- Semi-retired for a while, as I'm currently working hard on language learning, which will greatly help me on here in the future in terms of research. Definitely worth the sacrifice!
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Projects founded and move towards quality
I first arrived here in early 2005, although I didn't join formally and become very active until June 2006. I'm the founder of the Actors and Filmmakers project and the Historic Houses project. Fascinated in the Himalayas, Buddhism and the Far East, I started the Tibetan project and also made the Slovenian project an independent one, one of the last European projects to do so. In 2009 I started WikiProject Intertranswiki, a project intended to work towards translating articles from dozens of other language Wikipedias and ensuring that the English version has an article. Given that there's over 40 million unique articles covering all Wikis, it is a project on a massive scale and one which really needs to be pursued long term if we are to fully counteract systematic bias. The idea is to translate a missing or poorly developed article from the best version of it in another language, and where possible re-reference it and fully verify it. Sadly there are not many editors working together on it and it's barely used as a project but it is the project I've created with by far the biggest potential for growth and activity. In August 2015 I started Women in Green, a project intended to focus on improving the quality of existing women biographies, particularly core articles, and getting them to Good Article status. Though in my early days on here I was a prolific stub builder, intent on trying to reduce systematic bias worldwide by identifying missing topics and blue linking them, I gradually came around to believing that as a creator of an article you need to take responsibility in writing it at least to a reasonable standard upon creation. Since the mid 2010s I've been heavily invested in improving the quality of our articles and not placing much emphasis on quantity, even though I believe there are over 1 billion potential articles which could be written. The problem is just that, there's still a staggering amount missing, every article you destub, in expanding it you'll typically create at least three new red links, if not up to a dozen. Often surprising omissions. It is exhausting work trying to fill in the red links and create every one to a reasonable level of quality (often several days hard work needed to blue link them decently from a single article). It can only be done in a short time frame by creating short stubs to blue link them all, which in turns defeats the object of doing the destubbing in the first place to try to reduce the overall stub count! So I tend to leave most links red these days, even though I still feel obligated in a way to start them! Contests and challenges
As I am strongly focused on improving the quality of the average article in the encyclopedia, I've staged contests, with the support of Wikimedia UK, with mechanisms which produce an extraordinary amount of article improvements and creations within just weeks. Awaken the Dragon (April 2016) and The Africa Destubathon (October-November 2016) produced well over 3000 articles combined. In August 2016 I established the The British and Irish 10,000 Challenge and The African 10,000 Challenge, which I've since broadened out to cover most regions globally, functioning under the umbrella 100,000 Challenge. As it's often difficult to get editors to focus as a group on expanding existing articles, in March 2020 I ran The Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon, covering all 134 counties of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland as well as Jersey, Guerney and the Isle of Man in an effort to improve the average quality of articles, and ended with over 1000 articles expanded. Time permitting, I am considering running shorter one-two week contests in the future to target different areas of the UK, Europe and elsewhere, aiming for 200-250 improvements in a week as part of The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge, started in April 2020 which aims for 50,000 expanded stubs by 2030. Featured content
Good article content
Did You Knows?
Did You Knows? - 1666 articles - I've not contributed to this feature much since 2015 but I'm still one of the most prolific contributors to it. We set a World Challenge to cover the whole A-Z of countries and entities, but it was never completed. Nowadays I prefer to just put up articles on my talk page. Awards
I've not received many of these since 2017 but I currently have 296 awards. Useful stuff
Drafts
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