User:Kudpung

Wikimania, Barbican, London 2014

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

This editor is a Master Editor III and is entitled to display this Bufonite Editor Star.

Kudpung is the name of a village in Isan, Northeastern Thailand. It is also the main home of this 1940 vintage Wikipedian from Malvern, England where my father, an aeronautcs and defense systems scientist, (97, †2016), helped develop Radar during WWII. I was educated in a traditional English boys' boarding school (ugh! which could have been Buckeridge's model for Linbury Court) where I scived a lot of the time to build radio controlled model aircraft; my favourite subjects were Bach, the Boys Own Paper, Paris Match, Punch, Baudelaire, Molière, Shakespeare, and Émile Zola. After a failed attempt at Lettres in Nanterre University in 1968 (May, of course!), I took a first degree in Business Studies in the UK, after which I spent six years in Lower Saxony with BAOR (huh?), followed by a move to what was then West Berlin where I spent nine years studying a mix of linguistics, pedagogics, and media, and wrote some awful plays and an even worse rock opera, touring Europe as a drummer with jazz fusion bands. In 1988 following several years of involvement every summer with the Avignon Festival, I moved permanently to the Provence where I taught linguistics in a regional university, and developed marketing solutions and for Rhône wines. In 2000 I settled in Thailand where I taught in a public university, and designed teacher training programmes. I retired in 2008 to my farm in Isan where I occupy my time with writing, composing, and running a small consultancy. From 1999 to 2012 I was French-German-English lexicographer for an international publisher of bilingual dictionaries and authored one of the first comprehensive English-German and German-French electronic dictionaries for the Mac platform. In Thailand I wrote a complete set of EFL texbooks for Grades 1 through 12, published in 2006. I return to Malvern regularly. My daughter is director of a research faculty for robotics in a French university, and I have three super grandchildren.

This user is a Wikipedia Online Ambassador.

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

This user has been on Wikipedia for 10 years, 10 months and 30 days.

This user was ranked once number 132 on the list of Wikipedians by number of recent edits.

+14,000

I'm Watching Over 22,662 Pages

I began in 2005 by just looking stuff up and making occasional very minor corrections as an IP user. In 2006 I registered and and made every newbie booby in the book, but oddly nobody ever complained and I learned fast. We all work in our favourite areas and although I have created many articles and a Wikipedia project, I still do a lot of cleaning up of articles. I also work actively as a coord on projects such as the Schools, improving RfA, and contributing on Wikimedia to the development of new ways to welcome new users, patrol pages, and review articles at AfC.

Off-Wiki

I attended Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC and related events in New York, Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong, Wikimania 2014 in London, and Wikimania 2016 in Italy. I'm a member of the WMUK Chapter. Here in Thailand I occasionally give talks in schools and colleges about Wikipedia.

Help

This was my 1,000th edit to the Editor Help Desk - my talk page is also always open to anyone wanting some direct help; I don't know the answers to everything, but I'll do my best. The coloured blobs at the top of the page may say if I'm around (I may forget to change it though), and if I'm not, I'm still fairly quick to respond. I was an OTRS agent for a while until I was kicked off it for lack of activity on it, ironically when I was in the middle of resolving a high profile biographical issue.

Meta

I vote on WP:RfA and on all other elections. See my voter guide for theArbitration Committee Election 2014. I participate on most of the major discussions about policies and the way Wikipedia is run. I have launched several major RfC and closed many minor ones.
I sometimes work at ANI but it's really kettles and pots yelling at each other like the dead common characters across the cobbled streets of Corrie.

Wikipedia is not a social network

No, it's not, but Wikipedia is like a large office. There are clear Sociograms that crystallize out of the work here, and for those of us who work voluntarily day-in, day-out on WP, there's something nice about it. Unfortunately there are some regulars who do their best to piss people off - but you get them in every office too!

This user believes in civility and assuming good faith.

Some of the reasons why I do and say certain things on the Wkipedia are because I'm an admin and I have to be careful what I do and say - but so should every one else ;)

Conflicts

1. I often use customised messages instead of user warnings - even our official templates can cause rancour.
2. I quietly revert good faith editing errors and sometimes put friendly, helpful comments on talk pages.
3. I occasionally make genuine attempts to clean up the crap of lazy editors and fly-by-nights, but it does not give me pleasure.
4. I stay reasonably civil at most times, although less so with blatant and obvious vandals and spammers, and I sometimes give short shrift to pompous, arrogant, or patronising editors who try to behave like admins.
5. I don't believe editcountitis, self-righteousness, and arrogance, are qualifications for barnstars or adminship.
6. Gaming the system is sick, I don't take the bait, but I get sick of the deceit and fake self-righteousness.

Deletions

1. My interpretation of deletion is in this essay.
2. By the time I've done enough research for a speedy deletion, a PROD, or an AfD rationale, an inexperienced page patroller has often already wrongly tagged the article.
3. Why does every sports person who has played one professional game, every street musician, every bit part actor, every kid who went on X Factor and Got Talent, and every small town hack and painter merit an article on the flimsiest of sources, while life-long academics have to jump through a whole page of hoops?
4. I show no mercy whatsoever with people, bands, and organisations (even 'non-profit' ones), who are looking for free publicity at the cost of our volunteers' free time.

Meta

1. Many participants at RfAs have varying opinions on the quantity of content work that is expected from RfA candidates, but the basic premise is: Editors who wish to police pages should know how to produce them - and have demonstrated it.
2. My !votes on Requests for Adminship are done after thorough investigation of the candidate, and based on these criteria.
3. There's a strong consensus that the RfA system needs fixing. In 2011 I created and coordinated a huge investigation into it. IMO, according the massive research that we did, the major item for reform is demonstrated here. Some claim that RFA2011 didn't do much. It got its message across though, and it's a nicer place today (2015) than it was then.
4. The Arbitration committee has more pomp and circumstance than the British Houses of Parliament, is bogged down in its own bureaucracy and is generally too lenient. Kudos to the arbitrators nevertheless for the difficult task and the massive time sink that it is. Membership there is not a vertical promotion, it's just a sideways shift in a Wikipedian's focus - one that befits those who really know what they are doing and and have demonstrated it to the community.
5. I am utterly amazed that so many editors think new page patrolling is not worth doing properly, or even strictly necessary. I think it's one of the most fundamental functions. It's the only firewall against attack pages, hoaxes, and blatant nonsense, and needs to be done by mature, experienced users. WP:AFC should be closed down and merged to it.
6. 'Consensus' is Wikipedia's most abused word. The rules should not need to be rediscussed every time they get broken, or when just one editor disagrees with them. Consensus is crucial to the Wikipedia process, but long debates often cloud their own issue and could be concluded more frequently by a show of hands without further commenting.

What I would like to see

1. A splash page for new editors, one that preferably replaces our traditions 'welcome' system, that explains without walls of text, some of the basic principles of editing and expected behaviour.
2. A more inter-active and more (young) user friendly landing page to replace the Page Creation Wizard.
3. A 'soft block' system forcing good faith, but disruptive editors to go on an adoption scheme.
4. A New Page Patroller tutorial, or mentoring system run by experienced editors. IMO patrolling needs a near-admin knowledge of policy and should not be confused with counter vandalism.
5. A list of disallowed sources for WP:BLPPROD.
6. Clarification of notability for schools (or lack of it) and taken into policy.
7. Fewer help desks - although I created one myself. What we need is a centralised visitor/user help system, with a drop down menu to choose the department they want.
8. More of the common tools available to webmasters, to be used by Check Users, and extension of the 'stale' period.
9. A greater effort to recruit potential mature-minded young users to Wikipedia and its maintenance tasks.
10. An effort to gently dissuade univolved inexperienced users from hat-collecting and clerking or commenting in areas that are strictly admin-only.
11. Less pandering at PROD and AfD for obvious inappropriate pages and more CSD criteria.