was '17 going on 18'."

Images, unless they are within templates/tables, should always go in thumbs - they should not stand alone.

I have a fairly hard to explain view of categories - but I firmly believe it should be the universal view. Say there is a Category, Category:Apple Inc., that is part of a larger Category, Category:Information technology. The article that is specifically on Apple Inc, and thus encompasses all of aspects of the Category, should be the ONLY article within that category to be in the super-categories that Category:Apple Inc. is in (i.e. Category:Information technology).

My Computing World

I'm a pretty big fan of Mac OSX Leopard, but before it came out I was definitely an XP guy. I think that Spotlight just puts Macs miles ahead of PCs. I use Safari, XCode (for python) and Smultron (for html).