Who I am: short version
It gets kind of boring to write about myself, so I'll let Kristen Peterson speak for me:
“ | That administrator has edited dozens of Wikipedia posts on video games. Other edits include articles on sports, history, politicians, cameras, movies, and random topics: the Golden Raspberry Award, General Motors, United Kingdom Bank rescue package, Sylvia Plath, Las Vegas hotels and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Hbdragon88 edits almost daily - swapping a photo, changing tone, shortening entries and general copy editing, making sure somebody was "hanged" and not "hung." Hbdragon88’s page tells us that he or she hates "sunshine, kittens, puppies, lava lamps (apparently), happiness, free speech, lists of Jews, your articles, opposition to the Cabal, dissent, oranges, Wikipedia." |
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— Kristen Peterson, Las Vegas Sun
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- Swapping photo: Generally I remove photographs that are used under fair use. I rarely swap them.
- Changing tone: Yes. A lot of stuff I read sounds like it was ripped off a press release. Sometimes it is an actual copyright violation and I have to rewrite it.
- Shortening entries: I've been told that long plot summaries can be copyright violations, so I choose to exclude details and try to make a point. Because it's a summary, not a blow-by-blow account.
- Copy editing: Yes. I remove test edits, weird bolding, anything that doesn't look right when I read an article.
- Hanged vs. hung. Funny that should be mentioned (that was on the John Proctor article). A more humorous one would have been to make sure that Roman Rybarski had been "shot" and not "shooted" [1]
- Video games: Yes. Flash Focus was my first and only DYK. I successfully raised Duke Nukem Forever and Super Princess Peach into GA status until rising standards demoted them.
- Sports: Don't remember this at all.
- Politicians: Sometimes. I recently removed the promo tone from Debbie Cook and had to watchlist Sue W. Kelly when someone was adding promo stuff to it.
- Cameras: Yes. Recent work includes merging 20Da into 20D, removing a lot of badly-sourced AF stuff from 1D Mark III, merging various models of the 300mm and 100-300mm lenses together, and verifying information.
- Golden Raspberry Award: I ask for fact tags, people provide IMDB as sources. Nice try. Article also had a problem with people using scare quotes and biased language. We know the Razzie isn't a good award. We don't need to say that stars have accepted the "honor"
- General Motors: Article might have been front page material, or at least recent news, and had problems with consistent date formatting
- 2008 United Kingdom bank rescue package: Front page material. If I recall correctly there was redundancy. November 2008 Mumbai attacks would be a better example of engaging in up-to-the-date fact checking.
- Sylvia Plath: Old one (2006). Facts on her journals weren't up to date, so I updated it with the copy of the book I had checked out from the library
- Las Vegas hotels: Hmm. Most lasting contribution would be to fix the {{Infobox hotel}} box, and add a logo parameter.
- Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority: Became interested in it due to riding the rail network around LA. I had a minor edit war on this article.
My user page: That was a joke. Lava lamps was one time blanked and protected by WP:OFFICE and there was an ongoing controversy about lists of Jews. Funny how that ended up in the Sun.
Philosophy
I'm the kind of editor who will raise an article from stub or start class to B-class, but will leave GA or FA in the hands of other people. I've ascribed this to many reasons, including the fact that I pick weird and obscure topics that simply don't have the information to become comprehensive enough for Wikipedia's steadily rising standards. Because I do not feel I can write such articles, I do not feel qualified to vote on the FA process or pass GA nominations. This is why I simply reject GA nominations, open FA reviews, and comment on them, but do not vote on them.
The counter on the top of the page says I've been here for over 43 months, or three years, seven months. In that span, my interests have wildly flucated, the trends moving around far too much for me to notice. Even sticking to my intersts I've edited tokusatsu, anime, digital cameras, video games, films, and god knows how many articles other articels that I just randomly edited because I wanted to see what Wikipedia had to say about it (like A Chorus Line). As such, I no longer keep an updated list of contributions, but you can see User:hbdragon88/contrib back when I thought it was cool to track them down and my mainspace contributions.
We're here because we make the Internet not suck. I realize that sounds clichéd and I generally don't like what Jimmy Wales says, but trying to find other sources resulted in stuff of an even lower quality than Wikipedia purportedly produces. The best I found for A Chorus Line was a couple of small fan sites that had mostly been abandoned and were not informative in the least. They were ugly. They did not cite sources and were even more untrustworthy than Wikipedia was – at least anyone can edit here, and if there's a reference at the end of it, you can probably check it 90% of the time. For the rest, trust that the sources I find in academic databases are correct, or buy a subscription and check it yourself.
Userboxes
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