- My drafts
Hi! I'm a mathematician-turned-???. My username is a joke from this xkcd comic.
I edited some pages (typically train- or mathematics-related) before making an account, so my "User Contributions page" doesn't show all my work here. My recent work (since ~2022) has focused on chemistry-related topics, although I expect to return to mathematical contributions in the future.
If you want to reach me, try my talk page.
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Literaria
An edit summary I am very proud of:
The gallery tag
is your friend;
it breaks better
at line's end.
Stop using tables!
User:Utopes, on List of smiley codes (at the time a redirect to Emoticon) wrote at RfD:
Has some 2005 cruft history to list the three primary emotions that humans can muster: Happy, Sad, and Money Smiley.
Mission creep
The first and foremost goal of Wikipedia is to be encyclopedic (see also: WP:ENCYCLOPEDIC). But what does that mean? Are we sure all of our editors, particularly the good-faith power users, know it in their bones?
I know what encyclopedism means (with no guarantees that I put it into practice
). But I am (as I write this on 18-6-2026) roughly 28.5 years old, and the internet had not yet eaten intellectual life when I grew up. I still remember hauling out the Encyclopedia Americana for a middle-school research paper on Samuel Morse. Heck, I still remember when a high-school history class spent reading Encyclopedia Britannica School Edition articles was a cut above the textbooks!
I don't think EB's school edition outdoes the textbooks anymore. Nor does any print encyclopedia. I was pleasantly surprised in graduate school by the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics, precisely because I don't think I consulted a single print encyclopedia in undergrad. My sister (roughly 19 now) may have never used a print encyclopedia.
No, the only encyclopedia people use today is Wikipedia.
To have soundly defeated all our competition is a fantastic achievement. But it also means that the next generation of nerdy high-schoolers, obsessed undergrads, and bored grad students won't have an external referent for encyclopedism. Citogenesis is already a (small, thank G-d!) problem, precisely because it allows content to drift untethered from sources. A circular definition of our mission allows the mission to creep and shift too.
What might that drift look like? At the high-level end, we already function as free (undergraduate-level?) literature reviews for some sentific fields. At the low-level end, we struggle to distinguish ourselves from a dictionary. (Certainly, we tend to accumulate WP:RFORKs across English dialects. Skip (container) and dumpster still aren't merged, two decades into their simultaneous existence....) Perhaps these are early-warning trends. Or, given the problematic trends' pedigree, perhaps not.
No particular interaction with an editor sparked these musings, and I can't tell if I'm just shaking my fist at "kids these days". When telling another editor "just write it like you would see in an encyclopedia" provides no new information, will it be a problem? Probably the only way to know for certain is to wait and find out.
Citogenesis in action?
- Does Ropp, Richard C. (2013). Encyclopedia of the alkaline earth compounds. Amsterdam: Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-444-59550-8. copy from Wikipedia?
I think not, but one particular trouble is the magnesium iodide entry. Ropp appears to mangle our discussion of (Z) alkenes in the MBH reaction, saying: "Usage of magnesium iodide in the 'Baylis–Hillman' reaction...tends to give vinyl-specific compounds." But he also spends a few sentences on carbohydrate chemistry not on the magnesium iodide page. So I the collision is upstream: our sources are a subset of his.
(I'm still annoyed that he thinks cutting footnotes for space is appropriate, though.)- I retract the above (crossed-out) text. There are too many instances of word-for-word COPYVIO for the similarity to be Wikipedia's fault (i.e., us copying from him). I think he copied from us. Shame on you, Richard Ropp, shame on you!
I'm leaving the text above on this page, because there is (AFAICT) no centralized blacklist of sources that copy from Wikipedia wholesale. Please do not use Ropp's book as a source.
The template you're looking for...
...is {{multiref}}. Well, if you're me, anyways. (I've had to re-find the template on multiple occasions.)
  is unstable to WP:Typo Team/moss, and will eventually get replaced by a usual space. For a template field value that produces no visible output but still registers as nonempty, try {{nothing}} instead.
.jpg){kind=small}
). But I am (as I write this on 18-6-2026) roughly 28.5 years old, and the internet had not yet eaten intellectual life when I grew up. I still remember hauling out the Encyclopedia Americana for a middle-school research paper on Samuel Morse. Heck, I still remember when a high-school history class spent reading Encyclopedia Britannica School Edition articles was a cut above the textbooks!