User:Morgan Riley

Greetings!

Feel free to contact about any issues, ideas, edits or areas I may be able to help with. I especially enjoy illustrating pages, improving layout, writing leads and summaries, and in general improving navigation, organization, appearance, and readability.

My favorite subject matters to work on are the history of technology, cultural heritage, architectural history, and my local regional history and geography.

Wikiwork
There must be a reason why you came to this userpage: I did something good, did something bad, did something confusing, or you are simply a curious creature. So what sort of editor am I? In short, I fancy myself a jack-of-all-trades (master of few), primarily in the article space.

My rough editing goals are:
 * Structure: I am a logical person, and try to clean up disorganized and cluttered pages, and making confusing relationships between articles clear. I rewrite leads and bring about a logical, simple, or proper article Layout, make and redo hatnotes, make navboxes, and do categorization where needed. This also applies to several WikiProjects that I am a part of.


 * Illustration: I am a very visual person, and think that pictures can be used on Wikipedia to quickly and powerfully illustrate concepts. I spend much of my time over at the Wikimedia Commons; finding, sorting, and uploading images (mostly old Public Domain ones (I love wood engravings), though I am handy with a camera at times). I also try to improve article images and their layout when possible.


 * Counter-recentism: I am a historically–minded person, and so will be spurred on when I see recentism, both within an article, but also the systemic coverage bias more general. By this I do not mean attacking recent events articles as trivial ("anti-recentism"), but countering by trying to bring a historical perspective both within articles and by new articles. Most things have a long and rich history, so I try to dig about to find these and add them. Reading old books or other works on any subject matter will do wonders to shed light on what's still missing here; the "editor's frontier", as it were. In sum, I try to "think fourth-dimensionally".

Still, if I see any other work that needs doing and is fun and within my skill range, I may jump in. Let me know if I may be of service!

Happy edits!

Areas of interest
My natural habitats (when not on the Commons):


 * Category 1: Cultural heritage, architectural history, historic preservation, the built environment, and art history; esp. 17th-early 20th centuries.
 * Category 2: History of technology: essentially all those other things I had a fascination with as a kid that I have rediscovered: trains and railroading, mining, letterpress printing, infrastructure, etc.
 * Category 3: Things of local interest to me and my travels. My native Virginia, cities of Richmond and Fredericksburg, as well as elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic (esp. Philadelphia).

However, having experienced James Burke's Connections as a formative experience as a child, I do tend to jump from one article to another, finding myself in many a new location (wikilinking all the way).