User:Masamage/Past life



(This is my userpage as it stood at the end of 2009 when I fell off the internet.)

Hi! My pseudonym is Masamage. I am a college student, specifically a super-senior in the English department. I was majoring in Computer Science, but a slew of writing, literature, and political science classes all in a row blended catastrophically with the discovery of Wikipedia. I quickly realized that, if I'd rather sit around writing essays for fun all day, English might well be a better major. So now I just have a bunch of programming electives. (Though I love combining the two. Interactive fiction, anyone?)

I'm really sensitive to grammar and wording problems, so the ability to just reach in and fix them is completely addictive and kind of joyful. I keep wanting to do it to newspapers and such, so now I even write for a local paper, which scratches that itch quite nicely. As a rule, I edit pretty much anything I see on WP that seems to want it. Grammar, spelling, style, and clarity are big things for me; I usually tackle such problems any time I see them.

I work a lot on Sailor Moon articles, mostly because I was crazy about it as a young teenager and this justifies the absurd amount of trivia still in my brain. :) I founded WikiProject Sailor Moon, and am really enjoying the experience. This puts enough things on my watchlist that I don't usually keep an eye on the other things I edit, unless they're extremely interesting to me (such as The Be Five).

Significant articles I have created

 * Peirene - A fountain in Greek myth
 * Hilda Conkling - My favorite poet
 * Cats (Sailor Moon)
 * Takanori Arisawa (featured on Did You Know)
 * User:Masamage/NaNoBox
 * List of Haibane Renmei episodes

Pages to which I've made significant contributions

 * Sailor Moon (writing, maintenence, organization—now GA status!)
 * Sailor Mercury (gradually rewrote—now GA status!)
 * Sailor Mars (gradually rewrote—now GA status!)
 * Sailor Jupiter (gradually rewrote—now GA status!)
 * Sailor Venus (gradually rewrote—now GA status!)
 * Sailor Senshi (mostly rewrote, created diagram)
 * Silver Millennium (merged and rewrote)
 * List of Sailor Moon episodes (repeated reformatting, lots of Japanese, mini-summaries for first series)

Other projects I am involved with

 * Megatokyo and its subpages (helped it become featured)
 * Haibane Renmei (created the episode list and adaptation history)
 * WikiProject Dragonlance, to a much much lesser extent

Other stuff I do
I work on images when I see a need, whether it's categorizing, uploading, or writing rationales. I've also added two song samples.

I became an admin in May 2007, which is pretty awesome. Thanks, everybody! So now I'll be working on some of those responsibilities too. I try very hard to be polite and encouraging to new editors, and I try not to be disgruntled when people are uncivil. Not perfect at that, but I'm getting better. So far, my favorite admin activity is cleaning out the speedy deletions. It's surprisingly therapeutic (and frequently hilarious).

For those duly interested: my edit count and my edit summary usage. Hm, that second link doesn't work anymore. I'll have to find a new one.

I also have a sandbox, which I should have thought of a long time ago.

Projects I wish I was involved with

 * WikiProject Babylon 5. The show is enormous but so awesome.

I have a good friend named Courtney Jones. Note the link is red! That's because she's an up-and-coming performer, and has only just become ready for Wikipedia. I am working on an article, but it's difficult to remember what I know about her personally and what has been stated in published material. If anyone feels like giving me a hand, please drop a line! For more information, her website is here and her MySpace is here.

Okay! I think that's it for now. Thanks for coming, and feel free to drop me a line!