The Skull Cinema

Just to make things different, instead of a random article a List came up. Entitled Hoogendijk , it is a short list of people with that surname (almost all of whom are Dutch, unsurprisingly). Lists are quite common on Wikipedia ( forming 4.4% of all pages), so they will crop up now and then. Normally they do not require much editing at all, as the Page statistics for this list show with a grand total of 6 edits over 12 years. In this case there is a little preamble giving some information on the etymology of the surname. Here we can add a wiki-link to the term dyke, just in case the reader is not clear as to what the term relates to, and the single reference is not in a template so that can be expanded and reformatted into a Cite Web template reference. So at least there is something to do. The reference is mildly interesting as the page it links to is written in Dutch. So an infrequently used term is needed, |language=nl , which adds a descriptor to the citation. Also the nam...

The next topic demonstrates what is great about random editing. The 2015 ACC women's basketball tournament is not a subject I have any interest in whatsoever. But you can still help out sometimes. The article is rated as a stub and is basically a list of tables with content describing a post-season college league women's baseball tournament. It appears to be predominantly the work of a single user Lewisthjayhawk who has, let's say, a colourful history and leave it at that. Not that there is anything wrong with the content which all looks competently put together to my untutored eye. In fact, the only constitutive work was to add wiki-links to the list of players at the end of the article. A bit of minor editing to take out some white space and a wikilink for an abbreviation that would mean something to an American sports fan but not to me and it was done. Apart from adding an {{unreferenced}} template to the top of the article as it has not a single reference to...

And here we are at the Alexander Aircraft Company , a start-class rated article about a defunct aeronautical engineering company from the USA in the 1920's. As this is a subject with more interest to me I spent a little longer than usual on this article, giving it a top-to-tail polish. Starting with the lead paragraph , which consisted of a grand total of twelve words on arrival, I expanded it, if only by a bit, so at least there are now two sentences. The associated book citation was limited so this was expanded as well. Founding and Disaster subsections received a heavy dose of wiki-linking and the single reference provided across both subsections was dead, requiring a trip to The Wayback Machine to search for the given URL. The Wayback Machine is part of The Internet Archive , which is a not-for-profit set up back in the early days of the web to archive the nascent internet, as it was recognised that the content was not anywhere near as permanent as the previous forms of...

And with a single click we jump from 19 th century British poetry to 6 th century BC Chinese history. According to the random article presented, Duke Jing of Jin was the ruler of a state in ancient China. It is with a little trepidation that I approach editing this article as I know nothing about the subject and a chunk of the references are in Chinese. However the basics were still there to be done, as there were a few grammar and wikilinking alterations required. One edit that I made that doesn't show up on the displayed page is to the Short description template , changing it from " Ruler of the state of Jin " to " Ruler, state of Jin, China, c.6th BC ". Short descriptions are used for search results on Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches and the idea is to keep then below 40 characters. If you haven't heard of Jin the current description is a bit limited so I dropped out some of the prepositions and definite articles and replaced them with...

As with most things, it's fun to have fun but you have to know how. With Wikipedia one way of making it entertaining is by using the ' Random Article ' link on the Main Menu bar located to the left of the page. The link selects an article at random from Wikipedia's 7,539,822 pages, as of the 8 th of February if you are on the English site, and offers it up. For general reading selecting random articles is not very useful. Probably because 50% of Wikipedia articles are stubs (very short articles with only a few hundred words or less) and further 30% are rated as start class (slightly longer). But it's quite a nice way to select an article for editing. Unsurprisingly most, or almost all, of the pages that are returned will be on a subject that you have no deep knowledge of or, in some cases, that you weren't even faintly aware existed. But that is part of the appeal of this strategy. Generally, then, this limits you to copy-editing for grammar/layout/ etc...