The Wikipedia is beyond an encyclopedia of all potential notable subjects — it is also an almanac and the beginning of a possibly unforeseen civic infrastructure. Steve has often thought about what the Wikipedia's raison d'être really is beyond how it is commonly promoted. Ultimately, in his humble opinion, the Wikipedia and derivative efforts are about:
Creating a future (not so far away) where everyone on Earth has the right and access to know everything. Everything.
Destroying knowledge-based elitism in all its forms.
Creating a global expectation of radical transparency in government, business and all other walks of life.
In general, Steve believes that dedicating one's time to the development of anything positively useful by humankind is the highest moral act, especially because these kind of contributions tend to keep on giving past one's existence. With respect to the Wikipedia, Steve participates to:
Ensure that people understand what they need to know about subjects he cares deeply about. This especially applies to Louisville-related things.
Give the people of the world the power to control all knowledge and keep it out of the hands of the elite, greedy and power-hungry.
Ensure his community's appropriate placement and stature in this important work.
Clean up others' work and fight vandalism. Ugh... but totally necessary.
Steve can accomplish all of the above without ever becoming an admin. He sees no joy in the idea of being an admin—boring, thankless tasks aren't his bag. On the contrary, he finds immense joy in authoring articles and managing projects that enhance the process of authoring articles. Unless and until admins are paid a significant stipend, please do not nominate him for adminship.
Steve made his first contribution to the Wikipedia on March 20, 2004, adding a self-promotional link to direct democracy. Not much later he realized doing that wasn't appropriate, but ultimately he added worthwhile content to this and many other articles related to the subject of democracy.
Steve contributes to many articles and discussions, especially related to his hometown of Louisville and his home state of Kentucky. Also, using AutoWikiBrowser, he runs many cleanup processes that seek to improve article quality.
As of April 26, 2017, Steve is the 284th most active Wikipedian in the English language Wikipedia and has completed more than 127,000 live edits (97.5% of all edits), over 75,000 (59.4%) of which are directly to articles. 24.7% of his work is on article talk pages (and 2.7% on category talk pages), largely due to tagging and assessment for two WikiProjects. See his full list of contributions.
Steve believes in making constructive changes to articles in a very bold manner, but whenever a change dramatically alters the content of a well-established article, he will either: 1) seek consensus first from currently heavily involved contributors to the article; or 2) if there are not any currently heavily involved contributors, simply explain his changes on the talk page and then proceed.
When it comes to editing articles, Steve addresses obvious spelling, grammar and structural issues. But that's not all. As an editor, Steve always takes a strong look at:
Vandalism, whether it's blatant or sneaky. People who think they can vandalize or otherwise play games with our articles need to realize that established Wikipedia editors are engaged in serious business here, and our tolerance of vandalism, especially now that Wikipedia is undeniably a high-quality work, is about as low as it gets.
Blatant advertising, especially of unrelated products/sites, but also of related entities that could eventually get out of hand (e.g., under Internet forum, listing all forums on the web).
"Brochure-itis", where the content looks like it came from some corporate marketing department. Glowing, flowery, promotional language of a subject simply does not belong in an encyclopedia.
Making people out as saints in bios (similar to brochure-itis), where biographical content looks like it came from some rabid supporter or fan. Hagiographic language about a person also does not belong.
Lack of encyclopedic relevance — For the subject of an article to have encyclopedic relevance, there must be provable common knowledge and reverence of the article's subject within the subject's expected natural sphere of influence. Further, all references provided for proof should rest outside the direct influence of the subject itself as well as integrally linked parties or organizations. Neither the volume of Google hits nor a subject's ranking in Alexa (if it's a website) provide sufficient evidence for these purposes.
Egos of contributors in their promotion of original research and pet ideas that don't belong here.
Elitism — Steve supports a very non-elitist Wikipedia and thus takes a dim view of stuffy, highfalutin wording as well as self-appointed experts who claim dominion over a particular article.
Quick radical rewrites — Oftentimes when a long-established article (especially one related to politics) is virtually redrafted in a short period of time without any discussion beforehand, it is a victim of POV-pushing. As a rule, Steve reverts these radical rewrites and asks the author of those rewrites to explain their changes and get consensus approval before making them.
Whitewashing — Sometimes a contributor loyal to the subject of an article (or a part thereof) will remove inconvenient facts that they believe make their subject look bad, or in other cases, a contributor loyal to a particular side of a controversy will re-write content to buttress their side (usually with peacock terms) while effectively denigrating the other one.
Lack of edit summary — When content is changed significantly and especially if content is removed, the edit needs to have a summary. If it doesn't, Steve will oftentimes revert.
Unwikified unfactored text dumps — On occasion contributors take free content from other sources and dump it into existing articles without wikifying it or factoring it into the article so that the article flows as well as it did before. These contributors seemingly expect others to clean up their mess. This is unacceptable and Steve challenges these text dumps.
Treating articles like Christmas trees, with images as ornaments — Images added to articles ordinarily need to help convey information that is presented in the article (especially in the section in which they are embedded), and shouldn't ever be added for mere decorative or aesthetic effect.
TMI — Steve pretty much zaps trivialities, highly personal info, hours of operation, non-notable/minor things a subject is involved with, and other excessive details that normally go on a subject's website but not their encyclopedia article.
WikiProject Louisville finally now has a barnstar, The Louisville Barnstar! Use this award to show other Wikipedians your appreciation for work they have done on Louisville area-related articles and other pages. Just place the barnstar (per usage instructions) in a new discussion on their talk page and you're good to go.
🗞️January 8, 2024
Tom Cruise is our most popular article for December, barely edging out the 2nd-place Jennifer Lawrence. Although not covered explicitly in his article, the popular, box-office-busting movie actor and three-time Golden Globe winner Cruise attended St. X High School in Louisville for a couple years, and his parents are from the city.
🗞️December 28, 2023
There's now over 20,000 individual pages, including talk pages, included in WikiProject Louisville.
🗞️December 12, 2023
For the second time in our project's history, there's now over 19,000 individual pages, including talk pages, included in WikiProject Louisville.
🗞️December 8, 2023
Jennifer Lawrence is our most popular article for November. This is the second month in a row. Also note Louisville-born/raised rapper Jack Harlow appearing anew in our upper tier at #3 – his article was inexplicably not included in our project until November 9.
🗞️December 3, 2023
Check out WikiProject Louisville's new Participation and outreach department, developed per Wikipedia's recently determined consensus for moving away from the membership (club) model and toward a participation (action center) model for wikiprojects. Membership was never required to help with our project's tasks, but this change underscores it. All project pages (including templates) have been revised for this purpose. Please direct any questions/concerns to our talk page.
🗞️November 8, 2023
Jennifer Lawrence is our most popular article for October. Lawrence, an Academy Award winner and the world's highest paid actress for two straight years, was born and raised in what is today Louisville Metro.
🗞️October 24, 2023
For the second time in our project's history, there's now over 6,000 articles included in WikiProject Louisville.
🗞️October 21, 2023
WikiProject Louisville now uses a full interactive map to show its coverage area. Also, be sure to look around the rest of our project pages to see everything that's updated and new.
🗞️October 10, 2023
WikiProject Louisville's Assessment department has been revamped from top to bottom. Hopefully no more outdated info. Please direct any questions/concerns to our talk page.
WikiProject Louisville is reactivated, with a new coat of paint and updated action items! Also please feel free to show our news updates by adding the {{WPLouNews}} template to your user pages or other appropriate Wikipedia pages.
Steve adheres to the idea that policies are law in the Wikipedia and should be strictly followed, except when doing that interferes with reasonable, very necessary actions. However, he believes that guidelines are just that, guidelines, and are not absolute. Guidelines should be used to guide in one's contributions and to serve as weighted points in the determination of the correctness of content or its structuring. In some cases, strict adherence to guidelines over common sense or usability has been a bad thing for the Wikipedia. Further, while most guidelines are sensible and well-considered, Steve every now and then comes across a guideline and thinks "Who wrote this crapola?".
Steve uses {{prod}} to deal with unencyclopedic articles he comes across in the Wikipedia. But he won't bother unless the article's subject is obviouslynon-notable or the article's development is extremely weak. If he can't decide one way or another, he defaults to doing nothing.
Except with respect to pages included by WikiProject LouisvilleorWikiProject Kentucky, he normally does not participate in XfD processes. Steve is not exactly an "inclusionist", but figures the inclusion disputes are best left to those who enjoy the heat of these kind of disputes. It's also hard for Steve to think of himself as a truly contributive Wikipedia "author" if he spends much, if any, time deciding whether an article hardly anybody will ever look at should be kept or removed.
When it comes to disagreements over the content in articles, Steve is a strong adherent to seeking honorable compromises that maintain factuality and proper balance above all else. However, there are times when some other contributors descend into game playing, process abuse, personal attacks, muddying tangential discussion or repeated circular argumentation rather than faithfully discussing content disputes and answering straight questions (usually, "Do you have evidence or sources for your position?"). These folks are usually dealt with via consensus of the other involved contributors.
Note: I've created many Louisville-related categories that have been renamed via deletion followed by creation of the new ones, without credit made to the original creators.
This is the list of things Steve is planning to do in the Wikipedia. Of course, please feel free to beat Steve to the punch in getting any of these things done.
In progress Work on WikiProject Louisville tasks, especially with regard to improving inter-linking and categorization of articles included in the project.
In progress Ensure that all Louisville-originating musical acts have links to their Discogs artist pages (and their profiles link back to their Wikipedia articles).
In progress Review personally generated list of potential articles/pages to add to WikiProject Louisville, and clean/assess them.
Ensure that all Kentucky-originating musical acts outside of Louisville have links to their Discogs artist pages (and their profiles link back to their Wikipedia articles).
In applicable projects, explain what cleanups I perform on top of AWB's defaults.
Added what ultimately became the "Click here to start a new topic" link to {{Talk header}} -- Thank me (or yell at me) for making it easier for people to talk about Wikipedia pages. :)
Innovated project banner design in the earlier days of WikiProjects, with ideas now used widely.
Set up a project alert system in WikiProject Louisville and other projects that displays project-wide alerts on project pages, member banners and project to-do lists (displayed within talk page project banners).
Surpassed 100,000 edits in the English Wikipedia in 2016.
Using AWB, developed an advanced article cleaner that utilizes many "Find and replace" changes (with heavy use of regular expressions) on top of AWB's default cleanups. Now in use for WikiProjects Louisville and Kentucky.
Steve doesn't work in the Wikipedia to get awards, but still, they are kind recognition of his humble work, and he appreciates them.
The Technical Barnstar
Thank you very much for looking into all of my JWB settings and such to try to find out what the issue was. It was really helpful!!!Thank you very much!Geardona (talk to me?) 17:06, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Citation Barnstar
This award is given in recognition to StefenTower for collecting more than 5 points during the WikiProject Unreferenced articles's FEB24 backlog drive. Your contributions played a crucial role in sourcing 14,300 unsourced articles during the drive. Thank you so much for participating and helping to reduce the backlog! – – DreamRimmer (talk) 17:58, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
The Original Barnstar
For your tireless work in maintaining and improving RegExTypoFix. Wikipedialuva (talk) 09:44, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
The Barnstar of Good Humor
Thank you for gently and kindly making smart, fair edits to a momentarily sloppy change I made and for all the great work it looks like you do RYPJack (talk) 18:06, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
The Original Barnstar
Stevietheman helped me learn the ropes of Wikipedia after I jumped into editing. Thanks! Zach Murrell (talk) 00:24, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
The Original Barnstar
Thank you for the great job you are doing on the editing of articles especially mine. Chitt66 (talk) 22:29, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
The Special Barnstar
For your efforts at the Muhammad Ali page in fighting vandalism and disruptive edits as well as for your constructive editing on this page. May you continue to keep an eye on this page always. Soham321 (talk) 17:40, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
In appreciation of your important contributions to Wikipedia. You are an asset to this website. And Adoil Descended (talk) 17:06, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
100000 Edits
Congratulations on reaching 100000 edits. You have achieved a milestone that only 363 editors have been able to accomplish. The Wikipedia Community thanks you for your continuing efforts. Keep up the good work!
Pony!
Congratulations! For saving American Pharoah from an overeager bot, you have received a pony! Ponies are cute, intelligent, cuddly, friendly (most of the time, though with notable exceptions), promote good will, encourage patience, and enjoy carrots. Treat your pony with respect and he will be your faithful friend! Montanabw(talk) 22:25, 11 June 2015 (UTC)
To send a pony or a treat to other wonderful and responsible editors, click here.
The Original Barnstar
Well...I like your user page. Add and Got (talk) 15:11, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
The Original Barnstar
Thanks for your help. I appreciate your attention to the Louisville-related articles. Mitzi.humphrey (talk) 17:16, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
The Barnstar of Diligence
Thanks for your watchful eye! It is greatly appreciated. Taxee (talk) 16:15, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
The Original Barnstar
This barnstar is awarded to everyone who - whatever their opinion - contributed to the discussion about Wikipedia and SOPA. Thank you for being a part of the discussion. Presented by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Bluegrass Barnstar
I hereby award you with this bluegrass barnstar for your invaluable work to improve articles for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Keep up the outstanding work! -- Steven Williamson (HiB2Bornot2B) - talk 17:56, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
The RickK Anti-Vandalism Barnstar
Thanks for your help in preventing recent vandalism at Louisville, Kentucky and at other articles in the past. Your efforts are much appreciated! Seicer (talk) (contribs) 04:30, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
The Editor's Barnstar
For all you have done for Wikipedia, especially in regards to the Louisville Metro, I award you, Stevietheman, the Editor's Barnstar. Keep up the awesome work! --Moreau36 16:48, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
The Original Barnstar
I award this BarnstartoStevie for his tireless efforts in WikiProject Louisville and because he has received entirely too few barnstars for his hard work.
As a 13-year Wikipedian, Steve very much acknowledges Wikipedia's greatness and potential, but for the sake of honest participation here, he feels obligated to list and describe its faults as well:
CorporateBias. As most of the major news media (in the United States at least) is controlled by conglomerates, subjects considered notable or matters deemed acceptable to cover within an article often depend on reporting by media outlets with a business-oriented/corporate point-of-view. Overall, Steve sees this bias rear its head more often in terms of matters not covered rather than matters covered in a skewed manner. The media's sheepishness about conducting investigative reporting of politicians as well as engaging in forthright journalism of issues related to corporate bottom lines are major parts of this. Fortunately, we can also source from books (which tend to go more in-depth and not have as much corporate bias), but that doesn't assist well with having the most up-to-date content. Steve's basic concern with respect to the Wikipedia is that its policies and guidelines don't do enough to counterbalance this reality.
In the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey, Steve made a proposal to address some aspects of this issue entitled "Citation quality assessment". It tied at #169 out of 265 proposals. Nevertheless, he is determined to eventually figure out a path forward in this challenging area.
Conflict-of-interest Editing and Brochure Writing Getting Out of Hand. With rampant self-interested parties writing up glowing copy about themselves, sometimes whitewashing any criticism away, editors committed to a truly neutral publication are having an increasingly difficult time keeping up and dealing with these egotistical critters who frankly don't give a darn about Wikipedia's mission. There also seems to not be enough teeth in the enforcement of WP:COI especially.
Too Few Editors Explaining Their Edits. The time spent on figuring out what an editor has done and why significantly increases when they don't explain their change(s) in an edit summary. Steve would even go as far to say that not doing so is disruptive. However, there seems to be no strong encouragement (or enforcement) of editors taking the small effort to be transparent about their work. This makes the overall product seem less professional and less a product of genuine teamwork, ultimately negatively affecting quality.
Too Few Editors Today. Wikipedia has become a mammoth publication through the work of multitudes of editors (especially in the early years), but doesn't have enough editors today to properly maintain it, improve existing articles, and add articles for the many notable subjects not covered yet. This condition is likely based on a combination of 1) the site "scaring off" many editors; 2) the thrill/buzz is gone for many; and 3) the inaccurate idea that many may hold that this encyclopedic work is complete. Steve doesn't see much effort to draw in new editors or try to bring back ones who left.
How the Site Inducts New Users Isn't the Most Practical. Steve comes across a number of mistakes by new users that seem to be avoidable if they had been given more practical, more obvious assistance from the start. Examples:
We usually point new users to pages describing policies and guidelines, but even more useful is a new user looking at the vast examples for reasonable editing work we already have: our millions of articles. Surely we can provide links to exemplary articles and say "Do it like it's done here". Also, we can implore new users to examine existing articles and even copy/paste structures if that will assist them. We need to come to grips with the reality that many users don't like to read policies and guidelines. Whether we like it or not, we live in a world with many impatient folks.
It doesn't seem to be obvious to many new users that an article's talk page exists, let alone that it's there squarely to discuss questions/concerns about the development of the article. We need to figure out how to rectify this.
New users seem to be largely oblivious to edit summaries, especially ones used while reverting their mistakes. Oftentimes I see users wondering why something isn't there after they added it, even though the edit summary given to revert is there if they pull up the history or in some cases look at the generated notification. This also needs to be rectified.
No Donations Mechanism for Wikipedians' Work. We Wikipedia editors are volunteers, but so are open-source software developers. Our work here is no less important (and in many ways no less intellectually taxing) than the work of software developers, so why doesn't Wikipedia provide a way for us to collect donations for our work? Let us have an additional benefit to contributing!
Vast Numbers of Uncovered Local/Regional Subjects. Judging from just the Louisville and Kentucky WikiProjects alone, with access to hardbound encyclopedias on these subjects, Steve knows there are many notable uncovered subjects related to localities and regions.
Too Much Legal Red Tape for Adding Fair Use Images. Steve acknowledges the Wikipedia's need to abide by the U.S.'s brutal, big-corporate-friendly copyright laws, but all the hoops editors are made to jump through discourage the addition of useful images, and as such, multitudes of articles are graphically incomplete. We need a friendlier, less legalistic process here.
Dismissal of AAA Baseball Players' Notability. Somehow we have ended up with only Major League baseball players having presumed notability, even though AAA Baseball is played in many major U.S. cities, with usually sufficient media coverage of their players. At the very least, we should say AAA players in the Top 50 U.S. cities are presumed to be notable.
Stub Sorting System More Complex Than Is Necessary. Perhaps it would be much easier if we just used an "expand" tag at the top of what we call stub articles, and automatically build "expand" subcategories off of preexisting mainspace categories in which the stub article is included. Sometimes Steve gets a sinking feeling that people are putting a lot of time and work into the stub adding and sorting without contributing much of real, lasting value to the Wikipedia in the process.
Portals Are Pointless, Barely Maintained Hulks. The true portals of this site are what search engines and wiki searches lead people to, and that is the main subject articles themselves, not what we call portals. Most portals were developed in a frenzy sometime in the 2000s (some would argue as vehicles for some Wikipedians seeking adminship), and they have been languishing ever since. Steve thinks it's high time they, along with their namespace, be decommissioned. However, he wouldn't mind somehow retaining some of their elements, and placing them in main subject articles or in WikiProjects.
WikiProject Portals was rebooted in April 2018 in an attempt to address the myriad issues in the portal system. Maybe this will end up resolving my concerns eventually.
Wikipedia's technical issues and limitations[edit]
The product that is Wikipedia is made technically possible by MediaWiki, brilliantly designed wiki software, along with various other bots, tools, etc. But no software is perfect, and the following are the technical issues and limitations that Steve currently sees.
Watchlists and recent changes pages are not very efficient because we can't filter out edits by other users we trust. There are some users Steve trusts to do great work, and so checking their work is more curiosity than a necessity. Steve envisions a solution that could be as simple as going to a user's page and clicking a 'trust' icon (kind of like a star for adding to a watchlist), then filtering a watchlist by clicking "Hide trusted". Doing something like this was logged as a feature request in 2013, but it was closed/declined. In the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey, Steve made a proposal to address this issue entitled "'Hide trusted users' checkbox option on watchlists and related/recent changes (RC) pages" (tied at #39 out of 265 proposals). This proposal is currently being considered for development by the WMF as it is partially oriented to a "smaller group" (WMF coinage), namely Recent Changes Patrollers.
RC doesn't directly support tracking changes to all pages included in a WikiProject. Without this, you can't have WikiProject-level change patrol unless a page with links to all the project's pages is periodically generated. A fix for this is being investigated in phab:T117122. Also, a proposal at the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey (tied at #189 out of 265 proposals) was made to cover this concern.
An editor cannot be 'thanked' for an edit on a RC page like they can on a page history. Steve created phab:T90404 to address this. As of April 2016, the diff popup features "send thanks" as an action. I would prefer to have this on each line of RC per my request, but at least this gadget update is useful.
RC can't be set to disregard links within templates transcluded in an article, and that can be a pain with respect to navigation templates especially, where their links don't necessarily pertain to the article's subject. However, admittedly a challenge arises for how to determine the difference between a navigation template and templates that provide content to the article.
Watchlists provide no way to unbold (mark as visited) entries we've reviewed on the watchlist page itself. Steve usually sees the diffs using popups, so there shouldn't be a necessity for him to go to the watched page to unbold it. This is a matter of making the "processing" of watched pages more efficient. User:PerfektesChaos/js/listPageOptions provides this capability and thus is a great workaround until native functionality is created. In the 2016 Communtiy Wishlist Survey, a proposal was made to address this issue entitled "Make it possible to set single entries from watchlist un-visited (and visited)" (tied at #107 out of 265 proposals).
Watchlist entries can't be set to expire. Sometimes, Steve wants to watch a page only for a limited time, like for catching further vandalism or following up on a talk page discussion. phab:T100508 is covering this.
There is no built-in support for sharing pages, like on various forms of social media. phab:T56829 and phab:T120487 cover this issue. Also, a proposal at the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey (tied at #71 out of 265 proposals) was made to cover this concern and more with respect to embedding Wikipedia content on other websites.
None of the available tools for automatically completing bare-link citations throughout an article are comprehensive. Tools that leave too much manual work to be done by the editor need to be redesigned. Especially annoying and counterproductive is when some users use these tools and don't clean up after them, lazily letting the tool do all their thinking. If the tools did much more of the work, this annoyance would at least be reduced. In the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey, Steve made a proposal to address this issue entitled "Improve automated, full-page, bare-link citation completion tools" (tied at #107 out of 265 proposals).
Bots that revert vandalism don't seem comprehensive enough. Steve would prefer to not have to spend so much of his wiki time fighting off vandals. Update: Deferred changes is coming, and this may go a long way in satisfying this concern.
There's no straightforward way to seek out ambiguous links (to disambiguate) in a set of articles, such as articles within a WikiProject. There's a tool that works in the inverse (from the disambiguation page's perspective), but that's not good enough. Steve has a highly technical workaround he uses for this purpose, but it would make general users go cross-eyed.
Tabs at the top of each page dance around too much as the page loads, making it difficult for Steve to click the tab he means to click. Oftentimes, he means to click "Edit", but a different tab is opened due to the tabs dancing around. A proposal at the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey (tied at #24 out of 265 proposals) was made to cover this concern.
Section jumps often don't land where they are supposed to land.
In Fall 2003, Steve began focusing on independent web-related work (paid and volunteer), including web design/programming, online sales and Wikipedia editing. Aspects of this work continue to this day.
This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:StefenTower/archive.
Thank you very much! Geardona (talk to me?) 17:06, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
