User:Kayaker

Wikipedia does not yet have a User page called Kayaker. And now it does, 2½ 4½ 6 years (and counting) after I first contributed to Wikipedia in May 2003, when there were about 120,173 articles instead of the 6,938,342 articles we have now.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 21 years, 8 months and 7 days.

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.

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

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, 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).