User:JGDove99

This is my Wikipedia User page. JGDove99 is the Wikipedia User-id for John Gregory Dove.

For my professional profile please go to my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-dove/0/25/a88

I made my first anonymous edits to Wikipedia back in early 2005 when I was about to appear on a panel at the Reference and User Services President's Program at the June meetings of the American Library Association in Chicago, Illinois. I was CEO of Credo Reference (known then as "xrefer") and Jimmy Wales was also on that panel about the future of reference.

I made several edits just to feel what it was like. To add something of value to topics that the whole world can see was thrilling. It's also humbling when others come and 'improve' what you've written. After that experience I used to tell anyone who'd listen to me (among people in the publishing industry), "You need to edit an entry in Wikipedia. There's something you know about which is significant and which Wikipedia does not yet have the benefit of your knowledge. Just to be part of the publishing world, you ought to experience what's it's like." I knew something about the Maroons, a free people who live in an autonomous region in the mountains of Jamaica (given their autonomy back in 1738). And I knew something about equinoxes which is not common knowledge and which many reference sources (including many of those in Credo Reference) had completely wrong. Specifically, this is that the duration of day and night on the equinoxes are not, in fact, equal; not even close. the day is as much as 26 minutes longer then the night. So I made a new entry about the Maroons and I added two simple sentences to the vernal equinox entry clarifying the misunderstanding that most people have about the time of day and night on equinoxes.

I later participated in three Wikimanias: Cambridge, MA in 2006, Gdansk, Poland in 2010, and Washington D.C. in 2012. In the first two I was a speaker. In 2006 I was on a panel referred to as the "Dead Tree Publishers"--traditional reference publishers. I was a last minute fill-in for Karen Christensen of Berkshire Publishing. Credo Reference (called xrefer at that time) was certainly NOT a dead-tree publisher, being an aggregation of subject encyclopedias that was born XML and all online. In 2010 in Gdansk I led a session about "How can publishers, aggregators, and others with a commercial interest in libraries, and even libraries themselves work with Wikipedian editors in such a way as to strengthen Wikipedia entries and content while also serving libraries?". It was about this time that Credo Reference donated access for 400 Wikipedian editors to a version of Credo Reference so that they could have access to authoritative sources (what Wikipedia calls "reliable sources") and from there to resources within local libraries. This is what eventually became Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Library Project.

{a sidenote: all three Wikimanias I attended I arrived by motorcycle. Probably not noteworthy in Massachusetts or D.C., but a very memorable ride from Zvolen, Slovakia where my son lives, over the Tatra Mountains and across the length of Poland to Gdansk, after which I spent a night in "Hel"--check it out on a map of the area around Gdansk.}