User:SurreyJohn

I am John, an early-retired Analytical chemist and scientist, born in Merseyside, now living in Surrey and was making good use of my time by addicting extra and hopefully useful information to Wikipedia. For the last 15 years of my working life I was an IT analyst, working for a global pharmaceutical company.

Being analytical and an IT professional in a highly regulated industry I am well suited to the provision of detailed factual information, validation, and compliance so I expect my contributions will be somewhat based on analysis of information form different sources, or addition of some detailed natural photos, since travel, nature and photography are my key hobbies and pastimes. Although a fan of Wikipedia for many years, I only started contributing in July 2014.

Recently I have become despondent with Wikipedia. Factually correct articles have been deleted because someone decided they are not important. Some of my own images removed on copyright grounds, and I and generally fed up with some very difficult and argumentative people. Information which is clearly correct and verifiable from the internet, should not require independent references but it seems too many people (or robot bots) are only too willing to delete hard work done by others. I am therefore taking a back seat and do not intend to write any new articles. Do not be surprised if I do not reply to messages.

=Help for Me= Some of the useful Wikipedia help topics are listed here: More information will follow!
 * Help:Wiki markup - how to use the markup
 * Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners - how to include references
 * Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article
 * Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article
 * Wikipedia:Sources – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources
 * List of infoboxes (typically used in top-right of a page)
 * Use of userboxes. See also List of userboxes (shared by a special UBX dummy account))
 * | FileInfo - Commons File uploader (for Flickr, Picasa, etc)

= Pages I've Created = Page creations and significant revisions: (*) = Revision

=My Photos= This is a very small selection of the many holiday photos I have taken over the years. I have only added photos where I think they may be useful (or better) than ones already present. I avoid removing other people’s photos, instead adding mine to sit alongside, or as part of a gallery section. If you need a picture, video clip or GIF (mainly of wildlife), just ask and you may be given.

British Birds
Various photos of British birds (2010 - date)

Madagascar Lemurs
I have been to Madagascar twice; once in 2003 and again in 2014. Most of the photos (and video) concentrate on the lemurs I saw, although there's inevitably a large number of photos of the birds and other wildlife. I have only uploaded photos here used on other  pages.