User:Phoenixrod

I finally registered on Wikipedia in February of 2006. Previously, I had made minor changes to articles; we will see if I undertake more ambitious projects. Feel free to drop me a line (politely, I hope!) on my talk page.

As far as I can tell by the welcome messages, I registered a mere nine minutes before Wikipedia's one millionth user. So close to fame....

I have found that people like to ask about my user name. No, I'm not Harry Potter. And no, I don't live in Arizona. The answer is much more mundane: Back in the '90s, I liked to play a computer game called Heretic, and I rather liked the weapon called the Phoenix Rod. Something about lighting enemies aflame brought out the vicarious pyro in me, I guess.

I tend to prefer making minor changes. Does that make me a WikiGnome? Meh.

I rarely edit these days.

Picture of the day

Dred Scott (c. 1799 – 1858) was an enslaved African American who, along with his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the 1857 legal case Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Scotts claimed that they should be granted freedom because Dred had lived for four years in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal, and laws in those jurisdictions said that slave holders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled against Scott in a landmark decision that held the Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges that the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The Dred Scott decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history, being widely denounced for its overt racism, judicial activism, poor legal reasoning, and crucial role in the events that led to the American Civil War four years later. The ruling was later superseded by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, in 1865, followed by the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed birthright citizenship for "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", in 1868. This posthumous oil-on-canvas portrait of Scott was painted by Louis Schultze, after an 1857 photograph by John H. Fitzgibbon, and now hangs in the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis.Painting credit: Louis Schultze, after John H. Fitzgibbon

For my own use:

Edit count

• My edit count can be found here. On second glance, the information does not seem to get updated. I'm positive I have more edits that that. Anyone know where I can go to find out?

• Aha! Here is a newer tool that does for now. My particular user stats with this counter: [1]

• A faster counter, without the cool graphs is here.

• Another option: Wikichecker.

• To break down Wikipedia page history statistics: [2].

• Wannabe_kate is down. Here's a new one with a similarly cool monthly graph feature: Soxred93's tool. And a new version.

How often is a particular page viewed?

Wikipedia article traffic statistics: http://stats.grok.se/.

Template messages for user talk

These can be found at Wikipedia:Template_messages/User_talk_namespace.

Great lines from Wikipedia

From the article on trousers: "Removing one's trousers in public is, in the main, considered taboo."

Fantastic edit summary: pun indented.

From Serial_comma#Unresolved_ambiguity: "This is ambiguous as it stands, but even if a serial comma were added Mandela could still be mistaken for a demigod."

From Falsifiability#Inductive_categorical_inference: "It is impractical to observe all the swans in the world to verify that they are all white."

Funny edits

Here's an amusing bit of vandalism: [3].

Also: [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] Rickroll Home Taping Hitler Has Only Got One Ball where a catapult takes aim.

Userboxes

Are a waste of time. Mine and yours.

This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Phoenixrod.

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