User:Daniel Case



(Born March 10, 1968, in Englewood, New Jersey, USA) Daniel Case lives in the Hudson Valley region of upstate New York with his wife and son. Previously, they lived in the Greater Cleveland area and in Western New York. A 1986 graduate of Newark Academy in Livingston, New Jersey, he received a bachelor's degree in English and geography from Syracuse University in 1990, and a master's degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1997.

While living in the Niagara Frontier region and studying for his master's, he sort of backed into a journalism career with a part-time position as an editorial assistant at Night & Day, the weekly entertainment supplement for the Niagara Gazette, the daily newspaper in Niagara Falls, New York. After moving to the Western Reserve, this led to a position, first as a stringer and then as an actual reporter, in the Beachwood office of the Sun Newspapers chain of suburban weeklies. Upon returning to New York State, he covered the city and town of Newburgh for another weekly, the Mid-Hudson Times.

After having gradually discovered Wikipedia and its possibilities late in 2004, he began editing articles, particularly those devoted to the Catskill Mountains, which he has come to love while hiking extensively and having served on the board of the Catskill Mountain 3500 Club, and which he found to be deeply in need of extension and revision.

In 2007, having resisted that fate for some time, he was successfully nominated for adminship. In that position, he gained enough trust and respect from the community to be among the first users elected to the oversight position in February 2009 (He resigned it 11 years later as the oversight team no longer needs to be as large as it was then, it is being pretty well handled by other people, and he had been focusing more on content for a while anyway).

In 2009 he ran unsuccessfully for Montgomery town clerk on the Democratic and Working Families lines. The following year, he wrote AMC ' s Best Day Hikes Near New York City for the Appalachian Mountain Club.

Best "Only on Wikipedia" quotation, ever ...
As elves are not real creatures, I would like to know why I have been blocked. a user contesting their unblock denial

Milestones

 * | My 5000th edit. First milestone I've really gotten to notice in time to celebrate. Who could have imagined it would have been something so minor as adding the FA star to any article I otherwise had nothing to do with?


 * 6000th edit. Again, relatively minor, but at least connected to a WikiProject:New York State Roads, which I'm more involved in than any other WikiProject I've added my name to.


 * 7000th edit. I thought it would come from the highways project, but it was a little interlude on a train station that did the trick this time.


 * 8000th edit. Took some time to find this due to problems with the tool. A message to another user about an edit he made to a Catskill article.


 * 9,000th edit. Merely adding the template to a talk page comment. How lame!


 * 10,000th edit The biggie: Five figures. This was actually something substantive, the addition of a further reading section (i.e., works I came across while researching the subject that I could not physically or virtually get a hold of, so I'm putting them here so the work doesn't go to waste) to an article about a Supreme Court case.


 * 11,000th edit A talk page message to someone else ... first time I've made note of an editing milestone in the edit itself.


 * 15,000th edit A very minor fix to another of my personal favorites, Action Park.


 * 20,000th edit One of many assessments I did for WikiProject Fashion.

After 30,000, these events become meaningless. But this block notice was apparently my 75,000th edit

One that isn't meaningless is your 100,000th edit. This simple act of putting a picture in an article apparently marked that achievement for me.


 * 150,000: Adding something to a developmental list for 2018.


 * 200,000: Adding a refimprove tag to an article that I, again, have had little otherwise to do with.

Geography
You'll notice that a great deal of the userboxes at right deal with projects connected to geographical locations: rivers, mountains, lakes, protected areas, roads and hiking trails. Hardly surprising, since it was my "other" major in college. And indeed I see a connection between the two. I've always found writing about places to be the most pleasant writing I do, to convey the essence of a somewhere in words.

This has really come alive in writing the route descriptions for road articles. Roads to me tell a story of the country they pass through, and I try to convey that within the limits of encylopedia style. TwinsMetsFan has chosen many of the articles for which I've written route descriptions as NYSR featured articles and singled out the prose as a reason why. I'm flattered, but of course I understand. To see some of my personal favorites in that department, there's not only the US 9 former good article, there's also US 6, NY 52, NY 55 and NY 208 (Notice that it helps that they are also well illustrated).

The Catskills and hiking
Explained above. I created Category:Catskills and created or added in significant part to almost all of them. And there's a lot more to come. Sometime.

Hiking, too, is another area still not covered very well here. This led to creating Category:Hiking equipment and Category:Hiking organizations, taking the photo of hiking boots. I have worked on, and created, a bit in both. I would start a WikiProject:Hiking for this but I really don't have time, and I tend to range all over the place, anyway. (For one thing, a trail construction and maintenance article could be split from trail, and trail blazing (which I expanded and added a lot of images to, could really do with not only a cleanup (it looks like someone dropped their photos all over it) but perhaps a renaming and expansion to include signage as well. Trails is probably the best thing we've got going. Check out the project page, which has been established since I first wrote that there wasn't a project. (I like that it uses a picture I took in the userbox)

Probably we'll have to really get far along on WikiProject:Mountains first, though (and speaking of which, I've done and continue to do most of the work on Slide Mountain, which I hope to take to peer review and FA someday.

I'm very proud of Long Path, a creation of mine that is probably the most thorough of any hiking trail article on Wikipedia.

New York state highways
I've always loved exploring my adopted home state via car. I have seen much of it yet so much more remains. And I've always been fascinated by roads when I would read maps as a child. I liked the shapes they made, and wondered what it was like at particular places I hadn't been to. When I grew up I was able to explore them.

I didn't, however, know that there were others like this, and that there was a word for them until I got to editing Wikipedia. So when I found out about the New York State highways project, I wasted no time signing up. Creating and improving articles about the many roads I was familiar with, and some I wasn't, accounted for much of my editing back in spring 2006. I would bet that of any WikiProject I'm involved with, this would account for the most edits.

A few of the articles for which I have written route descriptions and taken or found photographs have become selected articles of the project, and on May 17, 2007, U.S. Route 9 in New York, an article myself and several other editors had beefed up a couple of months earlier, became the project's first Good Article.

In December 2007, I was asked to rewrite the route description for NY 22, the only north-south route in the state longer than US 9. It, too, has made GA, and I was awarded a barnstar for the rewrite.

While I wasn't looking, User:Mitchazenia developed NY 32, whose route description I had banged out one day at work, and for which I have taken most of the photos, to GA status as well. He went further, and on June 17, 2008, it became the first FA I can legitimately claim part of the credit for. So I did. On July 7, it was on the Main Page, sparking a lively discussion about why some two-lane state road was somehow important enough to be on the Main Page.

Two months later, Mitch got the Route 22 article to FA as well.

New Coke
As I mentioned on the article's talk page, color me sacrilegious but I finally started drinking soda thanks to New Coke. It still seems, in hindsight, like the perfect medium between the tastes of Pepsi and Coke. I would love just one more can of Coke II.

So I looked this one up in summer 2005, and found it a disparate collection of facts. One of the external links tells the whole story of how Coke made its decision (which you can really understand) and I decided to rewrite the article to tell that story.

That storytelling, which has since been, as I knew it would be, edited down, got a lot of praise, which pleasantly surprised me. Its structure is still intact in the final article, even if the narrative twists have been hammered out. The article got linked from the Main Page on the anniversary of Classic Coke's reintroduction, perhaps because of the work I'd done on it in the weeks before, and still seems to draw a lot of interest (which means vandalism, too ... of all the articles I've put my stamp on, it gets the most).

On September 7, 2006, all the work I've put into it was rewarded when it received good article status. I hope eventually to improve it further, take it to peer review and then FA. Even though it was delisted a year and a half later due to my concentrating on other articles, I still have plenty of research I haven't added to it yet, and I think it could easily be brought back to its former glory. When I have the time.

The Devil Wears Prada
In early 2005, a friend of ours shipped us some books she'd finished with and thought we might be interested in. The only one that struck me that way was The Devil Wears Prada, since I have a bit of a soft spot for popular chick lit, gender notwithstanding. I read it in three days and, still a few months new to Wikipedia, decided immediately to write an article about it.

What emerged, and is still there, reflects that era of Wikipedia and my tendencies as an editor at the time. I borrowed the template that I had sort of created for myself when doing The Lovely Bones a couple of months before. Like that one, it's a fascinating and comprehensive look at the book, but with an overly long plot summary and some critical commentary that borders on (and probably is) original research. At that time we weren't clear about how that applied to articles about literary works; today we wouldn't have it. Eventually I'll sit down and bring it in line with the novels project standards.

Later that year the film version was shot; by early 2006 it was clear that there was enough out there about it to warrant a separate article. I created it, added whatever information was available prerelease and then, when the film came out, saw it and wrote pretty much the entire beginnings of the "differences" section later that night. I also added the reviews and, most importantly, references that same night. Later I rented and watched the extras on the DVD. I probably know more about the novel than anyone except Lauren Weisberger and more about the film than anybody except the people who made it. On May 17, 2008, despite not being as complete and finished as I would have liked, it was listed as a Good Article.

That last decision has made it so much easier to upgrade the article into what it is now, my other current favorite for future featured status. It would have been so much harder if I had written it and then gone back in to put in references (as I did with New Coke and some other articles). The new emphasis on references and citations may be a pain for older articles but, with those started under that system, it is much easier to build it up to a good quality.

It also became necessary to create an article on the soundtrack album in the process, and (while I have nothing to really do with it), someone else did an article on the forthcoming TV show. Could a video game be next?

Anna Wintour
In the course of working on it, I also began expanding the article on the inspiration for Miranda Priestly, Vogue editor Anna Wintour. It grew and grew — I found her a fascinating subject. I had no plans to put it up for recognition until after I had finished with the Devil Wears Prada movie article, but in early March 2007 an assessor from the biography project gave it an A-class rating. So I accelerated my plans for it, putting it first in biography peer review. I was ready to nominate it for GA when another user did (just like New Coke ... always flattering when that happens), and on May 13 it was added to the GA list.

A WPBIO reassessment gave it a more legit A-class later. After waiting to see The September Issue on DVD, I made the additions and finally took it to FAC. It was not promoted, but I feel I can address the reasons for the failure and get it to the gold-star level.

Other featured pictures I have taken
All of them, as luck would have it, in London during Wikimania 2014

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