User:RadicalBender

My To-Do List
My List of Articles
My Sandbox
My Talk Page

Wikipedian Since: September 24, 2003
Administrator Since: March 3, 2004
Today is: November 14, 2024

USen	This user is just your typical dumb, monolingual American.

No. of Edits	15,000+
Pages Watched	1,250+

File:Bender.png Bite my shiny metal Manual of Style. USA Israel

I am one of English Wikipedia's administrators. If you think that my behavior is problematic or incompatible with this statute, leave a comment at Wikipedia talk:Administrators.

RadicalBender

Name: Bender; Age: 25; Location: Dallas, Texas, USA; Occupation: Web designer

Personal Site | Personal blog | Work Site

I do mostly minor edits. I'm also something of an italicizing Nazi. (Remember, kids: television shows, movies, books, album titles (but not songs or bands), video games, newspapers, magazines, ship names (but not prefixes like "USS") are ALL italicized - not underlined or quoted.) Basically, I do this to avoid stress. If you have the bravery, patience, mental fortitude, etc. to deal with controversial articles, more power to you, but that's not me. I'd much rather toil in obscurity than be on the front lines of controversy and burn out.

That said, let's go ahead and get the controversial opinions out of the way:

• Larry Sanger is absolutely right - we must stop accomodating and enabling trolls through process. Slash and burn might turn away a few contributors, but none of the ones we should want.
• NPOV is probably a waste of time and it definitely feeds the trolls.
• The majority of edits on large topics are decreasing the quality of those articles. This is because, for most people, the quality of the article as a whole is taking a back seat to the desire everyone seemingly has to have their imprint on articles. This is turning many articles into long lists of disparate trivia instead of naturally-flowing, high-quality encyclopedia articles. Efforts to stem this and make the encyclopedia more encyclopedic are criticized as counter to the spirit of "openness."
• Barnstars are stupid.
• Vandals should be shot on sight.
• Most tables and infoboxes are created by people who have no business doing so.
• Categories are doing a lousy job of clustering information together. Nesting is either too deep and scatters articles out too far or is too shallow and clumps everything together too closely. Lists work markedly better in most cases. Automation for clustered articles is a good idea, but poorly implemented.

In addition, I'm always working to make the way information on Wikipedia is presented better and more consistently so that more people will look to Wikipedia as a "first source" of information (as opposed to Amazon, IMDb, AMG or even Google). I do a lot of work with usability and information presentation, so this is a natural extension of that.

---

Boilerplate request for permission | Kana cheat sheet | List of Wikipedians by number of edits | MoS (biographies) | MoS (Japan-related) | Naming conventions (articles) | Wikipedia as a press source |