This Wikipedian is deceased. His user page is preserved here in his memory.
|
It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that.
![]() | This user has been vaccinated against COVID-19. |
![]() |
![]() | This user is one of the 1000 most active English Wikipedians of all time. |
![]() | This user contributes to Wikipedia Asian Month. |
Yes, I took the picture on the right. Yes, I change it frequently very occasionally. Yes, they're all used on Wikimedia Commons. Come back often for a new, marginally-in-focus picture! Collect them all!
I'm a Westerner living in the Tokyo area, about 170 miles (270 km) south of Fukushima. I've never been this close to a potential nuclear catastrophe, and I can't really say that I've enjoyed the experience.
I first became aware of Wikipedia when I began using it to look up some technical terms, since I was an English-literature major screwing around with computers, not vice versa. Being of a copy-editor bent, I noticed typos, misspellings, and generally screwy language occasionally, and after a while I realized that I could in fact edit them myself. So I did. Soon, I was hitting the random page button, just for my own amusement, and I got sucked in.
Now, this has turned into a relaxing break from my required copy editing: I get to exercise my pedantic tendencies, without the responsibility of deadlines or deliverables. I've occasionally gotten a little deeper into things, and have written a few articles from scratch.
This whole project is infectious: hitting the random page button, I encounter whole swatches of text and knowledge areas requiring work, and I suddenly feel compelled to try to do something about it, even if I didn't have any particular interest in the subject to begin with. For example, I did a massive edit (for style, organization, and a general readability) for the submarine USS Trout (SS-202). I have no particular interest in the military, especially not the Navy, yet I found myself sucked into doing this. Same with entries on community colleges and Booker Prize winners.
It's kind of like my current project -- if you can call it that -- of eliminating spam and MySpace-like vanity pages disguised as editor pages. This started out as a simple task which I figured to complete fairly quickly, but the more I dig the more I find. A few years back, over a six-month-or-so period, I figure that I tagged maybe 1,500 so-called user pages for oblivion, of whom maybe 3 have since done any editing whatsoever. And I keep finding more to this day, not to mention the brand-new ones cropping up daily, including obvious vanity articles that have been userfied by other editors who ought to know better.
So far I have added a few articles and stubs (and yes, I plan to expand the stubs if I can), but mostly it's janitorial work. As I told one troller, It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that.