User:Michael D. Turnbull

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This user is a citizen of the United Kingdom.

This user is a chemist.

This user is a Valencian.

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This user is a mentor to new editors.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 14 years and 11 days.

This is the user page for Michael (Mike) D. Turnbull, created on 26 April 2018. My first contribution was a major re-write and expansion of the biography of Ralph Raphael, followed by additions on other pages to cross-reference him. I have done the same for Alan Battersby. I work to improve articles on ICI; pesticides invented at Jealott's Hill, for example 2,4-D, MCPA, diquat, cyhalothrin, paclobutrazol, tefluthrin, fluazifop and azoxystrobin; plus others in Syngenta's product range such as butafenacil, mesotrione, pydiflumetofen and acibenzolar. I also write about biosynthetic routes, for example vitamin B₁₂ and chlorophyll, adding oddments related to chemistry in general.

Chemistry is the study of the behaviour of the chemical elements and there is a simple template here which gives their names on hover-over and allows readers to jump to the relevant pages in the encyclopaedia by clicking on the cell of interest. My professional focus is organic chemistry and during my career I have made many novel compounds containing the marked elements.

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I prefer to edit existing articles rather than create new ones. At present there are 6,946,227 articles on the English WIkipedia and my opinion is that this is too many. For every new article it might be best to delete a less worthwhile one, so new editors should consider using WP:AfD before WP:AfC.

In October 2020 I assisted Ed Gold by uploading some of his remarkable photos to Wikimedia Commons with {{CC BY-SA 4.0}} licenses, which means not only that they can be incorporated in articles here but also that they may be freely downloaded for any purpose whatever, provided that Ed Gold and/or Wikipedia is acknowledged if they are subsequently published. Note, however that many are portraits of living people and these persons are protected by {{Personality rights}}, which means that they must be contacted before the image can be used for a commercial venture. This is not a hurdle for re-use within Wikipedia articles or for personal non-commercial use.

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This user is a native speaker of the English language.

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Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau élémentaire de français.

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Useful links

Wikipedia Chemical Structure Explorer allows search of Wikipedia chemistry by substructure.
Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) to check if a webpage has been archived or to archive one.
Wikipedia custom Google search engine: put the search term in the box.
User:Headbomb/unreliable for documentation on unreliable sources script.
WP:Citation expander gadget as a timesaver in creating accurate citations, especially for scientific references with a digital object identifier.
Alternative to citation expander is citer.toolforge which can take a wider range of inputs.
This link gives fascinating statistics about the global use of Wikipedia.
.... and this link gives visualisations regarding all sorts of Wikipedia-related material.
WP:Records is a page with current records of all sorts relating to the encyclopaedia.
To find contributions that appear missing for an editor using an IPv6 address: add /64 to the end of the URL. For example Special:Contributions/2601:5C0:C380:4980:BD25:9843:27D3:B53C/64

Using search-and-replace with regex search

The source editor has an "advanced" menu bar with a search-and-replace function (icon on right). This is very powerful but must be used with care! An interesting example is to use a RegEx search to convert external links incorrectly placed in the body text into proper citations:

1) Search for expression= \[https?(.*?)\] (this matches both http and https prefixes)

2) Replace with <ref>https$1</ref> (tick box "Treat search string as a regular expression")

3) Preview to check whether any legitimate external links have been converted to refs and manually put them back. Save/publish changes.

Finally, use the WP:ReFill tool at this link to convert the bare URLs into {{cite web}} templates.

The never-ending tasks

Removing imdb links that look like wikilinks

See WT:WikiProject Film/Archive 79#Masking imdb links as wikilinks for the background. These searches should give no hits but usually will have some that can usefully be cleaned up.

Removing links to guidechem.com

This insource search should have no hits and if it does the edit that introduced them should be reverted.

WikiProject cleanup listing

External link to WikiProject Cleanup Listings.