Wikipedia

Mckaysalisbury

Joined 5 July 2004

Current Tasks (requests for help)

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Why is it that no one can tell me how I'm misunderstanding policy, but they always tell me that I don't understand it?

If someone wants to help explain one or more of these things to me, I'd love to have a nice little discussion with them.

Notability

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I've heavily defended a couple articles up at AFD, and usually, people think differently than I do about the "trivial" portion of the Primary notability criterion. Admittedly, the policy is intentionally little ambiguous, but I think everyone else misunderstands the policy. If a news article article is about X and Y together, Is "Y" trivial? I say no. I'd say that Y is one of the primary subjects of the article. What about an article about how X affected Y. I'd say that in that case, it is clear that X and Y are subjects of the article. sure, An article about X that mentions Y in it, even for a few paragraphs is a grey area. The canonical example of trivial, is a one sentence mentioning in an entire book. Only on that scale can someone say something is clearly trivial. A single sentence in a news article? probably trivial. A paragraph? Definite grey area, deletionists will say "trivial", inclusionists will say "non-trivial". That's where I stand on the matter. Apparently, an article has to be about only Y to be considered a non-trivial mentioning by many.

James Earl Salisbury

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James Earl Salisbury is my father (Archived at User:mckaysalisbury/James Earl Salisbury).

  • When I was WikiYoung, I created the article, I used "google hits" as criterion for inclusion. (version). Someone asked about notability, and I was able to satisfy questions then (see Talk:James Earl Salisbury for discussion).
  • Eventually the article was nominated for deletion. (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James Earl Salisbury. I thought that the outcome of the article was obviously "keep", but the end result was that User:Cuchullain, the closing administrator, thought that the result of the debate was "merge", so he merged it. So, today, I put a note on his talk page with my reasoning of why I think he was mistaken. (my post to his talk page).

I think that he's mistaken in his decision on a couple of levels:

  1. He executed his vote, rather than consensus
  2. His vote wasn't something I think is in line with policy, but I kinda see where he's coming from

So am I crazy? Am I missing some crucial piece of Wikipedia policy?

collecting sources about him, not just mentioning him
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Consensus

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History has shown that I'm not understanding what consensus means. I've read the article, and I think I understand it, but according to others, I don't understand it. I've asked for help specifically to administrators about this, but I don't ever get a response.

Bias

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Some have hinted that Creation of an article means that AFD votes shouldn't count, so does that mean I shouldn't ever be allowed to delete or redirect my own article (e.g. Canyonlands Desert)? Or am I only biased when it's in favor of keep?

What do I do with my life?

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I'm a computer scientist. Mainly that means I'm a programmer, software engineer, and software architect. I currently work in databases and computer security. I've worked a lot with Relational Databases. I'm rather familiar with the theory, and I've built 5 DBMSs, but most of the time I end up implementing database systems, or building systems on top of them. I really enjoy math and physics programming. Also, I'm doing some real computer science research in my spare time, and I've written a few indie video games, some by myself, some with teams.

I love playing video games (and board games). I don't spend as much time doing this as I like. I might like to work in video games in the future.

My hobbies include: Literature and movies, mainly Science Fiction. (Post)Cyberpunk and Time Travel are probably my favorite sub genres. I enjoy reading about the latest discoveries in math (like Rational Trigonometry) and science (sorry Pluto, you're not a planet). From a non-geek perspective, I like social dance, and rock climbing.

My activity in Wikipedia comes and goes.

my webpage can be found at https://www.mckaysalisbury.com/

My Watchlist

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I've watched about a bajillion pages. Many of them have so infrequent changes, that I forget I have them in my watchlist. I have several topics that I try to keep the articles pure, mostly in the database industry. I don't watch my watchlist as much as I have in the past:

Some other computer science topics:

I watch a few math related topics:

Some science topics:

Some Science-Fiction topics:

  • Cardassian I had a question about spoonheads, and I'm awaiting a response. Maybe I'll eventually see the episode again
  • Star Trek

And, finally, from nowhere, a couple of people topics:

Yeah, there are other pages in my watchlist, but these are the important ones.

Update: 04:08, 20 October 2007 (UTC) My watchlist isn't helpful anymore because I have too much on it. ("539 pages watched not counting talk pages.") My wikitime is far less than what it used to be, so I'm going on a watchlist purge. I'm removing topics I don't care about as much. If you'd like me to help out with something, let me know on my talk page, and I'll be glad to help out. McKay 04:08, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Articles I started

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Articles I Spoke

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My wife has had insomnia. We discovered that one of the best things I can do to help her sleep is to read Wikipedia articles aloud. Why not help other people fall asleep by reading it for all on the Internet to listen to.

Todo list

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Heroes of the day

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  • Randy Pausch is my hero of the day (7 Oct 2009). Did good work, as a computer science professor, and even made an appearance in Star Trek!
  • Liviu Librescu is my hero of the day. (11 June 2007). I guess the Virginia Tech massacre article and his sums it up nicely. Though his life of Holocaust survivor -> education -> hero is a pretty impressive resume.
  • Jiang Yanyong is my hero of the day. (8 Feb 2006) I found him while researching SARS for the article on my father James Earl Salisbury (another hero).
  • Saul Bass is my hero of the day. (23 Aug 2015). He isn't heroic per se, but he changed credits in cinema. We need more people innovating in credits.
  • Arland D. Williams, Jr. is my hero of the day. (31 Aug 2015). Very heroic. He was a bank examiner (and I've done work for the FDIC, so that's interesting too. I discovered this article looking up his story which was found in a religious classroom manual I was reading where they compared his heroics to the Crucifixion of Jesus.
  • Isaac Allerton is not quite a hero of the day, but he's my Great13 Grandfather, and a Plymouth Colony settler who came on the Mayflower. His son Isaac Allerton Jr. is also an ancestor.
  • Charles Joseph Minard Is someone I've been thinking about for a while, but he's my "hero" of the day (6 Oct 2020). His One image of the map of Napoleon's Russian campaign single-handedly gave me the understanding of the fall of Napoleon's empire.

Cool Diffs

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  • Elephants tripling: [2]
  • Off by one error: [3]
  • Jeremy Renner the Velociraptor: [4]

Humor

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I'm having trouble getting closure on this closure I'm writing in closure which performs the closure to calculate the transitive closure of a set.

Other Wikis

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I hereby certify that I am user:mckaysalisbury on Wiktionary, Meta, Spanish Wikipedia, Memory Alpha, and WoWwiki (certification diff).

Block History

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I feel my block log is very clean, but yet, there are entries. I feel a bit of a need to explain myself in these cases. Yes, I've got the final edit on this page, but feel free to take a look at the page histories (the ones I provide or others)

  • June 6, 2007, I was blocked for making a single edit to a page. I felt very justified in the edit, as it seemed like it was in full compliance with all of the policies particularly because I was sourcing my material. I had discussed how the enforcement of BLP wasn't correct policy. I discussed the block with a friend of mine, and he suggested I email some admins, so I did. A large discussion with several admins got involved, and I eventually got unblocked before the 3 hours was up. Since, several admins have said they disagreed with the block, and one (via email) even said "PS. Being punished by a tyrant is generally considered an honour."

Images

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My Images on Wikipedia
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