Wikipedia

Curb Safe Charmer

Joined 15 February 2007

Curb Safe Charmer 
— Wikipedian ♂ —
Born
Jersey
PronounsHe
NationalityBritish
Current locationJersey
LanguagesEnglish, French
Current time22:19 GMT [refresh]
Personality typeINTJ
Family and friends
Marital statusMarried
Account statistics
Joined15 February 2007;
17 years ago (2007-02-15)
First editMarch 25, 2007; 17 years ago (2007-03-25)
Autoconfirmed26 March 2007;
17 years ago (2007-03-26)
New page reviewer16 August 2017;
7 years ago (2017-08-16)
Rollbacker19 October 2021;
3 years ago (2021-10-19)
Edit count75,000
Userboxes
1857 pending submissionsThis user is a participant in WikiProject Articles for creation. You can help!
This user has been an Articles for creation reviewer for 7 years, 8 months, 1 week and 3 days. (verify)
This user has been a new pages reviewer since 16 August 2017 (7 years, 4 months, 1 week and 5 days). (verify)
This user uses reFill to expand bare references.
This user is a participant in WikiProject Spam.
This user is against the practice of paid editing on Wikipedia.
This user participates in
WikiProject Citation cleanup.
<ref>This user would like to see everyone using inline citations. Please...
This user participates in
WikiProject Jersey.
This user was born and lives in the Bailiwick of Jersey.
This editor is a
Master Editor III
and is entitled to display this
Bufonite Editor Star.
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than 15 years.

Curb_Safe_Charmer has been active on Wikipedia for 17 years, 9 months and 3 days.
This user has helped promote 3 good articles on Wikipedia.
What did you do?This user includes edit summaries in their contributions and thinks that everybody should use them as well.
This user has written or expanded 1 article featured in the Did You Know section on the Main Page.
This user has successfully nominated or updated 1 article featured in the In The News section on the Main Page.
enThis user is a native speaker of the English language.
fr-2Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau intermédiaire en français.
de-1Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse.
This user rescues articles for the Article Rescue Squadron.
This user participates in
WikiProject Biography.
This user participates in
WikiProject Companies.
This user is a participant in WikiProject Wikify.
This user is a participant in
WikiProject YouTube.
This user is a participant in WikiProject COVID-19.
NEWSThis user has access to Newspapers.com through The Wikipedia Library.
This user has access to
The Wikipedia Library Bundle
This user supports a free, independent, undivided,
and fully restored Ukraine.
This user is a donor to the Wikimedia Foundation. You can be one, too.
This user is interested in helping with GLAM projects.
# This user is known as curbsafecharmer on irc.libera.chat.

Hi, I am Curb Safe Charmer. My username is an anagram, in case you're wondering!

Organising information has been an interest of mine since I was eight years old when I volunteered in my primary school's library, helping make sure all the books were in the right order according to the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

As a boy I enjoyed the original Batman TV series filmed in the 1960s. In particular I was fascinated by the Batcomputer. Batman could ask it anything, and a few moments later it would spit out the answer on a piece of paper. How did the computer 'know' all of that information? I guessed that at some point, a person must have fed the computer with information, some how. I didn't know anyone who did that for a job but it seemed like a really interesting thing to do. I gave up plans to be a doctor when I grew up, and instead wanted to be someone who inputted and organised the knowledge in a big computer system.

As a teenager, I became fascinated by computers, but when my friends were playing computer games I was more interested in databases.

It is not surprising that as an adult I spend time here, helping to build and curate the world's largest online encyclopedia.

What I do here

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Wikipedia is 99% run by volunteers. I benefit a great deal from Wikipedia and feel I have something to offer in return. My main area of volunteering is Articles for creation where I help sift through new articles and consider whether or not they should be added to Wikipedia, based on my knowledge of the project's policies and guidelines.

Unfortunately, some people try to use Wikipedia as free advertising for themselves, their business, organisation or cause. It is not always easy to tell what is promotion and therefore not permitted, and what is acceptable. Some editors go to great lengths to dress up their promo article as being encyclopaedic. The references they give may be to news articles that are substantially based on a press release, for example. So far I have saved a couple of thousand inappropriate articles from being added to Wikipedia.

A particular frustration that I have is when people who work in public relations, marketing or SEO do not realise that they have to disclose the paid nature of their editing, as part of Wikipedia's terms of use, which they accept every time they save a change to a page.

My AfC stats
Overall AfC stats
Most active reviewers

At the same time, and this is a part of the work that I really like, even though strictly it is not part of the Articles for Creation role, is when I have come across a few articles which have real potential but needed some help, and I have worked with the author to improve their draft so that it is accepted into Wikipedia. The best buzz is from the articles that I've helped with reaching 'Good Article' status.

Deletion

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When I come across an article that at first glance looks like it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, I will often set about editing it, such as running ReFill, trimming excessive citations, removing spurious content and tagging issues such as citations that fail verification. Once the article is a bit more concise and readable, if it still looks like there aren't three good sources providing significant coverage then I'll go ahead and tag it for speedy deletion, propose it for deletion or nominate it for deletion. Hopefully the work I've put in will make it much easier for other editors to carry out their review and quickly come to the same conclusion. This process does result in a lot of my edits (about 30%) being deleted, though.

Articles for Creation

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~8 weeksThere are 1,853 pending submissions pending AfC submissions.


reFill

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In March 2021 I responded to a request for help (T278211) and became a maintainer of reFill, a tool for expanding bare references. I since found the learning curve too steep to maintain the codebase, but contribute to the project in other ways.

Article creation

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Some of the articles I've created:

Some of the articles I've also substantially contributed to:

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