Defy expectations
Close up of Paul Housberg's Four Seasons


     Current & Ongoing Tasks
Current Projects
  • WikiCup: It's WikiCup season, which means that I'll likely work on a few portals and improve a few articles. Last year I made it into the third round. I am aiming for a repeat of that performance.

Ongoing Tasks

  • One shot articles: I occasionally build articles, often as part of edit-a-thons, where the majority of the work is done in one sitting.
  • File Renaming: I used to work very heavily in renaming files, as there several thousand images with non-descriptive names. If you have filemover and want to help, please do!.
  • Backlog Elimination: Perpetual source of back end gnome work. I work mostly in the two sections dealing with images.
     Wikipedia Resume
Milestones

Content

Essays

  • Failed RfA Advice: After a few users that I worked with went through unsuccessful RfAs and lost their sense of direction, I created this essay to both encourage them and to give them tips so that their next RfA might be more successful.
  • The monster under the rug: An essay published in the Signpost on 31 October 2011. It was covered by two external blogs and generated 70,000 bytes of talk page commentary.
  • A foolish request: An op-ed reiterating what the community has agreed is acceptable and not acceptable for April Fools' Day joke edits, and offering additional guidance.

Alternate accounts

  • This is also Sven Manguard: I use this account when I edit on computers other than my laptop and when I use editing aids with stored passwords (AWB and FTCG).
  • Svenbot: Bot account with approved tasks on English Wikipedia and Wikidata. It is inactive.
     Links & Tools
Links
  • Admin Reading List: A useful grouping of policies and instructional manuals regarding Wikipeda. My personal belief is that just like people go to law school before becoming lawyers and people go to medical school before becoming doctors, people need to go to admin school before becoming admins. I would be in favor of making the reading of the entire collection a prerequisite to running for RfA.
  • Antandrus's observations on Wikipedia behavior: This essay both prompts refection on one's own behavior and contextualizes the behaviors of others. Certainly an important read for just about anyone.

Tools

  • Cyberpower678's Counter: For those suffering editcountitis, use once daily. Also of interest to fans of colorful graphs.
  • Noommos' Media Tool: A tremendously useful tool for quickly generating a list of images on a given page. It even sorts them into free use and fair use for you. It's a bit sensitive to overtaxing, so don't use it on pages with more than two dozen or so images, but otherwise it's just awesome.
  • Nikola's File Detector Tool: Great for file movers, this tool generates lists of files using regular expression patterns, making it easy to find files that badly need renaming. If you follow the link, the most useful regular expression is preloaded, just replace PICT with any camera generated prefix and you're good to go.
  • TTO's For the Common Good: A godsend for anyone who wants to help with the massive backlog of files that need to be transferred to Wikimedia Commons.