Userboxes This user really likes old computers. This user is interested in computer engineering.

I have been on the internet since nearly the beginning of my existence and it remains to be seen whether that was a net positive.

I mostly work on articles about old technology.

When using the visual editor I've found that deleting the first instance of a reference that's used in multiple places deletes the ref completely, resulting in the big red error in the ref list. If this happens to you, I've built a tool for automatically repairing it, under this specific circumstance.

You can find the tool here: https://gekk.info/code/wiki-ref-fix.htm

All you do is put in the name of the page, the revision ID of a version where all the refs worked, hit the button, and it'll spit out a version where the first instance of each broken ref is replaced with the correct ref tag. If you have problems with this please let me know, but I expect it to break easily.

I'm sorry! I promise I did it in good faith, and it might not be as bad as it looks.

I am not a deletionist. I think Wikipedia should keep info it doesn't necessarily need, rather than delete info it thinks it doesn't want. However, I find that a lot of articles are full of repeated statements, and things put more floridly than they need to be (or is appropriate for the encyclopedia.) That means that in the process of condensing an article, I might erase your work because I'm folding it in with another part of the article that made the same point more clearly, or more verifiably.

Also, especially on technology articles, citations are incredibly difficult to find. Much of the content I end up leaving when I do rewrites is still unsourced until I have a chance to do a citation pass - wikipedia might prefer that I remove everything that's unsourced, but that leaves very little left to work with, so I leave it when I think it makes sense. However, I do remove content that is both unsourced and historically biased.

For instance, an unsourced assertion about a minor implementation detail of a sound card is not impactful enough to remove immediately - hopefully it can be sourced later - but an unsourced assertion that a sound card was a commercial failure has a greater direct impact on a readers understanding of the subject, and unfortunately I find myself removing a lot of assertions like that.