User:PeterIto

I am a transport information professional based in Suffolk in the UK. I have interests in transport policy, the role of campaigning and protest historically and at this time. I am also intested in transport futures and the roles that will be played by scheduled transport, cycling, shared taxis and car clubs in the information age. I am an active member of Openstreetmap, a project to develop an open-source map base for the world. The opinions I express are mine personally and not necessarily those of my employer.

General transport articles

I have given Car-free_movement a major overhaul, partically restructure and ordered Public Transport and removed blatant pro-car POVs but this article is still desperately in need of TLC and references. I did a minor restructure of Share taxi to create a framework to discuss new technology based share taxi systems.

I am creating a common framework for holding information for current and planned 'improvements' to UK trunk roads and motorways and have worked on articles for the M1 motorway, M6 motorway, M74 motorway, M80 motorway, A1 road, A14 road and a number of other significant road schemes including the Longdendale Bypass and will give the M6 Toll a tidy up. I have tidied up the history sections of the A1 and A14.

Road and Aviation Protests and Campaigning

I contribute to UK related articles about transport related activism and protests. I created articles for Flying Matters, Road protest (UK), Rebecca Lush, AirportWatch and 2M Group (this one is still on my user pages). I have restructured the Camp for Climate Action, spring cleaned Campaign for Better Transport (UK), helped build Plane Stupid, added detail to Twyford Down and added an opposition section to Heathrow Airport. I also keep at eye on Association of British Drivers which had some naughty misleading links and lacked a controversies section.

I will be adding additional articles for some other significant UK aviation protest and campaign groups including HACAN Clearskies. There are no doubt others in the road protests domain that I haven't looked at yet and many of them, for example Reclaim the Streets potentially needs 100's of references for the individual actions. Most airports need a controvery section on expansion and an Aviation protest (UK) article may be useful.

Cycling

I have contributed to articles on both national cycle routes and regional cycle routes that form part of the UK National Cycle Network. I reworked the majority of the existing articles into a consistent structure which hasn't been challenged and have contributed detail to National Cycle Route 1, National Cycle route 51 and originated Regional Cycle route 41, Regional Cycle route 42 and North Sea Cycle Route.

Openstreetmap

I am an active contributor to OpenStreetMap and helping to map my home town of Ipswich and am now developing links between OSM and wikipedia using the 'wikipedia' tag within OSM and by putting CC-BY-SA OSM maps into articles in wikipedia where appropriate, such as in the Rushmere Common article.

Other

I have created local articles for Bawdsey Manor, Rushmere Common and Local Ferries in Suffolk. I have also worked on random other articles where I can contribute, sorting out vandalism on Creature Comforts, doing an audit of List_of_Google_acquisitions improving and correcting many of the references. Also working on Geoffrey Vickers, Chesham Bois, Chenies and John Cheyne (Master of the Horse). I was alarmed while working on the last three, which were all pretty contradictory, of the extent to which wikipedia itself has become 'the truth' as it spreads around the web. Few of the claims in these articles were referenced and it was quite hard to find sources that weren't actually reflections of the wikipedia itself. This is clearly a huge challenge for Wikipedia in the future and a reason to insist on quality references.

Impressions as a new wikipedian

I started ending very minor articles without getting bothered much. I then created some new minor article before starting on Share taxi and Public Transport. Public Transport was in a real mess and I did some major surgery on it without being challenged. I then started working on article on aviation campaigning and how things changed. Flying Matters, which I started and which was certainly in a very message state was marked for deletion and took a lot of work to save it. It was much better at the end of it mind you. I then I then noticed that other articles I had written had just disappeared. I spent time resurrecting them, morphing some in the process, including Local Ferries in Suffolk which started out as a number of smaller articles. user:Uncle G was a huge help as a mentor(thank you Uncle) and then User:Factotem made contact over aviation policy which is great. User_talk:Flying1 has kept trying to water down the Flying Matters article, but I have a pretty good idea who that person is and it is par for the course. I am still trying to get the 2M Group back from the dead. My overall message is please communicate with the originator of an article that seems to be well-meaning but which is weak before putting it on trial and executing it! Please put a message on the originators talk page if an article is marked for deletion and again if it is deleted. If I wasn't a pretty suborn sort of person I would have gone off to find something more productive to to. Oh yes, and just when things seemed to be going ok the AirportWatch article got torn to shreds in a way that seemed to others as well as to me to be unreasonable. Hey ho, onwards and upwards. plenty more still to be done. Thanks for all the stimulation, I love it.