User:Benbest



About Me
My interests are biogerontology, cryonics, history, economics, and health (among many others). For nine years I was the President of the Cryonics Institute, but I now work for the Biomedical Research and Longevity Society.

I use my real name Ben Best for User:Benbest. I have created User:Ben Best as a doppelganger account to prevent someone else from taking it. If I had known better I would have started with User:Ben Best from the beginning. These names are NOT being used for sockpuppetry or any other nefarious purpose. I have a biography at Ben Best (Deleted 9 February 2020), which due to my prominence in the cryonics community I feel I was justified in starting. I have not edited the Ben Best entry since June 2006, so as a result of many edits by others it is not in the form I would like it to be. I think there is value in my being able to provide information about myself that others do not have access to, but because other Wikipedians have strong feelings about Wikipedians editing biographies about themselves I have adopted a "hands off" policy toward editing the Ben Best entry myself.

Comment about my Wikipedia experience
I admit that when I first got involved in Wikipedia that there was much self-promotion associated with my contributions. This has diminished considerably -- or perhaps I have done as much self-promotion as I want to do -- and I am increasingly interested in building this wonderful on-line encyclopedia. I believe that Wikipedia will become the greatest encyclopedia ever created and will leave all others in the dust. It is a terrific resource and I love the way everyone can become involved, warts (vandals) and all. I still have selfish motives, but it is usually the selfish satisfaction I get from having done a good job and feeling that I have made a worthwhile contribution to Wikipedia. I get satisfaction from improvements large and small: major re-writes, reverting acts of vandalism and spelling corrections. I have learned to lengthen my fuse when changes are made which anger me, and I think I am becoming better at negotiating with goodwill and avoiding &quot;revert wars&quot;. Nonetheless, I still have not figured-out how one becomes a Wikipedian involved in The Wikipedia Community.

I have a few contributions in Wiktionary, but I feel that this resource has a long way to go. I think it is harder for people to get motivated to create entries for Wiktionary, which is sad. But who has a special interest in words like "increase" and "embark"? I have created a number of new word entries in Wiktionary, but it is a massive undertaking to make that resource comparable to what we have with Wikipedia.