|
| This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than
ten years. |
History
I started editing Wikipedia around 2006, but for years my contributions remained infrequent and generally minor. In 2010 I started making more substantial contributions and in 2011 I finally got around to registering as an autoconfirmed user. At about 21,000 live edits since then, I'm still not exactly a heavy hitter in terms of volume, but I consider myself a Wikipedian through-and-through and take great pride in the accomplishments of this community -- not just in terms of our content, but also with regard to the way of getting things done (and getting on with each-other) that we've developed. I try to make myself broadly useful in a variety of areas of contribution and feel I have a thorough understanding of how this little project of ours operates.
Activity
I contribute largely in the areas of...
Science
|
Life sciences
|
Mostly in topics relating to
ecology,
evolution,
natural history,
taxonomy/
phylogeny,
sociobiology,
physiology (the physiology of the
sensory systems especially),
neuroscience,
medicine,
botany, and
zoology/
ethology.
|
Cognitive sciences
|
With particular interest in
evolutionary psychology,
environmental psychology,
biopsychology,
cognitive psychology,
social psychology,
perception/
sensation,
memory,
emotion,
nativism,
semiotics, and the
computational and
modular models of the mind.
|
Linguistics
|
Particularly
historical/
comparative linguistics,
syntax,
semantics,
cognitive linguistics,
neurolinguistics,
universal grammar, and
translation.
|
Physical sciences
|
A small part of my contributions and mostly limited to
astronomy and
cosmology, but with occasional minor contributions to various subfields of
physics and
chemistry.
|
Philosophy
|
With a focus on
ontology,
naturalism,
determinism,
logic, and
epistemology.
|
Humanities
|
History
|
...in which my contributions are all over the place, reflecting my general love of the subject in regard to every era, people, and locality it can be applied to. These interests parlay with interest and work in related fields of
pre-history,
current events, and
geography.
|
The arts
|
Narrative arts:
literature,
film,
television, and
theatre.
|
Performing arts:
music and
dance (and many other forms of human movement).
|
Visual arts: both traditional and digital approaches to
painting,
drawing, and
sculpture, amongst other mediums.
|
Games: from ancient to modern.
|
Ideological and
social topics
|
...in many areas, but particularly with regard to those intersecting with
humanism,
human rights,
women's rights,
non-violence, and some light edits to other areas of
politics where they connect with above topics.
|
Discussion and Community
|
I also contribute widely through a variety of process pages:
- I spend a good deal of time on
RfC discussions and in article talk space generally.
- I try to make time now and again for various of the other routine work concerning
pending changes reviews,
new page reviews,
AfD,
AfC,
requested translations,
requested articles,
GA nominations, community and policy discussion areas,
ANI and other noticeboards, and even
SPI, when necessary.
- I also frequently contribute guidance at the
reference desks and often find it one of the more rewarding experiences on Wikipedia, especially when I can marry it to general editing of an article brought to mind in the discussion.
- I'm a member of
a handful of Wikiprojects relating to some of the topics I contribute to in mainspace.
- I venture on rare occasion to
the Wikipedias of other languages to translate/transwiki the occasional article.
- I hit up our sister projects on occasion, particularly
Meta,
Commons and
Wiktionary.
- I do some ever-so-slightly more technical work with templates and complex tables wherever I find something that could use the attention, either while pursuing the above or encountering the issue through community forums.
|
Looking Forward
Presuming I can wrangle some of those pesky and numerous other life obligations, I'm hoping to broaden my contributions into some significant new areas.
- I've already begun to engage in the daunting process of reviving some flagging WikiProjects which I think are far too underdeveloped for the importance of their subject matter. This is part of a broader interest in editor retention efforts. I'm going to be requesting mass-mailer privileges for this purpose very soon.
- I hope to start contributing some free license photographic content to the project in the near future.
- I've got a truly monstrous back-log of content contributions that I've committed myself to seeing through first, but I may well eventually see about whether the community would judge me to be a good candidate for a mop.
If any of the above areas are of interest to you and you have an uphill task within them, or really any subject or process, do not hesitate to drop me a line; collaboration is more than half the fun. :)
|
|