User:Diderot's dreams/sandbox

Accomplishments at Wikipedia

This page may be useful for those who wish to have an overview of what Diderot's dreams does here. It's mostly here just as an accomplishment record.

I wanted to add, correct, and enhance the content of articles on issues important to society and improving the world, and I suppose everything else. The society ones that need improvement are often philosophical battlegrounds, and I am not really satisfied with how they read even after my labours. It seems it is near impossible to stop the addition of unreasonable arguments and implications, and I will have to be content with the information and points that I have added. And I wonder what will happen to these articles when I stop monitoring them. Articles I've been a major contributor to: Pickens Plan, Air America Radio, Ethanol fuel, Roundup, and Carbon tax.

Light rail and BRT (and not really BRT) transit system articles were natural places for me to contribute: Transmilenio, Metro Orange Line (LACMTA), Emerald Express, Rapid Ride, South Lake Union Streetcar, [[SWIFT Bus Rapid Transit], and MAX light rail.

I have made pertinent additions or corrections a several articles in science and economics: High-density lipoprotein, Case-Shiller index, Chirality, the Space Shuttle, Sub-saharan Africa, Aromaticity, and Linus Pauling. Adding statistics seem to be the most significant way I do this. And finally some various others I have contributed majorly: Cindy Crawford, American bison, [[]] and Llanera de Ranes. many facts or corrections I have made to about 60 others.

There was a newspaper article that detailed a census study of the percentage of commuters who used mass transit to get to work in major American cities. I added this information to the articles of several of them, including two featured articles. This is responsibe for 58% of the bragged about on my userpage page view statistic.

Not counting the articles above, an additional 80-some articles have had a prose, spelling, grammar, or layout improvement by me.

About 20 articles have been the recipients of my one man campaign against unverifiable information. I search Google for articles with fact tags (search: "citation needed" site:en.wikipedia.org) and remove statements with old tags that I don't believe are true or are undecided, and find references for those I suspect are true.

Reviewed 12 good articles:

Lipid bilayer,

Lodewijk van den Berg,

Rod Blagojevich corruption scandal,

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,

Osteitis fibrosa cystica,

Betty Roberts,

Red-capped Robin,

1973 Pacific hurricane season,

Boron nitride,

ReactOS,

Love dart,

Photoinhibition. I also do a bit at Good Article Reassessment. Significant suggestions on the Peter Griffin article.

All of these articles were significantly or substantially improved after the review. It looks from the record that I am a tough reviewer. Not neccessarily an accomplishment but others can be too easy. On average, about 90% of articles pass for GA. Lately there have been complaints about this.

Improved the color scheme at the Featured Articles page. The old scheme had a clashing contrast of blue and green. This is viewed over 1 million times a year. Interestingly, a week later the page got a banner at the top of the front page in celebration of reaching 2,500 featured articles! I wonder if my color scheme improvements had anything to do with that idea. Same for the Good Articles page. More ugly colors. About 100,000 views a year.

I have created six articles. Two are translations from the Spanish Wikipedia: Economy of Hispania and Federico Trillo. The former is a beautiful article featured there (I used the same pics and layout), the later was my first new article attempt on a scandalized Spanish defense minister from the 1990s. I once did the reverse, Bicapa lipídica is a partial translation of Lipid bilayer. The Spanish article gets 50% of the English article's traffic.

I found online aggregation to be an largely unexplored topic on Wikipedia, so I wrote two articles: Poll aggregator and Video aggregator. There are more types of aggregation on the internet too, and more articles could be written. My "opus magnus" is the article on the Bologna sandwich. Okay, I wanted to add an article on something common, and at this late date it's hard to find one. This one no one had the audacity to create, and after some squabbles it remains. And many people read it too. On the other end, I basically wrote John Barraclough Fell, which was getting a whole 60 some page views a month.

Adding pictures I find at Flickr and adapting them for Wikpedia is fun too. Images: apartments in Mexico City, HV transmission lines and tower, and bologna sandwich. And pictures from the Spanish wikipedia, too. Those people have artistic style.

I was unsatisfied with the userbox choices for Americans (either too strongly worded or just says I live here), so I recently added this template:

This user is an American.

I think it's inoffensive and still shows that bit of pride we Americans have in well, being an American. It has not been a "big seller" as I had thought.

Unrelated notes

Enron

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2002/02/18/daily9.html Fortune mag lists Enron as most admired energy company: 1999,2000,2001. Fortune mag doesn't have most innovative list, Forbes does.