User:Calton

''It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that.''


 * The above obviously includes the various trolls, spammers, quacks, greedheads, and crackpots -- and their enablers -- who hang out at ED and WR. I also seem to have attracted the unwanted attention of a crackpot spamming "psychologist", an indefinitely banned (for good reason) spammer, a serial plagiarist from Colorado, an egotistical ex-publisher of a freebie magazine in Tokyo, and an indefinitely banned anger-management poster child socking from the Czech Republic (and his reincarnated sock). If you're one of the those various trolls, spammers, quacks, greedheads, crackpots, and/or their enablers, welcome! Now get lost.


 * User:Calton/SpammerList
 * User:Calton/Watchlist - Sockpuppet IP list
 * Some pictures I've taken and which are used on Wikimedia projects. Ansel Adams I'm not, but I might as well be useful.

Yes, I took the picture on the right. Yes, I change it frequently very occasionally. Yes, they're all used on Wikimedia Commons. Come back often for a new, marginally-in-focus picture! Collect them all!

I'm a Westerner living in the Tokyo area, about 170 mi south of Fukushima. I've never been this close to a potential nuclear catastrophe, and I can't really say that I've enjoyed the experience.

I first became aware of Wikipedia when I began using it to look up some technical terms, since I was an English-literature major screwing around with computers, not vice versa. Being of a copy-editor bent, I noticed typos, misspellings, and generally screwy language occasionally, and after a while I realized that I could in fact edit them myself. So I did. Soon, I was hitting the random page button, just for my own amusement, and I got sucked in.

Now, this has turned into a relaxing break from my required copy editing: I get to exercise my pedantic tendencies, without the responsibility of deadlines or deliverables. I've occasionally gotten a little deeper into things, and have written a few articles from scratch.

This whole project is infectious: hitting the random page button, I encounter whole swatches of text and knowledge areas requiring work, and I suddenly feel compelled to try to do something about it, even if I didn't have any particular interest in the subject to begin with. For example, I did a massive edit (for style, organization, and a general readability) for the submarine USS Trout (SS-202). I have no particular interest in the military, especially not the Navy, yet I found myself sucked into doing this. Same with entries on community colleges and Booker Prize winners.

It's kind of like my current project -- if you can call it that -- of eliminating spam and MySpace-like vanity pages disguised as editor pages. This started out as a simple task which I figured to complete fairly quickly, but the more I dig the more I find. A few years back, over a six-month-or-so period, I figure that I tagged maybe 1,500 so-called user pages for oblivion, of whom maybe 3 have since done any editing whatsoever. And I keep finding more to this day, not to mention the brand-new ones cropping up daily, including obvious vanity articles that have been userfied by other editors who ought to know better.

So far I have added a few articles and stubs (and yes, I plan to expand the stubs if I can), but mostly it's janitorial work. As I told one troller, ''It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that.''

User sub-pages
Various subpages I have, listed in one place until I get around to doing something about them:

Drafts/Starts

 * User:Calton/Nara List
 * User:Calton/Kyoto List
 * User:Calton/St. Mary's Square (San Francisco)
 * User:Calton/Noriyuki Haraguchi
 * West Marin
 * User:Calton/Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Natural History
 * User:Calton/Tobacco and Salt Museum

Stubs, now moved

 * User:Calton/Hirakushi Denchū
 * User:Calton/Fumio Asakura
 * User:Calton/Kodaira Hirakushi Denchu Art Museum
 * User:Calton/Asakura Museum of Sculpture

General

 * User:Calton/Pictures
 * User:Calton/Sandbox
 * Testing
 * Articles
 * Editors
 * Wikipedia is not paper
 * Of Exactitude in Science
 * International Travels
 * American States
 * Test table
 * Diners
 * Sam Spade (temp)
 * Impact
 * Table test
 * ISBN Test


 * User:Calton/Testbed

Watchlist

 * User:Calton/Userfied pages
 * User:Calton/Userfied pages to watch
 * Self-promotion watch
 * User:Calton/Watchlist
 * Articles that should probably be AFD'ed
 * Walled garden alert
 * Them what bear watching
 * Jack Sarfatti
 * Cisco's Own Hindu Nationalist