User:Joedeshon

Who I am
My real name is Joe DeShon (yeah, I got real creative when I created my user name, didn't I?). I live in the beautiful city of Lee's Summit, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. I work in the marketing department of a really, really big telecommunications company in the Kansas City area. (You figure it out.) My joke is that I used to work in the IT department, but then I gained a personality so they told me I had to work in marketing. (That's not too far from being truth!)

I'm also a pianist and a percussionist. The difference between a drummer and a percussionist is that a percussionist can read music. (Musicians will understand what I mean. If you're not a musician, don't try to figure it out.)

A cool picture
Okay, isn't the picture of the balloons really, really cool? It's my proudest Wiki-contribution so far. This is about the only time I'm going to break my arm patting myself on the back.

What I edit
I mostly do little clean-up work. A few grammatical corrections, some "see-also's", disambiguation pages, stuff like that.

I just finished disambiguating the word "spring". That was an experience! Maybe I'll find some other word to disambiguate.

I really don't like it when articles link to a disambiguation or a redirect page. When you write an article, don't just put two square brackets around significant words and be happy that you "created" a link. Click on your links and check them out. Sometimes you're not linking to the thing you think you're linking to. If you find yourself linking to a disambiguation page or a link page, you're messing up one of the most unique features of WikiLinks. Fix it before some editor-wannabe like me has to come along and clean it up.

I'm always on the lookout for misuses of "it's" (with an apostrophe) as a possessive.

Sometimes I poke around the special pages for short articles, dead-end articles and other things that look interesting to work on.

Actually, here's what I've done, and here's the number of edits I've made.

Have I made it to the top 1,000 contributors yet? Nah...

My significant contributions
Here are some of the articles that I either wrote from scratch or contributed a significant amount of material to:


 * Adam Forepaugh
 * Dana Reeve
 * Great Pershing Balloon Derby
 * Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus
 * John Ringling
 * Johnathan Lee Iverson
 * Manhattan State Hospital
 * Music on hold
 * Night glow
 * Pinewood derby
 * Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus
 * Ringmaster (circus)

Stuff I need
Here are the links that I use all the time to do my job:
 * Special pages
 * Manual of Style
 * Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)
 * Manual of Style (biographies)
 * Manual of Style (headings)
 * Manual of Style (dates and numbers)
 * Manual of Style (links)
 * External links
 * Lists
 * Tables
 * Tables
 * Redirect
 * Naming conventions
 * Sandbox
 * Special:Categories
 * Categorization
 * Image copyright tags
 * Image use policy
 * Publicity photos

Please don't edit this page
If you have something to say to me, please edit my discussion page, not this page. Let me edit this page, okay? I wish there was some way to lock your own page down from anybody else editing it. Is it on the features list or the "features-wanted" list? I dunno... Please click here to leave me a new message. ^^^Stolen from Redwolf24 who stole it from Linuxbeak ^^^

Kinda sorta gotta
If you ever get a casual email from me, you'll notice that I sometimes use the words "kinda", "sorta", "gotta" and a few other variations. I've even added them to my spell checker. But I realize there's a big difference between colloquial English and the formal written word. Colloquialism may have a place on my user page. They have no place in any article I'm editing.

Be bold in your editing
I think everybody that is considering editing a Wikipedia page should read the article "Be bold in updating pages". Go ahead, be bold. Just don't be reckless. I've edited lots of pages and have had almost none of my edits reverted. (Actually, I can't think of any at all.) Keep a neutral point-of-view, keep your opinions to yourself, check your facts, run your text through your favorite spell-checker, be relevant, and go ahead and edit. Trust me, there will be plenty of fellow Wikipedians following after you to mop up any errors you may have left behind.

Conservative pages
I love reading about conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter ... the list goes on and on. But I rarely edit their pages. It just gets too messy trying to keep up with everybody's NPOV arguments. I'll leave those battles for others, God bless ‘em.

Spoken articles
While looking for Wiki-stuff to work on, I stumbled on the Spoken Articles Project. It looks fascinating. I've worked on a couple of articles for the project, but I haven't published anything yet. It's harder than it looks! You should really check it out.

My blog
If you want to find out more about me, you can check my blog at The Mind of Joe.