User:ScottDavis

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has been an administrator since November 2005.

I live in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. I had read articles in Wikipedia over several years. I finally joined at the beginning of 2005, and started filling in some gaps in things I know something about. Most of the articles I created or added to in my early years were about South Australian geography - towns, highways, regions, rivers. Most of them were quite short and marked as stubs, in the hopes that someone else would add info I didn't know. I'm gradually expanding my interests. I have tried to assist with the historic Australian Politics articles and also a few other Australian topics, as well as edits for places I've been to or other articles I read and notice problems with. After a few years of very few edits, I am back with wider interests, but still generally South Australian and Australian.

Wikiprojects
I contribute to a number of areas of WikiProject Australia:


 * I am a member of the WikiProject Adelaide, but my interest is really all of South Australia, not just the Adelaide metropolitan area.


 * WikiProject Australian politics is a project to address the deficiency of articles related to Politics in Australia. Before it was set up I had ensured there was an article for each Governor of South Australia.


 * I was previously involved with WikiProject Australian motorsport but my interests in that area have waned.


 * WikiProject Australian places covers all places in Australia, especially if not under a more specific wikiproject. I have also added coordinates from Geoscience Australia to many of them. The results of early coordinate tagging in Wikipedia can be seen by Stefan Kühn having created a Google Earth dataset. It is now much more obvious with the WikiMiniAtlas link at the top of pages with coordinates.


 * WikiProject Australian history
 * I revived the Australian collaboration of the fortnight which had become sadly neglected through the first part of 2005, however interest waned again a few years later.

WikiProject Geographical coordinates works to standardise representation of location in articles, and being able to do useful things with locations such as displaying locator maps, maps of places, and maps of areas highlighting links to all Wikipedia articles about things in that area. My main contribution has been to add coordinates to South Australian town articles, and working through other geographic features, and other states, but slower. WikiMiniAtlas is a handy way of checking that coordinates are roughly right, and finding other nearby articles.

I supported the Wikiproject Stub Sorting in helping to move stubs and short articles to the stub categories where they might be best noticed by experts. I encourage all Australians to review the Australia stubs category and its subcategories and see if you can expand a few articles.

The Red Link Recovery Project is an interesting way to read more of Wikipedia, and help the project, too.

Wikipedia milestones
I started this table when 1000 edits sounded like a lot. Of course, since then I've become more involved, and joined stub sorting and red link recovery wikiprojects which lead to much larger numbers of smaller edits. Whenever I find an article with no category, I try to add at least one relevant category to it.

Using AWB to fix links to articles that have moved also pushes up the edit count quite quickly.

I took time off from the end of 2008 to mid-2014 with very few edits in that period.

Good ways of increasing your edit count include
 * Writing new articles for any red links (like this one) you find
 * Fixing spelling, grammar and other common mistakes
 * Fixing wiki syntax
 * Disambiguating links to disambiguation pages
 * Stub sorting
 * Find a category you know something about, and improve all the articles in it
 * Add categories to articles without any category

Bad ways include edit wars, arguments on project pages, wikivandalism.

My contributions
You can review
 * My contributions
 * My user activity log (shows admin activity, uploads and page moves)

I also had a list of most categories and articles I have created, but it is way out of date.


 * Some of the people for whom I have created articles were Governors of South Australia. I have ensured that the entire set have at least a stub. Most now have as much information as I could find on the internet.

Awards and achievements
I have been awarded several barnstars and other awards.

Images/photos I've contributed
See /Images or an automatic gallery of my contributions to Commons

Things I still want to do

 * My current focus areas include:
 * improve info on closed railway lines in South Australia
 * Ensure all the places that are mentioned in the railway article (including map) have an article that mentions the railway
 * Same for rural highways as for railways
 * Create articles for places that have a family history connection, ideally with a photo
 * Legislative Council districts

(reminders to myself - feel free to butt in and do them first)
 * Create an article for each of the red links I've made
 * Monitor and add to Category:Towns in South Australia
 * each article should be named "placename, South Australia" - more recent conventions seem to make the state name optional but a redirect is required.
 * Each article should have either a redirect or link from "placename" or "placename (disambiguation)"
 * Each article should contain
 * text description of location
 * an infobox with
 * its coordinates and population - coordinates from Geoscience Australia
 * description of LGA, state and federal electorates, and postcode
 * Monitor and add to Category:Geography of South Australia &mdash; as above except for naming
 * Keep an eye on any of the categories I created, and expand the articles in them.
 * Solar power stations in Australia
 * The /plain town names list contains all the placenames from the Australian postcode lists, with their state name removed. I can use it to find mis-named new town articles.
 * Perform some of the tasks and redlinks listed in the templates below.

My international travels
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