User:Spike-from-NH

I am a technical writer in New Hampshire USA. My greatest enjoyment here is the enjoyment of writing clearly and concisely, especially when this is the greatest good, such as plot summaries of movies. I am less enthused about researching and debating citations.

I joined Wikipedia in 2008, fell away in 2009 after several good jobs were reverted as "original research," and drifted back in 2011. I've participated in the following articles:

• Local sports leagues, such as the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, New England Collegiate Baseball League, and Futures Collegiate Baseball League;
• North American Women's Baseball League, an amateur league for which I was a game-day volunteer;
• Baseball (Statistics), Sudden death (sport), and Walk-off home run, where I contributed an understanding of baseball rules.
• Manchester Millrats, which was a semi-pro basketball team, with occasional forays into articles on its rivals;
• Improvement in the structure of the technical and architectural information on the Digital PDP-11 architecture, Digital PDP-8 computer, VT52 video terminal, and IBM 1130 computer;
• Articles on several solid-state memory devices, such as Secure Digital.
• New Hampshire--the sections on Politics and Transportation; also a reorganization of Government of New Hampshire, extensive work on Politics of New Hampshire, and New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotated. From there, stumbled onto Apportionment (politics), Floterial district, and View tax.
• Figure of speech, Literal and figurative language, and Writing style, the last of which illustrated writing style by breathtaking counterexample.

And most recently:

• A complete rework of Capital gains tax in the United States, substituting polemics with a study of the range of polemics.
• Substantial editing of Milankovitch cycles to make it better organized and more readable.

Wikipedia is a marvelous development environment with a fine markup language and a rich toolbox. It is helped by the consensus that we are writing an encyclopedia rather than a screed or memoir. If I were King, we would take wider advantage of the ability to assemble folklore or information that falls short of the WP notability standard. But I accept the actual ground rules because my way would make it problematic to fight the addition of self-serving or biased information.

I have appreciated other people's contributions regarding rock bands and minor-league sports teams. For such material, Wikipedia uniquely draws on local expertise to which other reference works have no access. But I see the notorious bias in some articles and the widely reported double standard regarding insertion of unflattering information on articles on politicians. Biographies of conservatives are chronological lists of potential scandals; those of liberals are sympathetic catalogs of unpalatable moves he "was forced" to take. Wikipedians have a clear bias that is not negligible, but also strive to document the facts, when they can be discerned objectively.