Fayenatic london

Hi, I live in London, UK, and even here there are Fayenatics -- i.e. fans of Faye Wong, a singer from China with a remarkable voice. Anyone who loves her scat singing album Fuzao (Restless) is a real Fayenatic.

It was in order to edit Faye's article here that I registered as a Wikipedian in early 2006, but I soon broadened out into a thoroughly generalist editor. I work on some subjects of personal and professional interest, many that are not my own area but where I can figure out what's what, and others of merely passing interest where I see a need that I can fill. As of January 2019 I am among the 200 most active editors on Wikipedia.

Signature

In February 2012 I became an administrator on English Wikipedia. At that point I added a red L to my signature, meaning to display a Learner plate for a time while I was going through New Admin School. Later I decided to keep it, because in Wikipedia (as in real life) I am still learning all the time. In my signatures from June 2012 to February 2017, it was linked to my contributions; the following letters link to my talk page. The red letter also disguises my omitting to use a capital L for London when I registered as a user.

Origin and destination

This user is a Christian.

If you want to know what's most important to me, you could start here.

In real life, I do some Bible teaching, but while I'm editing Wikipedia I work hard to be objective from a neutral point of view. I hope that no-one could tell from my edits what particular denomination or theology I might identify with. If there has been notable criticism of a person or body, I will include/restore it in Wikipedia, regardless of whether the subject is "on the same side" as me.

Wikipedia activity

Admin statistics
Action	Count
Edits	318248
Edits+Deleted	343499
Pages deleted	32514
Revisions deleted	68
Pages restored	3538
Pages protected	84
Pages unprotected	3
Protections modified	3
Users blocked	166
Users reblocked	6
Users unblocked	6
User rights modified	2
Users created	1

(for a comparative report, see User:JamesR/AdminStats)

This user strives to maintain a policy of neutrality on controversial issues.

This user is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. (verify · RfA)

This user is one of the 200 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

This editor is a WikiGnome.

This administrator is open to recall.

235,000+

This user has made more than 235,000 contributions to Wikipedia, over 88,000 of which were to articles.

This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than 15 years.

This user uses JavaScript Wiki Browser to quickly make repetitive edits.

This user is an editor on Wikidata.

This administrator will consider reasonable requests to provide copies of deleted articles.

Faye Wong is the page that I have edited most (apart from reversions on pages about given names). I also wikified the article on Wang Chieh, another superb singer.

I have a natural gift as a proofreader, and whatever I spot, I fix. That means in practice that I'm not very focussed!

Portfolio

Here are some examples of my work.

New articles

People:

George Gammon Adams • Boyanka Angelova • Zechariah ben Jehoiada • David Bell (composer) • Phil Chang • Nassima el Hor • Sandra Jordan • Li Lili • Li Lingyu • Solomon Male • Barry Mason (cyclist) • Nisha Pillai • Ralph Senensky • Gaétan Siew • Otto Zacharias
Michael Woodford (executive) (since expanded by others)

Organisations:

Biblical Creation Society (I hope you find it neutral; I hadn't guessed what a fight I'd have on my hands from an undisclosed-POV deletionist, but in the end he helped to improve the article considerably)
Homes and Communities Agency • Tenant Services Authority • Places for People • Circle Anglia
Ancient Order of United Workmen • Leonard Curtis • Tasmanian Land Conservancy • Education Endowment Foundation
Street Pastors • Christian Action Research and Education • City Gateway • St Saviour's Centre for the Deaf
South African Conciliation Committee • Conference on Indians in the Americas • Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts • Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength
Countryside Properties • London & Regional Properties • HC-One • United House • Banks Group

Works:

Restless (Faye Wong album) • Harmony (Sa Dingding album) • Moby Dick (1998 miniseries) • "Calypso Carol • "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" • Inversion (artwork) • "First Steps" (Elbow song)

Reliable sources:

Accountancy Age • Building Design • Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria • Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament

Places:

Millennium Mills (in collaboration with 2 other editors)
King Edward Memorial Park • Troxy • Lindley Library

Lists, replacing categories:

List of cases of police brutality in the United Kingdom — Argentina — Canada — Iran — Pakistan • List of child abuse cases featuring long-term detention. Writing these was quite a gruelling talk, because of the grim reading required to decide what should be stated in the list.
List of Byzantine Greek words of Latin origin • List of New Zealand repeated place names • List of repeated place names
List of materials used in Hinduism • Nepalese customary units of measurement • List of under-occupied developments in China
List of Star Trek production staff • List of Star Trek composers and music (subsequently expanded by another editor with an article on the film themes)
List of one-eyed creatures in mythology and fiction (this was also to listify a category, but I had mainly populated it myself. What does it say about us that about 150 people a day look at this page?) • List of animals featuring external asymmetry • List of squid-faced humanoids
List of mathematician-politicians
List of U.S. Army installations named for Confederate soldiers, to facilitate CFD discussion in 2019

Other:

Expanded from stubs

Gayle Williams • Zakaria Zubeidi • Michael Perry (hymnwriter) • Na Ying • Stephen Haddrill • Payments Council
Jahaziel • Jehu (prophet)

Added sources and expanded/improved significantly

Fraser's Hill • Bedder • P.S. Longer Letter Later • Refugee and Migrant Justice • Achill-henge‎
Patrick (shoe company) • Vantis • Ajax (cleaning product) • Decent Homes Standard
Shepherds Friendly Society • Ancient Order of Foresters • Independent Order of Foresters

Rewrote from deletable self-promotion to fairly good articles

Greg London • Gregory Henriquez‎

Rescued from proposed deletion by improving somewhat

Category:Fictional females
Christian Concern For Our Nation • Dunwich Dynamo • YesAsia
The Ace Cafe • "He Lives‎" • Fusion (student movement)

Articles for Deletion

Although I sometimes turned a deletionist tide, e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Renee Williams (person), I used to find AfD annoying or depressing, so I generally steered clear of it. Now I recognise that nominations are generally made in good faith to implement sensible policies which improve the quality of Wikipedia, and I occasionally nominate articles for deletion.

Merging

Judaism in Africa into African Jews
"See no evil" into Three wise monkeys
Individual song articles into Songs from Les Misérables, rescuing worthwhile content from deletion
Industrial and Provident Society with a differently-capitalised article
List of games in Star Trek - this merged article was described as "very good work" at AfD, an early pat on the back for me.
List of Star Trek materials

Splitting

Bayat into Bayat (name) and Bayat (disambiguation)
Likewise, Patrick, Giles, Nathan, Zack, Woods ...

Copy editing

E.g. Jean Rustin, Sara, Chhibramau, List of Arabic names, GEICO, a school, Singapore, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Mary Dyer

Disambiguating links

Most new inbound links for Nike are intended for Nike, Inc. I'm always looking for ways to reduce future maintenance, so I supported a proposal to rename that page, but it failed to gain consensus. So, it keeps needing to be re-done as more bad links get written.
Zechariah was a big project – over 250 edits – as Zechariah, Zachariah and Zacharias were articles about different people that used to be differentiated only by their KJV spellings, and a lot of inbound links were incorrect.
There were over 2,000 links to Catholicism when the separate article Catholicism (term) was at that name. Sometimes I used to work through another page of them and change the link where Roman Catholic Church (now at Catholic Church) was intended. For the record, I have no vested interest in the matter.

Categories

On 20 March 2007 I finished creating a hierarchy to organise the articles within Category:Christian martyrs by era and by major branches of the church. (This has since been further sub-divided by others.)
I've also enjoyed depopulating the once-bloated Category:Star Trek, creating new sub-categories or lists (see above).
After Category:Fictional children survived a discussion at WP:CFD, I set up Category:Fictional children by medium and most of its sub-categories.
I've set up various categories for lists including Category:Entertainment lists by franchise, the contents of which are mostly also my work.
One evening in 2012 I set up Category:Islands in fiction, Category:Films set on islands, Category:Novels set on islands, Category:Video games set on islands and Category:Fictional castaways – a nice little project.
I assembled Category:Sports champions by sport as part of my contribution to the 2012 London Olympics.
Building Category:Deaths by country took a bit of time in 2013.
I particularly enjoy participating at WP:CFD. It's very satisfying to find a creative way to balance different policies and precedents while making the encyclopedia easier to navigate and understand.
On and off I've been working at simplifying the many tiers of religious leaders, see Category talk:Religious leaders#Clergy categories.
In 2015–16 I spent a good while reversing a series of CFD closures categorising biographies of ancient people by date of death, as required following Wikipedia_talk:Categorization_of_people/Archive_10#RfC:_BC_births_and_deaths_categorization_scheme, and as detailed at Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_71#BC_births_and_deaths_categorizations. I hadn't intended to do it alone, but nobody else jumped in, and even the others who had contributed to the situation omitted to reply to the invitations recorded there.
I wrote up my experience on a specific area as the essay Wikipedia:Category redirects that should be kept.
In 2022 I recategorised many former members of the deleted Category:Pranksters.[1]

Templates

{#if}

This user understands and uses ParserFunctions.

I've created templates to help to manage, populate and link category pages for subjects outside my own areas of interest, including Template:Balletdecade, Template:FictionSetDecade and Template:Adult model.
I also made some useful navigation templates such as {{Gangnam Style}}.
I learned from m:Help:Parser functions to use conditional logic, and used this to suppress redlinks to non-existent categories from {{BC year in topic}}, {{Decadebox}}, {{StateestdecadeBC}}, {{DeathdecadeBC}}, {{EstcatBC}}, {{EstablishmentsInDecadeBC}}, {{DeathyrBC}}, and to display portals in {{EstcatCountryDecade}} and {{Year in country category}}.
I also padded the century number in {{EstcatCountryDecade}} in a category sort key so that first-millennium decades appear first, e.g. in Category:Establishments in Sri Lanka by decade. See m:Help:String functions.
I added further parameters to that set of templates for a country's new name where that is used in parent categories (see Template talk:EstcatCountry).
I added a conditional line in {{Year nav topic5}} so that architecture-in-year pages have a link to buildings and structures completed in that year.
Likewise, I added links to portals. e.g. in {{DecadeCategoryNav}}.
In October 2017 I did my most complex work yet on {{EstcatCountryCentury}}, so that it no longer displays links to year and decade categories in older centuries for which such categories are now deprecated.
In 2019 I eventually figured out how to use a hyphen or space in e.g. "17th-century" depending on whether a parameter began with "in ", to build "17th century in music".[2]
In 2023 I figured out how to make {{Cfm-double}} generate a discussion starter including the second _target, by tweaking {{Cfd all}} and {{Cfm2}}.

WikiProjects

This user is a member of
WikiProject Editor Retention

This user is a participant in WikiProject Categories.

This user is a participant in WikiProject Anthroponymy.

This user is a participant in WikiProject Abandoned Drafts.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Editor Retention is a great idea. I first read about it in October 2012 and recognised that I do some of those things already.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts covers work that I do when I stumble across abandoned user pages while checking backlinks after category moves.

Others that interest me – and to which I contribute from time to time – are:

Milestones

On 14 December 2006 I passed the milestone of 500 edits. A month later I passed 1,000 in main (article) space, partly because I discovered categories! On 27 Jan 2007 I started using Auto Wiki Browser to help me do link/category corrections more quickly (although I've hardly used it since, as it doesn't run on the computers at work or at home). The same day I also passed the milestone of 1,000 unique articles edited, fixing new inbound links for Nike.

I just fell short of 1,000 total edits in the month of Jan 2007 alone. Then, after an unbroken 71 days of constructive edits, I forced myself to take my first Wikibreak on 4 Feb 2007, which was a good idea.

I passed 3,000 edits in mainspace on 21 April. After that I slowed down a bit, making fewer minor edits. I was still editing every day except when on holiday, and passed 4,000 on 17 August 2007, and 5,000 on 3 November 2007. On 15 October 2008 I was categorising lists of Indian politicians when I passed 10,000 edits to articles; at that date my total edits were over 14,000.

October 2008 was the first month in which I made over 1,000 edits, although that included a lot of similar edits to category pages.

I've been given seven barnstars (I left them on my talk page and its archives), picked up my first DYK in January 2009 and had my user page vandalised in February 2009 – I felt that I must have arrived!

I collected a few more DYKs in 2010, and passed 30,000 total edits including 20,000 to articles, but became rather more patchy in my editing habits for a while. I'm still highly active, but can have a gap of a few days without feeling funny.

On 19 January 2011 my new pages became autopatrolled (I hadn't realised I had made enough pages, but that credibility took account of the articles that I created as disambiguation pages or splits).

I had a moment of modest excitement in July 2011 when I realised that the person who had reverted one of my edits, which I admit was only indirectly and subtly cited at the time, was none other than Jimbo Wales.

On 10 August 2011 I joined the list of the 1,000 most prolific editors on Wikipedia (based on cumulative number of edits). It was on the day of the English Wikipedia blackout that I moved up into the top 900, although I spent that day helping out at Simple. I think Production babies was my first new article to make it into WP:DYKSTATS, that same week in 2012.

The next month I was finally talked into standing for adminship, after saying for years that I was having too much fun just editing. The process concluded on 18 February 2012 with a very encouraging result. I wasn't in a rush to use my new powers, but took my first admin action on 21 February before I'd even finished leaving my thank-you notes.

On 12 September 2012, WP:WBE counted my edits as over 50,000, by which time I was in the top 700. On 7 August 2013 I reached the top 500. As of September 2021 I'm in the top 150.

This user has earned the
100,000 Edits Award.

Since July 2014 I have been doing a lot of work at WP:CFD, as most other experienced closers seem to have moved on to other things, and in August 2015 I passed 100,000 edits in English wikipedia.

In June 2020 (during the coronavirus lockdown) I passed 200,000 edits.

Alternative accounts

This user has an alternative account named Fayenatic london test (talk · contribs).

Before the advent of unified login I used "Fayenatic londres" on French, Portuguese and Spanish Wikipedias, and "Fayenatic londra" on Italian (these links are to my old contributions). Those accounts are no longer in use.

In 2022 I set up a "test" account in order to see how pages appear to logged-in non-admin users.