User:Erik the Appreciator

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All About Erik (AAE)
Greetings, greetings. I'm Erik Jensen, a 23-year-old (as of August 7) white male editing from California. Nowadays I rarely do any editing here on Wikipedia, because I'm a sysop at the Golden Sun and Smash Bros. wikia wikis where I spend most of my editing time. And I'm certainly not the type to spend all day making minor edits to a lot of pages. I pretty much reside only on Wiki-style environments on the Internet; aside from the above sites listed and occasional comments from me at a Golden Sun forum, you will not find me anywhere else on the Internet, and I am not reachable by email.

I'm a very non-aggressive person, and also quite lazy and prone to procrastination. On anything that's a Wiki or something like it, I always try to think from the perspectives of the other people making edits, and if there's someone I disagree with, I look for ways to compromise and collaborate. The self-imposed title "Appreciator" refers to my tendency to be very forgiving with what I see and read in stories, as well as how I like to go out of my way to understand what the developers of a show or game have in mind instead of randomly rant or rave about what I see on the surface through a quick glance; I can appreciate pretty much any type of character and plot element, and if there's something in a story or game I don't like, rather than bitch about it I ignore it so I can focus on the other aspects that are better.

The biggest thing I don't like is nonconstructive criticism. Basically, if someone doesn't like something, they would do well to explain how and why, because that feels like a well-supported opinion that can be respected. Straight blanket statements like how something *is* bad, without paying any attention or respect to those that happen to like it, on the other hand: As Sonic Sez, "That's no good." :P People won't like you if you insult their favorite franchise just for the sake of having something to randomly rant at, but I can at least say that I'll respect and ignore your misgivings if you provide an understandable reasoning and show you don't have anything stupidly personal against other people that think differently.

Golden Sun is the one series I ended up deciding to embrace completely because I really loved it back when I played the two games back-to-back in 2004 (at a time when my life also happened to become a lot easier since I was coming out of high school x_x). I definitely like high fantasy and magic and the sorts, and there's certainly huge examples of that in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings which I pay attention to, but what endeared me to Golden Sun is that, at the same time it felt somewhat complete as a setting and mythos, it has so much potential for future expansion and development. Golden Sun DS certainly looks set to realize this. As for the characters, what made me appreciate them for life is that they're not insanely developed and deep; they're probably the only characters I've seen where a lack of development makes them more interesting, because the reader then wants to see them developed and starts imagining ways they could be. I theorize this to be the driving force behind Golden Sun's fan fiction and shipping communities. ^_^

Transmission ending... Erik Jensen (Appreciate me here!)

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Past and Current Activities
In the past, I did a lot of work filling up pages on individual Pokémon species. When a lot of users complained about the overuse of cruft to fill up the pages, like User:A Man In Black, I was one of the main proponents of the merge plan for the species that's being implemented now as 25 descriptive list pages covering 20 Pokémon each. (Too bad they're now cutting out more content than I was hoping: )

Anyways, the articles I've devoted the most time to on Wikipedia are the ones about Nintendo's small-scale but strongly-appreciated Golden Sun series of games. This being my favorite game series, I've done just loads of rewriting and imagework on the following pages:
 * Golden Sun: Took real effort to get this to Good Article status.
 * Golden Sun: The Lost Age: It will take a lot more real effort to give this page similar honors.
 * Characters of Golden Sun: Now it's at its best shape yet, and will need the sourcing implemented.
 * Weyard: The page on the game's fictional world... I've revamped it to match the world article of a Final Fantasy game.

Here are some other pages I made major edits to at some time or another:
 * Advance Wars
 * Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising
 * Advance Wars: Dual Strike
 * Characters of Castlevania: Sorrow series

It seems, however, that nowadays I don't do as much editing on Wikipedia as I used to... Most of my editing time is spent on the Golden Sun wikia and SmashWiki.
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Erik's Miscellany
/Erik's Sandbox: Something I use only occasionally. /Erik's Rationale: I had put some editing philosophies in here a while back.

After being on Wikipedia for two years, I now proudly present...

MY FAVORITE ALLCAPS:
 * Exhibit A: Taken together with this, this gets my preliminary vote for the single greatest two-way interaction in the history of mankind. This came out of a dispute about inserting content into Pokemon pages.
 * Exhibit B: After this enraged IP carved the article on Charizard and its talk page and was reverted by A Man In Black, his response prompted AMIB to christen him the charming nickname "Skeletor".
 * Exhibit C: This new user had an entertaining approach to conveying to AMIB that he had more "rights" to Mario articles than AMIB does, but AMIB recognized the user's situation and "helped out".
 * Exhibit D: Now HERE's how you reprimand an admin for deleting your article: declare you'll "sew" him for ten tredecillion dollars.
 * Exhibit E: Flamboyant rants like this are quite fitting of users who name themselves "Disgruntled". I dunno about talk page posts like this, though...

I'll concede that I did get a couple awards over my years at the site. The first was for rewriting an article that would later on be merged practically out of existence because of notability and sourcing issues; the second was a free barnstar handed out to me and a couple dozen other WP:POKE members by a user attempting to get out of his eventual ban. Hey, it's some recognition for my efforts!


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