User:Jazzman831

Hello there! Feel free to call me Jazz, JazzMan, or any variation thereof.

About Me
I am a (small-l) libertarian of the Walter E. Williams/Milton Friedman/Ron Paul variety. Unlike some libertarians, I'm pretty open-minded, and not fully set in the details of how I think a perfect society should function.

In May 2008 I graduated from Bucknell University with a degree in chemical engineering. Then 12 minutes later the economy tanked, and I'm having a hard time finding a company in my area (Cincinnati) who wants to hire a new grad with no job experience. My dream job would be in food engineering or flavor science. ''Gah! That's a redlink!

Wiki experience and skills
I have pretty extensive wiki experience, though not a whole lot with Wikipedia itself, ironically enough (the first ribbon above is for my WP editing; the other ribbon is for my combined edits across all wikis I can remember). I edited on Conservapedia for about a year and a half under the username Jazzman831 (aka "JazzMan"), but was better known (and further promoted) under the name HelpJazz. I also edited (though almost exclusively on talk pages) at Conservapedia's rival RationalWiki, also under the name Jazzman831. I was a sysop and a bureaucrat (for what it was worth) at RationalWiki and had "blocking rights" at Conservapedia.

I understand basic wiki markup, and am pretty good at finding out how to do new things. I'm not very good at fancy formatting and whatnot, but that's largely because I'm too lazy to figure out how to do it, and I've never really had a good reason to learn. (I have little enough aesthetics to be able to use tables and colors to actually make anything look better!)

What I will contribute to Wikipedia
My primary (and so far only) editing at Wikipedia is geared towards copy edits and language structure. I'm pretty good at clearing up "the panda eats shoots and leaves"-type grammar problems. I don't follow much of an edit pattern; so far I've only been editing articles that I just so happened to be reading. I haven't yet decided if I will be spending much time in a concentrated effort to edit; for now I'll just edit when I happen to see something that needs fixing, so I can get my bearings and lurk a little longer.

My areas of interest
These are the areas that I will likely be editing, since they are the areas for which I most often use Wikipedia:
 * History (mostly ancient history and modern history)
 * Cooking
 * Chemistry
 * Current events

Thoughts about Wikipedia

 * Since I've been using this link to find pages that are more often neglected, I'm noticing a lot of the pages which have "fallen through the cracks". It's somewhat amazing how many pages there are about obscure Indian towns and soccer players. And they rarely make complete sense.
 * What's the point of allowing you to change your time zone if all sigs are still displayed in UTC? This just means that, at some point or another, I'm going to have to do addition or subtraction, unless I happen to live in 1 specific time zone (and I don't).

Helpful Links
For things I always seem to need... but can't find.
 * WP:VANDAL for what to do about vandalism and WP:AIV if they still vandalize after a final warning
 * WP:BRD: a good theory for dealing with stalemate discussions
 * unreferenced and unreferencedsection for articles or sections with no citations
 * style for various style guidelines
 * dead link, WP:DEADREF (citations), and WP:DEADLINK (external links) for what to do with dead links
 * Click here to search for common phrases accidentally left by new users (link blatantly stolen from this guy)
 * Category:Wikipedia maintenance for things to do when bored
 * WP:TC for a list of "cleanup" templates