User:Kayaker

Wikipedia does not yet have a User page called Kayaker. And now it does, 2½ 4½ 6 9¼ years (and counting) after I first contributed to Wikipedia in May 2003, when there were about 120,173 articles instead of the 6,908,523 articles we have now.

Kayaker

This user has been on Wikipedia for 21 years, 6 months and 6 days.

This user supports the right of anonymous users to edit Wikipedia.

I rarely log in, except to attempt to contribute images, reply to some issue about an image I contributed (if I notice the problem in time), or rename pages. Editing without logging in promotes close reading of my contributions, which almost always improves them. As a side effect of not logging in I realize I miss out on the good and the bad of being a cenobitic Wikipedian.

Pet projects include

• introducing Wikipedia:Footnotes into articles, and reformating existing references using those conventions
• reducing the mergist's enthusiasm for certain kinds of redirects
  • those that don't take into account the context within which a related term is used
  • those that redirect somewhat specific terms to generic 50K articles (e.g. feature film no longer redirects to film)
• finding homes for parenthetical remarks
• shortening run-on sentences
• incorporating Oxford English Dictionary insights (credited of course; see three-peat and beetle bank for example)
• mining newspaper front pages hosted by Newseum for local headlines (learned about The Adventures of Tintin that way)
• trying to build the web; trying not to provoke those who wikify sparingly
• creating articles on subjects from old books (e.g. list of lumberjack jargon, which was m:Transwikied and is now here)

When bored, I find a random article to clean up; as of 2007 2012, I find reasons to improve about 1 out of 3 random articles.

A few more of my creations:

• Almost Famous, Beyond the Rocks, Blair Brown, Category:Association of American Universities, Category:Buddy films, John Ciardi, Columbarium, Gastropub, Indian Peace Medal, Ingeo™, Maura Tierney, Million Dollar Bridge, Missouri Wall of Fame, National Trails System Act of 1968, Nickel (U.S. coin), Petard, Portal:Current events, Property tax, Silicon Forest, Slaughterhouse-Five (the film), The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, They Go On, U.S. presidential election debates, 2004, Wyatt Earp (card game)
• Shoepeg corn: This was probably one of the most poorly written articles I've ever introduced. The work of others has made it better.
• List of changes in Star Wars re-releases: I started it on September 20, 2004 and have ignored it ever since. As of April 2006 the first two sentences are still mine :-) ...
• Retrospective (album): "Created" as a disambiguation page after moving the Red House Painters albume of that name to Retrospective (Red House Painters album).