View source for User:DreamGuy

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{{Master Editor II Userbox}} <!-- between several years of anon edits before signing up and edits while not logged in (years ago for separate periods of several months, while I was being aggressively stalked), this is actually a conservative estimate of my total edits -->
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==About DreamGuy==

Usually what I end up doing is undoing really bad edits by other people: spam, hoaxes, trying to put their own opinion into an article as if anyone else cares, horribly pointless trivia and so forth. 

The good thing about Wikipedia is anyone who spots something wrong can change it. The bad thing about Wikipedia is all the people who want things to be wrong (either from bias or cluelessness) can easily do damage that takes multiple good editors five or more times the effort to undo as it took the bad editor to do in the first place.

==The eternal struggle==
[[image:Skeleton-warrior.jpg|left|225px]]
''The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: "Experts are scum." For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War -- and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge -- get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.'' 

::::'''&mdash;[[Lore Sjöberg]], from [http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/commentary/alttext/2006/04/70670 "The Wikipedia FAQK"]'''

<small>'''Fun trivia: After I added this section and graphic they have been reused on a number of talk pages and even expanded into the essay [[Wikipedia:Randy in Boise]]. It even led to someone [[Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive577#Oversight_enquiry|getting in trouble]] after someone who was not paying attention thought that the reference to "Randy in Boise" was [[WP:OUTING|outing]] someone else's secret, real-world identity.</small>
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==Useful things==


===Unlinking===
For seeing just how many pages a spammer got to, or how many pages use a ridiculously bad site as a source for information:

'''[[Special:LinkSearch]]'''

Sites that probably need to be removed as references and external links in most cases:

*.aveleyman.com
*.bestthinking.com
*.filmreference.com
*.findagrave.com (it's annoying how many people put this in)
*.wisegeek.com
*.paintinghere.com

(I'm sure there are tons I just don't remember right now. I'll add more later. I'll eventually make this a running log so that I go back and check links I previously removed to see if they found their way back again.)

See also [[Wikipedia:External links/Perennial websites]]

===User warnings===

Full list:

'''[[WP:WARNING]]'''

===Templates for article improvement===

'''[[Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup]]'''

And when there's a bunch on the same article:

'''[[Template:Multiple issues]]'''

<!-- still working on this, hiding for now:
===Lost causes===

Things I used to try to work on improving but which proved impractical to really accomplish but which I'll list here to see if I ever feel like banging my head against a wall again:

*Making sure Wikipedia articles accurately differentiate between [[serial killer]]s, [[mass murder]]ers and [[spree killer]]s when they are mentioned. Articles on specific mass shootings frequently use the terms interchangeably. I would frequently go through and fix multiple articles, only to have somebody come back and mass revert everything. [[List of spree killers]] was the worst offender of the lot. Someone finally renamed that to [[list of rampage killers]] to avoid some of the problem, but it is still littered with errors and questionable sources and [[WP:OR]].

*I used to edit [[Jack the Ripper]], but unfortunately a gang of people I had reverted in the past decided to tag team so that any edit I made, even such minor things as to correct the spelling on authors' names, was blind reverted nearly instantly. These same people had regularly made group accusations on WP:ANI against me, filed false sockpuppet reports, etc. If I made an opinion known about something this group would from then on oppose whatever that was, no matter it was. For a while if I found something outrageously wrong I would hand it off to someone else to go change it so they wouldn't know I was the one who spotted it, but I eventually gave up even looking at the article because it was too frustrating. 

* 

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