User:Dylansan

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Dylansan is a Wikipedia user from Massachusetts, who is interested in contributing to Wikipedia projects and articles to improve their quality and consistency, making them more accessible as a means of self-education. He studied Physics at Boston University, and is currently a software developer in Health Informatics. In 2018 he was diagnosed with ADHD, which he has treated with a combination of medication, ADHD-related books, and an obsession with organization and task management.

He will no longer refer to himself in the third-person, starting now.

Wikipedia
My interest in contributing to Wikipedia began when I came across an obvious typo in Sinking of the RMS Titanic, but was unable to edit the page as it was semi-protected. I would have to make more edits elsewhere to gain access to correct it.

At that time I had also been looking for resources for studying world history which were both high-quality and complete, at least in the sense of covering the whole range consistently. The History portal drew me in, but the inconsistency of article quality and structure drove me nuts. Broad information is easy to come by, but when the major components of an era or an event or a civilization are summarized in an article, some have a decent amount of depth, while others are lacking. Since I will have to flesh-out these areas for my own study anyway, I figured it might be nice to inject that balance back into the source, in the hopes that future readers will have a more consistent resource, whatever their use may be.

Study
Since graduating, I have felt that I didn't put enough effort into my education. I find myself wishing I knew more about many subjects, several of which are strong areas of knowledge for some friends and peers. Over time I have begun to pursue more and more of these topics, which has been more satisfying than I expected.

Geography
By using Gringer's script for map generation, I created flash cards in Anki to study geography, including the location of countries, and of the major cities within them. In the process I gained some unexpected experience with using GIS software, editing vector files, and using perl scripts.

Japanese
As a result of my inconsistent study habits during my Japanese classes in college (which I blame myself less for after my ADHD diagnosis), I found I had to start from scratch in order to continue learning the language. It's still an area I struggle with, as creating effective flash cards for language learning is no simple task, and every resource has its own lists of vocabulary and grammar and its own priority in which to learn them, and none are complete. A consistent collection of knowledge is hard to form without feeling like something is missing.