User:Ronald W Wise

I'm a fifty-something user of Wikipedia who began contributing in June 2006.

Currently a resident of the Highland Park neighborhood, I've lived in Seattle, Washington, most of my adult life since starting classes at the University of Washington in 1973, after being born and raised in Port Townsend, Washington. Since 1993 I've been employed by a company that creates and manages digital brand assets for other companies. Our company is currently located in the Kennydale neighborhood of Renton, Washington.

For the past two or three decades I've been a voracious reader and a loyal listener to National Public Radio. Though I could remember the overall concepts to which I was exposed, I was often frustrated with my inability to remember the detailed facts that supported those concepts. In the mid-1990s my introduction to the Web and HTML got me started on the foolish venture of creating my own hypertext encyclopedia. After hundreds of hours and thousands of empty stub articles, I finally came to my senses and wrote that effort off as at least being a good lesson in HTML hypertext linking and Web research.

In June 2006 it suddenly occurred to me that Wikipedia was a public version of what I was trying to create on my own back in the 1990s. It's much easier with millions of collaborators!