Welcome
For some reason or another you want to know more about me. Well, the userboxes on the right tell you some of my interests. The rest of this page just talks about what I do at Wikipedia and why and collects various thoughts I have about the project. I like helping other editors, especially beginners, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Why do I edit Wikipedia?
Because I love it! Wikipedia has become an indispensable resource for modern life. Not only does Wikipedia serve to settle bar bets, provide ordinary people with a wide range of health and legal information, and help us learn about our favorite books and movies, it has become a major driving force behind forefront research. Scientists and academics from all over the world consult it everyday and it helps them solve problems and make connections they otherwise might not make. Besides that, Wikipedia helps educate and inform people ranging from schoolchildren to curious adults or people living in countries where access to free information cannot be taken for granted. In other words, Wikipedia is helping make the world better! Who doesn't want to help make the world better? It feels great to know I contributed to something that will hopefully exist forever as a literary monument of what we can achieve together.
My editing style
My editing style changes with time and goes through phases that can last for months or even years.
Generally speaking, I am a wiki-gnome who prefers to make small corrections to articles. I occasionally combat vandalism or might start a new article. I love correcting mistakes in references, because they are otherwise difficult to detect, and I frequently consult WorldCat and Google Book Search to confirm my edits. I also do a lot of copyediting.
I am an administrator but administrative tasks are only a minor part of my editing. When there's a clear need for administrative action, I'm glad the community has entrusted me to do things I would otherwise have to ask others to do. It's much more efficient this way. Editors like me sometimes have trouble getting through RfA over "no need" opposes. I see the concern there and I wish there was a better way to identify users who should be given admin status even if they'd only rarely use admin actions. For long term editors with a solid history, I think Jimbo's administratorship is "no big deal" idea should reign over "no need" arguments.
The gnome in me
I largely fix things that many other editors ignore. I fix spelling and grammar. I copy-edit pages to fix references, section structure, formating and so forth. Sometimes I will just click the "random" page until I find some page that has obvious problems which I then fix. I once scrubbed the encyclopedia categories contaminated by user pages. This turned out to be a lot more interesting than it might sound, as it discovers some really shady user accounts and some very friendly new users who just need some help learning the ropes.
Whenever I edit a page, I usually spell-check the entire article while I am there. I use the native spell-checker of Firefox with American, British, Australian, and Canadian dictionaries. Multiple dictionaries are very valuable to an editor and I strongly encourage you to install them (but note that they aren't gospel when it comes to defining the dialect, so use caution). I always try to verify that a misspelling isn't a sic (e.g., in quotes) and include a sic notice if it is.
I like to change curly apostrophes and quotes (’ “ ”) to straight ones (' " "). The curly ones aren't forbidden but the straight ones are recommended. See MOS:QUOTEMARKS.
At one time or another, I have nearly or completely purged Wikipedia of the following spelling errors:
currrent,
Mississipi,
improvment/improvments,
athelets,
Detriot,
Philidelphia,
Anerica,
Willliam,
entertianment,
oponent,
sweetner/sweetners,
acoording,
guarenteed,
repsond,
quikc,
wresting (for "wrestling"),
relaese,
esential,
referece/refereces,
graudate/graudates/graudated/graudating/graudation,
privledge/privledges/privledged,
and many, many more. Many errors have since returned. Oh well, I'll return to them some other day.
An arch-nemesis of mine is the use of "it's" as a possessive. This isn't a job a bot can do because you must read the context to know whether to make a change. I've fixed many instances of this and there are probably tens of thousands more corrections to make, so you could help out. The rule is simple: "it's" always means "it is" or "it has" and never indicates possession.
I pride myself on the idea that just about all these types of contributions go straight towards making Wikipedia better. If two editors rewrite a biography article, it is a matter of taste which version is better, but if I fix all the spelling mistakes they left and bad URLs in their references, it is unquestionably an improvement.
Important topics
In terms of topics, I have a few that grab me.
I focus a lot of my effort on articles for vulnerable, threatened, endangered, and recently extinct animals. This includes my wikignome-like editing as well as adding and improving references. It's not a lot but helping spread good information via quality articles may help in their conservation.
The rest include things like math and computer science articles, dystopia science fiction, a few geography special interests, and so on.
My impact on Wikipedia
As a Gnome, my impact on Wikipedia is often invisible... just slowly improving things by degrees. There have however been some aspects of my editing that have contributed to the site as a whole.
- Was perhaps the most active member of the Typo Team for a number of years.
- I was one of the first editors to start adding descriptions to categories that define what the categories should contain, a practice that is now widespread.
- I helped craft the wording and formatting of some of the editing and legal templates used sitewide, for example the edit summary prompt and the licensing notice as well as the licensing and trademark text at the bottom of every page.
- I helped craft the modern wording of many of our inline citation templates.
- Many of our redirect categories (rcats) have been improved by me.
- I helped refine the wording of the key phrase in our BLP policy that states "Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately" from the more ambiguous and confusing "Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material should be removed immediately".
- I participated in discussions which lead to the removal of the ((Persondata)). That was clearly a good move.
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I was right. After a lot of discussion. The community eventually pressured the WMF to change the tool to "opt-in" and were successful.
