Welcome to SeoR's personal page on Wikipedia.
_rose-coloured-glasses.jpg){kind=small} | This user pledges to return to Old-fashioned Wikipedian values. |
Background comment: This is a pretty broad community whose members perform a range of tasks according to their interests, knowledge and skills, often shifting over time. No more than academia, politics or business, the community is not a perfect mirror of the world's diversity, but almost all regular editors are committed to the sharing of knowledge and the community's standards. Wikipedia is sometimes criticised for lack of coverage of certain topic areas or aspects of life, and over-coverage of others, and I share such frustration at times - but as an encyclopedia, it tends to reflect the world, with its inherent biases, especially when it comes to reliable sources. I'm involved since 2007, and it's still fun (but I did take an extended near-break from 2009 to late 2017, when family circumstances / other aspects of Real Life demanded, and when some internal arguments, notably to do with certain Irish topics, got a bit shouty).
I love what Wikipedia does for the world and its users, and believe in keeping most of what we have, but reinforcing its quality and reference-ability - but I do find it frustrating that we have sportspeople and popular culture figures by the 10s of thousands, especially from 15-20 countries, and also many historical leaders, but still poor coverage of large areas of science and other aspects of academia, and of many business figures and enterprises too (sadly an area where we receive far too much PR / other inappropriate content), and of the almost the entire rich histories of whole countries and cultures, and the >50% of humanity... I also wish more people would donate suitable images, notably photographs of people.
Myself: I focus on Irish matters, especially to do with localities in Dublin and nearby counties, and also including myth and folklore, the Irish language, Irish authors, and further including speculative fiction, some areas of science and industry, and more. I'm on the Web since Gopher was a thing, and have put in a lot of time on previous projects, notably the Open Directory Project. I also joined Wikimedia Commons early on, and hope to do more there, from attic storage and other sources. I joined after I'd been asked for suggestions and material by existing Wikipedians, and having had the "compliment" of having some of my material "borrowed" too. At times, I'm also active in Pending Changes, reviewing proposed alterations to semi-protected articles, and trying to improve submissions which have value but are not quite right.
For what it's worth, I've made around 42.5k edits and >2k logged actions across more than 24k pages, a good portion of that concerned with article improvement and rating (I've rated more than 15k articles for WikiProject Ireland, and had the pleasure of finally reaching "zero to rate" with the help of a couple of colleagues). From 2020, I've also returned to an old interest in creating articles, now more demanding than it was in the 2000s, when it was often enough to have a source or two - we now require much better referencing. My statistics are available to view:
SeoR (talk · contribs · logs · block log · page moves · count · edit summaries · non-automated edits · articles created · BLP edits · AfD votes · XfD votes · admin score (beta) · no prior RfA)
If I can help improve an article, or answer a question, please reach out to me on my Talk page, or send an e-mail (I have a dedicated account for Wikipedia). Like most Wikipedians, I keep my encyclopedia and day-to-day lives separate, so any discussions will be with my identity here, only. If you're new to Wikipedia, welcome, and please do help us do even more :-)