User:Realkyhick

My user boxes

I'm Realkyhick, short for "Real Kentucky hick," a nickname someone hung on me in my current home of Birmingham, Alabama. I'm a retired journalist.

Around Birmingham I'm sometimes known as "The Loudest Man in High School Sports" because of my work with various schools as a public address announcer for their football, basketball and other sports games, primarily for the now-closed Garywood Christian School.

On Labor Day 2007 I founded the Wikipedia Intensive Care Unit. It's a place to "heal" articles about subjects that are probably notable, but the article themselves face imminent deletion for other reasons. The project has since become inactive and tagged as "historical."

I spend much time on new-page patrol, where I've tagged for speedy-deletion a seemingly infinite number of articles about just-formed garage bands. I guess you could call me a confirmed deletionist. I recently removed a part of the article Hoover High School (Alabama) about a non-notable alumnus (actually he did not attend the school, but played for a lacrosse club associated with the school), even though it had a reference — for an article that I wrote! Pretty sad, I suppose.

I'll decorate this page with more stuff when I get a chance.

Words to live by at Wikipedia
"The best-written article in the world won't make a non-notable subject notable."

Neat tools
This page has a lot of neat table formatting and template helps: User:Pdfpdf/Tools and references. (I added this as much for myself as for anyone else.)