About me
Therefore, I do believe that God loves those who disagree with me. Or him. And so should I. | ||
Because that is what I grew up with. | ||
But I will use the spelling and grammar appropriate to the article (as far as I understand them). | ||
We invented the steam engine and the NHS. I'll stay for now. | ||
It's not perfect, but as they say: If you find the perfect church, don't join it (because then it won't be perfect any more). | ||
That is the area I am doing most editing in. | ||
The reason the city I was born and raised in actually works. | ||
A topic I enjoy reading about | ||
I have benefitted from other editors acting on these values; this is the Wikipedia I wish to pass on. | ||
And some more whimsical opinions | ||
My signature
Here is my signature: -- Verbarson talkedits
It includes links to relevant pages. The -- Verbarson part links to here, my User page; the talk links to my User talk page; and the edits links to my Contributions page. The whole is wrapped in a template that keeps it from being split over two lines.
Here is the code that creates it (as entered on my Preferences page under the User profile tab):
{{SUBST:nowrap|[[User:Verbarson|-- Verbarson ]] <sup>[[User talk:Verbarson|talk]]</sup><sub>[[Special:Contributions/Verbarson|edits]]</sub>}}
For this to work, I must also tick Treat the above as wiki markup
Breakdown of the code |
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Here is a explanation of each part of the signature code. {{ start template SUBST: 'magic word' SUBST before template name nowrap the actual template name | start template parameter (everything else) [[ start wikilink User:Verbarson link target: my user page |-- Verbarson text to display for user page link ]] end wikilink extra space for readability <sup> start superscript [[ start wikilink User talk:Verbarson link target: my user talk page |talk text to display for talk page link ]] end wikilink </sup> end superscript <sub> start subscript [[ start wikilink Special:Contributions/Verbarson link target: my contributions |edits text to display for my contributions link ]] end wikilink </sub> end subscript }} end template Notes |
But there is another aspect to my signature that is invisible to everyone except me.
In my common.css page is the code
/* Highlight sig for my use only - bold black text on green */ #bodyContent a[title="User:Verbarson"] { background-color: #00ff00; color: #000000; font-weight: bold; }
The effect of this is that when I am signed in (which causes my common.css to be active on every wiki page) and the browser finds an anchor titled "User:Verbarson" (which includes my signature, and a few other items), it will display it in bold black text on a green background, like this: -- Verbarson talkedits. This makes occurrences of my signature stand out to me, which is useful on Talk and History pages, without it being unduly distracting for any other reader.
Pages I have created, and why
NOTE: although I created these pages, and am chuffed to have done so, they are in no sense "my" pages, and many other editors have enlarged and improved them.
Page Name | Reason |
---|---|
GWR 3901 Class | Somebody asked on Talk:Locomotives of the Great Western Railway why there was no mention of this class. Since I had some details, I added it. |
GWR 4600 Class | Another class not mentioned on Locomotives of the Great Western Railway. Only one was ever built, since it was rather a failure, but it ought to be included. |
List of GWR standard classes with two outside cylinders | This is really why I started editing Wikipedia. I wanted to be able to compare the various Churchward standard classes by the standard parts they shared, and I realised that the wikitable sort mechanism made that easy. So I have created this page to do it, and let everyone share. |
Skerne Bridge | The oldest railway bridge in continuous use in the world now has its own article |
Chippenham viaduct | A redirect page to the viaduct section of Chippenham station, which allows the viaduct to be categorised on its own merits. |
GWR petrol-electric railcar | A very early attempt to use internal combustion for local passenger services. |
GWR 0-6-4 crane tanks | A redirect page to the crane tanks section of GWR 850 Class, which they were based on. |
Queen's Pier, Ramsey | A redirect page to Queen's Pier Tramway. It should be the other way round, with the tramway being a section within the pier's article, but the tramway article existed, and the only "Queen's Pier" article referred to Hong Kong, so I put this in for those who might search for it. This has now been switched round, so that Tramway redirects to a section of the Pier article. |
GWR oil burning steam locomotives | The list of renumbered oil-burners was found to be too much for the GWR numbering page, so I've started this page for that list and any other relevant info I can dig up. |
List of Isle of Man railway lines and locations | This brings together PoIgb templates for all the passenger-carrying lines on the Isle of Man, and also makes them individually available for transclusion on other pages. |
Cliff railways in the Isle of Man | Three of the five cliff railways have no specific article; this will fill that gap. The very limited articles for the other two have been redirected to this one, which has more information, and better citations. |
Bassaleg Viaduct | A redirect page, to allow the second-oldest operational railway bridge/viaduct to be categorised independently. |
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary | A book that combines two fascinating subjects; an author I love to read, and a work of reference I love to consult. |
Grenville steam carriage | The oldest self-powered passenger vehicle still in working order. I discovered its existence by accident while searching Commons for images about Churchward. |
{{Tolkien's legendarium}} | A template that adds clickable links to the underlying image. When I first saw this diagram I tried to click on the various parts and was disappointed when it didn't work; now it does. |
The Society under the patronage of Saint Wilfrid and Saint Hilda | A redirect from the full name to the not-very-obvious shorter name. |
{{Sketch Map of Middle-earth}} | A template that adds clickable links to the underlying image, in this case a map of part of Tolkien's invented countries. |
{{Great Western Railway}} | A navbox template that pulls together all the major pages for the Great Western Railway. |
Other stuff I have done
Page, Section or Template | Contribution | Reason |
---|---|---|
GWR 2800 Class | Remove a '/' | My first edit: I removed a stray '/' character that was stopping a URL from working properly. (I forgot to leave an edit summary.) |
GWR locomotive numbering and classification | Table GWR class numbers by 1st/2nd digits | I had always felt that the GWR numbering system was best laid out in two dimensions, so I started to build a table to do it. It turned out more complex than I was expecting, but I am fairly satisfied with the outcome. I'm glad the data is static; I wouldn't want to keep a table like this updated if the information changed regularly! |
{{Isambard Kingdom Brunel}} | Restructured and added many more entries to this navbox. | The content of this navbox was fairly meagre, entirely unfitting to the manifold output of the great IKB (including, of course, his failures). |
GWR 850 Class § Crane tanks | Added section for the crane tanks based on the Class 850 | The crane tanks were only mentioned on WP as a red-linked list entry in Locomotives of the Great Western Railway. |
GWR 101 Class | Removed the attribution to Holden | Holden was long gone from the GWR when 101 was built. However, it may have used his patent oil-firing mechanism - to be confirmed. |
Dorman Long § Bridge building | Added an image for each bridge listed | I think that the variety of Dorman Long's work is better appreciated visually (even if DL's successor company is going into administration). |
Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company § Bridge building | Again, added an image for each bridge listed | Sadly, Cleveland Bridge has closed. All I can do is highlight their past achievements. |
Charles Collett | Enlarged the article considerably | The article was small and almost entirely unreferenced. Even now, it is almost entirely locomotive oriented. Collett did much other work with coaches and other aspects of railway engineering. |
Locomotives of the Great Western Railway § New-build steam | Added this section | GWR locomotives continue to be built, not just restored. |