User:Astrophobe

In 2020, and to a lesser extent in 2021, I spent many hours every day editing Wikipedia. In 2022, however, I made several major life changes that have reduced my activity on Wikipedia down to about one light edit per day. I still try to visit the website every day as a reader, and to check for pings and skim changes to my watchlist, so I am very reachable on here. However, I probably won't notice much unless it's specifically brought to my attention. I really hope that in the medium term I will strike a balance that leaves me time to regularly commit larger edits, since I miss writing and overhauling pages. I'm proud that at one time I was one of the most prolific writers of high-quality biographies on Wikipedia, and I would like very much to return to that pace. So, as both an archive and a piece of self-motivation, I have constructed below a record of the things I did back when I had more time, as well as some hopeful plans for a more flexible future. Oh, and sorry to anyone who tries to look at this page on a smartphone (or other small screen). I know that this page's layout is broken for smaller screens, and one of my plans is to fix that. - Astrophobe  (talk) 13:39, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Mainspace
I try to track pages I wrote that have been rated class so that I can easily see which pages might be good candidates to try to improve to GA.

Some other things I've done

 * I enjoy manually doing gnome work to correct simple MoS violations, especially MOS:CITEPUNCT and MOS:CURLY. It's pretty satisfying to make Wikipedia marginally more readable and standardized.
 * I did substantial fact-checking on the List of the first LGBT holders of political offices and the biographies it links to throughout summer 2018. I spent a huge amount of time in summer 2018 removing LGBT tags and categories from the pages of elected representatives when I could find absolutely no evidence that they are LGBT. That could have serious repercussions for people. Before you publicly declare that somebody is LGBT, please triple check your sources!

Goals
Inspired by a note on user:Clovermoss, I'd like to add two references (in the spirit of having multiple reliable sources, even if I can't find ones that are independent) to each page in Category:All unreferenced BLPs.

I'd also like to eventually overhaul the following fundamental/important pages with extremely high page views that are (at best) unpolished:
 * Social science
 * Politics
 * Political science
 * First-past-the-post voting
 * Election
 * Proportional representation
 * Street dance
 * Election audit
 * Many of the political science-related vital articles
 * More BLPs to write: Colevia Carter,

Some weird ideas
I think I've earned the right, as one of Wikipedia's most prolific writers of biographies, to state an extremely heterodox but sincerely held opinion about them. I think it is a demeaning and pointless practice for wikiprojects to rate the "importance" of pages about human beings. When I sit down to write a page about a person from scratch, I climb inside that person's life for a few hours, learn all about what they did and why it matters, and try to explain their notability in an enduring way that will help make sure that information about that person and their contributions will be freely available in perpetuity. I do that because I think it matters that notable (and, frankly, all) people are remembered, and that the basic facts of their lives are not hidden behind paywalls but are equally available to everyone. How do you think it feels to log in the next morning and see that the page has been rated as "importance=low"? Probably not half as bad as it feels for that person or the people who care about them, if they happen to come across the talk page banners. If you rate the importance of humans for a wikiproject I really think you should ask yourself how you make those judgments, why that's a judgment worth making, and whether it's worth your time as a volunteer.

Other accounts

 * From 11 January 2009 to 2 January 2015 I edited (very occasionally) as User:Darth Wombat. The best thing I did on that account was a bit of very early work on Gliese 581g. I also registered an account under my real name (for reasons related to WP:DOPP, and obeying the restrictions of that policy). I also did many years of copy editing as an IP because I didn't really care whether or not I was logged in.
 * I have done tiny incremental bits of either basic maintenance work or BLP corrections under the same username at The French Wikipedia, The Portuguese Wikipedia, The Spanish Wikipedia, The Polish Wikipedia, The Javanese Wikipedia, and of course lots of cross-language connections at WikiData.

Magnificent awards/snacks/pets