User:Esprqii

I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2006, and have written more than 300 articles from scratch, many relating to the U.S. state of Oregon. I was one of the early contributors to WikiProject Oregon, a Wikipedia project dedicated to creating and improving articles relating to Oregon. My interests have spanned from biographies of political leaders and sports heroes to descriptions of important historical events and places. In addition to creating new articles, I have researched, edited, maintained, and assessed thousands more Wikipedia articles, with an emphasis on providing accurate and well-referenced source material.

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Projects
Here are some of the articles and projects I've put the most work into:
 * Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands: As I delved into Oregon history, so many topics came back to this topic, a jumbled mixture of the economy, the environment, local and national politics, law, and of course--scandal. The only thing missing is sports. It is a complex topic that continues to this day to have a huge impact on the state's economy and culture.
 * List of United States Representatives from Oregon: When I first stumbled across this list, I was amazed at how few of the representatives had articles in Wikipedia and took to adding them one by one. Just when I thought I'd read the most incredible story—both good and bad—I found yet another. These "old dead guys and gals" never failed to disappoint.
 * 75th Oregon Legislative Assembly: Within a week of the November 2008 election, I worked to ensure that all 30 Oregon senators in the current session had articles, and created a half dozen articles for the Oregon representatives.
 * Oregon Sports Hall of Fame: So many Oregon sports heroes are included in this hall from a wide variety of sports, but a surprising number had no articles about them. I took their Oregon sports hall status as a show of notability and have been tracking down their bios for articles ever since. I continue to be amazed at the fascinating stories out there.
 * Stanford Athletic Hall of Fame: Another sports hall of fame, this time from my alma mater. More interesting, notable sportspeople with no Wikipedia articles.
 * WikiProject Oregon/Assessment: Once the Oregon project really took off, we had thousands of articles that needed to be tagged to be included in the project and then assessed in terms of completeness and quality. I did as many as I could.
 * Oregon portal: Several other editors did the vast majority of work, but I was happy to help where I could to get the Oregon Portal to Featured article status.
 * Did You Know: When I create a new article, I nominate it for the Did You Know feature that appears on Wikipedia's main page.
 * Barnstars and awards: Hey, it's fun to get recognition.
 * To do: Articles to create one of these days if someone else doesn't beat me to it.

Articles created
Here are the articles I've created from scratch. There are a lot of articles I've written up from stubs, but that would take a lot more work to uncover so this is a good sampling of what I've done around here. I try never to create an article without at least one good reference and always work to get it to at least Start class.

Politics
As noted above, a lot of these are former Oregon congresspeople or current Oregon legislators.

Sports
A lot of these were based on sports figures who were inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame or the Stanford Athletic Hall of Fame.

Other
Sometimes I just come across a redlink that is crying out for an article. A lot of these tend to be geographical in nature, but others just beg to be written.

Templates
Templates make life easier for editing and moving around articles in Wikipedia. Here are links to some that I created.

Photos
Here are some of the photos I've taken and uploaded to Wikipedia that are in use in Wikipedia articles today.

Notes to self

 * http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi?lastname=Public&firstname=John&middlename=Q
 * 566825
 * http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1984/JSH1103/jsh1103b.pdf