User:ReyBrujo/Wikipedia

So, you want to know what I do at Wikipedia?

My first contribution ever was removing a slash from a URL, with this account. That was in May 2005. I created this account for that purpose, never really expecting in staying here (as you could see from my earliest contributions). But something happened on September 2005, wish I could remember what exactly, and decided to come back and stay.

I am mostly a WikiGnome (which explains my high edit count). I spend my time doing format corrections to comply with the different manuals of style, adding cleanup templates to articles, and removing unnecessary content from articles (original research, vandalism, etc). I also like just going to the pages with no incoming links and reviewing them, tagging with the appropriate cleanup messages, prodding or directly sending them to deletion process.

From time to time I visit the Articles for Deletion page to see if I can help in any of the current discussions. I have participated in a few templates and maybe categories discussions, but mostly in items I had crossed while editing.

My watchlist has around 3,000 items, with almost a third of them being images. I concentrate on gaming (hardware and software), some music (mostly symphonic and gothic metal), fantasy (Dragonlance and some Tolkien) and japanese culture (pop music, anime and manga, etc). If I edit any other kind of article, it is likely I reached there through Special:Random, or clicking a couple of wikilinks starting from an article in which I have knowledge.

Finally, I expand some articles when able. Since I am suscribed to quite a good number of gaming sites, I am able to add references to gaming articles. I also like expanding Dragonlance articles, trying to make them fit the manual of style for fictional articles. I have overhauled (I like that term!) four articles, three related to Dragonlance characters, another about a MUD game.

Wikimedia Commons
I believe our freedom is more important than our quality (a thought that brings problems, indeed!). Recently, promotional images have been deleted as there may exist a free replacement. While I agree with the concept, I don't agree with the method. Personally, we should have started to tag the images from "most common" to "rarest" ones. How to determine an image is common? Well, if the topic is well known. And how we determine that? If the article has many active contributors, or if the article has many more revisions than others. I know this is arbitrary, but it is usually safer to say that an article with 1,200 revisions has either more [active] contributors or is better known than one that has 50 revisions in the same period of time.

To prevent a text-only Wikipedia, and to help other Wikipedias that do not allow fair use at all, I spend some of my time at Flickr, browsing thousands of images, searching for ones that could be used here. In my time there, I noticed there are images of very good quality, sometimes matching promotional images (just check my images section to see them. Whenever possible, I upload them to Wikimedia Commons so that they can be used in any Wikipedia. If the image has a copyright tag that is incompatible with us, I contact the uploader to request permission. Most times, I have been successful, not because of my charisma, but because they do really want to help us. In other words, it is worth taking a minute or two to contact a user who owns the copyright of an image to see if he is willing to help us.

Finally, whenever I find free images here, I add them to my small collection of images that should be moved to Commons. Hopefully in the future I will be able to move them there, ask someone else to do it, or create a bot to do that automatically.

WikiProject Free images
We are pushing forward a WikiProject to contact copyright holders directly to request free images for Wikipedia. You can learn more at WikiProject Free images.

Meta
I have an account at Meta (User:ReyBrujo). I mostly edit my user page there, adding information about dump statistics. Other than that, I contribute small things to the spam blacklist, some minor vandalism control, and request temporary adminship when I detect a small Wikipedia is having trouble dealing with spam.

Other Wikipedias
I have accounts in many Wikipedias. I use them to add interwikis, images and links from Commons, and to update information from time to time. Other than the Spanish Wikipedia, I am not likely to contribute heavily to any of those. However, if circumstances force me, I request temporary sysop access in them to help with deletion backlogs, spam fighting and vandalism prevention.