“ | [Articles], written without effort, are read without pleasure. Anon, 1764 (often misattributed to Samuel Johnson) |
” |
This user edits using their real name. |
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than ten years. |
This user is a member of WikiProject History Merge. |
This administrator will consider reasonable requests to provide copies of deleted articles. |
Subpages here:
Hello, I'm Scott Martin. I've been editing since 2002, and I'm an admin. I'm also a moderator at the Wikipedia criticism forum Wikipediocracy, where my user name is Hex. In real life I'm an archivist in London.
You can contact me by email through here, or as @hex on Twitter - however, I won't discuss any specific matters relating to Wikipedia edits via those methods. Please my user talk page for that.
After 13 years of seeing the worst more often than the best, I'm pessimistic about this project.
In August 2014 I gave up being a regular editor on the basis of my belief that Wikipedia, as it currently exists, is fundamentally broken. While did I return to editing after a 9-month break, my feelings haven't changed. It's impossible to go more than a click without encountering an error, falsehood, or deliberate distortion made for personal gain. Being a successful editor is still fundamentally a matter of game-playing. The governance model is broken. The underlying technology is painfully feature-poor and out-of-date, with successive showy and poorly-implemented projects by the WMF doing nothing to resolve the core issues, exacerbating the issue of the drop in editor numbers.
Although I do contribute new material sometimes, my primary interest is no longer in doing that. It's in minimizing (by making corrections or removals) the harm that the project's flaws have the potential of causing to readers. Also the harm that some contributors can cause to others: by mutilating or misappropriating their work, or losing editing history by unwise use of local software features. There's a lot of early history that needs repairing for those reasons, and that's something I'll be involving myself with. I'm also interested in the significant potential for research into how Wikipedia has evolved as a system, which may be of use to either efforts to reform this project, or found new ones.
What does my being an admin mean?
Well, I was granted access to the administrative toolkit in 2007. However, when I came back to editing, I had decided that I'm no longer going to: block or unblock any accounts or IP addresses; issue any user warnings; close any discussions in our processes (such as at AfD); participate in any discussions at WP:AN/I (beyond making simple requests for urgent interventions if absolutely necessary); or perform any non-speedy deletions. So please, don't ask me to do any of these.
What that leaves for me is to: inspect and perform maintenance on page histories: merges (or even de-merges), splits, and moves; appropriately use revision hiding in any cases that I discover of content that our policy requires removing from public view; and be open to answering requests made of me by users to look into matters of article history or revision hiding. That may be in the course of normal encyclopedic production, or investigating possible hoaxes, vandalism, or administrative malfeasance.
Articles
- .shabaka
- Albert Houtum-Schindler (a spin-off from Ganjifa, below)
- Auguste-Arthur Plisson
- Bonnington Square
- Common Query Language
- Dopplr
- Edwardes family
- Extended Semantic Web Conference
- Fabulous Five Inc.
- Fox family (English aristocracy) (including large family tree)
- Fox Primary School (which I attended)
- Gamelan gong gede
- Ganjifa
- George Bishop (astronomer)
- George Bishop's Observatory
- Hall Farm Curve
- Holon (physics)
- Hoxton Square (where I was working at the time)
- Hunguhungu
- International World Wide Web Conference
- Isabel Rich, Countess of Holland
- Kebun Raya Cibodas (visited on vacation in 2004)
- Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012
- Letter-Books of the City of London
- Lovina Beach (visited on the same vacation)
- Lloyd Charles Sanders
- Ludovico Brea
- Nutty Buddy
- Polyethylene glycol propylene glycol cocoate
- Reliance of the Traveller
- Rich family
- Shabaka (domain name)
- Sodium lauroyl sarcosinate
- Sodium ricinoleate
- Spinon
- Surgical tape
- Theresa Thornycroft
- Thornycroft family
- UHU
- Undermind (TV series)
- Val Bennett
- Visard
- Vula Viel
- Walter Cope
- Zarganar
Templates
- Family trees: {{Ancestors of Charles II of Spain}}, {{Family tree of the Rich family}}, {{Family tree of the Sassoon family}}, {{Family tree of the War of the Spanish Succession}}
- Diagrams: {{Chelsea-Hackney Line}}
- Formatting: {{A note}}, {{Asterisk}}, {{Example HTML comment}}, {{Help link}}, {{Paragraph break}}, {{Square bracket close}}
- Userboxes: {{User free cultural works}}, {{User real name}}, {{User watchlist count}}
- Utilities: {{Bump}}
Project pages