User:Barnards.tar.gz

Hello. I am the reincarnation of an editor from the early 2000s Wikipedia. I took a 15 year break from editing to have a career and a family. I didn’t want to revive the old account because it was too personally identifying, so I am born again.

I love Wikipedia and I'm continually astonished at how it persists in providing generally excellent reference material in spite of so many potential pitfalls.

Some goals of mine are:


 * Provide original free-licensed images that will help illustrate articles.
 * Offer sensible responses to RfCs.
 * Do lots of wikignoming.

I also wrote the essay Wikipedia will exist in the far future.

On presence
My real-world commitments sometimes necessitate me taking wikibreaks at short notice. Particular apologies to my mentees if I take a long time to respond to questions.

On mobile editing
I usually do my reading and editing 5-15 minutes at a time, in random moments of downtime, and nearly always on my phone - on which I prefer to use the desktop vector legacy (2010) setting. Yes, it's very fiddly - but quite doable. More on this subject: User:Cullen328/Smartphone_editing.

You know how you see people at the airport or bus stop waiting in a queue scrolling through social media apps? That's me, but with Wikipedia instead of Twitter.

On administrators
What I expect from administrators:


 * Servant leadership.
 * High standards of transparency and ethical behaviour.
 * Skill in defusing drama.

What I don't expect from administrators:


 * Perfection. RfA oppose votes that bring up one dumb thing said years ago are absurd.
 * Participation in drama.

On contentious topics
Wikipedia is important, and some of the most important topics are the contentious ones. This is where Wikipedia's influence is at its strongest, and at its most insidious when NPOV is not respected. I can often be found opposing:


 * Tendentious point-scoring through labelling everything.
 * Picking winners between competing POVs of comparable weight.
 * Opinion leaking into wikivoice.
 * Fish who've spent so long in the water they don't know they're wet.

On self-preservation
“The atheist must have the sense to know that God exists only in the head of true believers, and the wisdom not to say so while in church.”