User:Vaoverland/Contributions

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My interests and writing for Wikipedia
Writing for Wikipedia provides an opportunity to learn more about subjects which are interesting to me, including a few which have been part of my life. In July, 1956, I recall hearing the news about the collision at sea and sinking of the SS Andrea Doria, even though I was only 5 years old at the time. I was a bit closer to another disaster I have written about. On January 13, 1982, I was in Washington, D.C. working with a cold weather-related bus transportation problem when Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge and plunged into the Potomac River. For about 15 years, I was a franchised dealer for Wayne Corporation, a now-defunct bus manufacturer and leader in safety engineering, so working on that article and related ones has been a labor-of-love so to speak.

Since reading H. Reid's The Virginian Railway during my high school years, the 600 mile-long Virginian Railway built by mining engineer William Nelson Page and industrialist financier Henry Huttleston Rogers has always been my favorite railroad, although I have also have an interest in  the James River and Peninsula subdivisions of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (now CSX), which I have lived within earshot of almost continuously since 1958!

When I was a community college student, I worked part time at several local radio and television stations such as WFMV and WWBT-TV in Richmond. My work with charter buses and tours stimulated my continuing interest in the American Civil War, Colonial Williamsburg,and Jamestown as well as many of the historical sites such as the James River Plantations. Railroad research led me to learn a great deal about William Mahone, and his cultured wife Otelia B. Mahone, who named a number of railroad towns along the Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad from books she was reading written by Sir Walter Scott.

Back in 1992, I stopped my car to help an apparently wounded kitten lying in the roadway near my home in a freezing November rain. Its toes appeared badly mangled, although there was strangely no blood, so I took the little wet thing home and we called the emergency vet, expecting bad news. Instead, he pronounced the little kitty "A-OK". It turns out, she had extra toes and was a polydactyl cat, something I had never even heard of. She turned out to be unlike any other I have ever shared space with (no one "owns" a cat!). What began as a simple arbitrary act of decency enriched my life. Anyway, I learned that author Ernest Hemingway became so taken with these cats after he was given one as a gift by a ship's captain that he provided for those he lived with and their descendents to live in his former home in Key West, Florida. I wrote an article which many other Wikipedians have enhanced; (you can also learn about these amazing creatures at the preceding link).

I am mostly focused on history and people, places and transportation subjects including buses, streetcars and railroads, and highways, bridges, etc. Geographically, I generally like topics with an orientation fairly close to Richmond, the Tri-Cities, the Historic Triangle, and Hampton Roads, all in Virginia. I also have some strong interests which extend into southern West Virginia. I belong to a number of Wikipedia special projects, perhaps most notably, WikiProject Virginia. In the past few years, I have lost close family members to prostate cancer, MAC Disease, and Alzheimer's Disease. I am also interested in Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, so these are also areas of Wikipedia close to my heart where I contribute and monitor. Details are at: About Me.

In the course of writing on subjects such as these, I have learned more and other writers in turn have been stimulated to contributing more, and so forth.





User Statistics
While I am one of less than 1,000 active administrators to work with millions of registered users on the English version of Wikipedia, working with content and editing articles are my areas of strongest interest. As of January 2009, I had made 30,034 edits since 2002 to over 3,000 articles. A more current edit count is abale using this tool: [http://gtools.org/tool/wikipedia-edit-counter/?str=vaoverland&project=en.wikipedia. External Wikipedia User Edit Counter].

I also am proud of major roles in:
 * 5 featured articles
 * 14 good articles
 * 88 items featured on the Main Page in the Did You Know? section.

Listing my contributions, collaboration
I am listing on this page some of the WP articles I have been involved with including current and past work. Listing here does not necessarily mean that I started the article, although it is a pretty good indication I have contributed to it. While I take pride in some articles I started, I firmly believe that the best thing about writing for Wikipedia is collaboration. Of the five featured articles for which I was a major contributor, none were solely a work of mine.

Through the magic of WP collaboration, I have contributed to literally thousands of Wikipedia articles, primarily on transportation, biographical, geographical or historical subjects, many involving Virginia or West Virginia, my strongest areas of interest. In almost all cases, it is great to see others adding to them as well. For the occasional vandal, prepare to be reverted. Please be silly somewhere else.

Did You Know? new articles for the Main Page
I have been directly involved in 88 articles to date (82 of which I started) which have been featured on the Wikipedia Main Page in the Did You Know? (DYK) section, which presents short blurbs and links to new articles.

Good Articles
Wikipedia's Good Articles contain excellent content but are unlikely to become featured; they may be too short, or on too broad a topic, or on too specific a topic, or on a topic about which not much is known. What makes a good article?

A good article will share many characteristics with featured articles, and like featured content it must:
 * be well written
 * be factually accurate
 * use a neutral point of view
 * be stable
 * be referenced, and
 * wherever possible, contain images to illustrate it.

Good articles may not be as comprehensive as our featured articles, but should not omit any major facets of the topic.

List of Good Articles
I have been significantly involved with 12 Wikipedia Good Articles. Alphabetically, they are:


 * American Civil War
 * Amtrak
 * Atlantic Coast Line Railroad
 * autorack
 * Florida East Coast Railway
 * Henry H. Rogers
 * Henry Morrison Flagler
 * Overseas Railroad
 * Richmond, Virginia
 * Sears Catalog Homes
 * West Virginia
 * William Mahone

Featured Articles
I see the FA competition as sort of WP's Academy Awards. They are something you want to keep in mind in much of your work, and set the standards to measure by, but most good work still won't make it.

To quote from WP, "Featured articles highlights Wikipedia articles judged to be particularly well-written and complete. They exemplify Wikipedia's very best work and represent what Wikipedia offers that is unique on the Internet. Before making the grade, a nominated article is subjected to a review and usually some enhancements and improvements from more than one writer. There are hundreds of thousands of articles on Wikipedia. Only about 1 in 900 achieves featured article status."

The Wikipedia featured article process is helping me improve my research and writing skills, as well as contributing to articles which I hope others will enjoy and learn from. I try to spend some time each week reviewing and critiquing the work of others, and I share suggestions and words of encouragement when I feel I can and should. I tend to withhold comments or votes unless I feel strongly.

My current score is 5-2 in FAC competition. I have not given up on my failed nominations, but will resubmit them only when I feel they are ready.

Gained status as Featured Articles
The five articles which became featured articles I have been involved substantially with were each collaborative efforts. I was the principal writer (but not the only contributor) for three, two of which I started, and I was a secondary writer on a fourth, and contributed substantial content to a fifth. Each would not have come up to FA standards without the work of multiple writers. They are:


 * William Nelson Page became a Wikipedia featured article in October, 2004. I had been working on research on William Nelson Page and the Virginian Railway for several years before I started writing for Wikipedia. This remarkable man was co founder of the Deepwater Railway and Tidewater Railway, which were combined to form the Virginian Railway (VGN) in 1907. While Page's silent partner, millionaire industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers, has received most of the published attention for building the VGN over the years, and it was he who put up the money and obviously helped determine a winning strategy, I believe that other VGN Enthusiasts and I have come to realize that Page's role was a crucial portion of their partnership. As a featured article candidate, the article had lots of help from other WP contributors, including one who went to a local library and got some great information to fill in some gaps, which also led me to new sources. It has been an exceptional pleasure to add this man's story (and that of the building of the Deepwater Railway, Tidewater Railway, and of course, the Virginian Railway) to Wikipedia. User:Niteowlneils contributed significantly.


 * Battle of Hampton Roads became a Wikipedia featured article in December, 2004. Like most Virginia school children, long ago I learned about the famous American Civil War "Battle of the Monitor and Merrimac" which took place in 1862. However, a number of more recent events and work researching the Virginian Railway (which topped the U.S. Eastern Continental Divide at Merrimac, Virginia) and all the news about the locating and raising portions of the USS Monitor combined to renew my interest. In the article, and the related one about the CSS Virginia, the naming confusion regarding the Confederate ironclad warship has also been discussed. User:Brian0918 did a lot of work on the article, especially the campaign box for the Peninsula Campaign, images, and a much better map than the one I had found earlier. This article is much more about the ships and their innovative equipment than the north vs. south aspects of many Civil War subjects. It a timely Wikipedia article with the preservation efforts and display activity regarding the Monitor very much current events.


 * Carl G. Fisher became a Wikipedia featured article in March, 2005. This is an article I started when I came across a red link while working on another WP project. Carl Fisher was a child in Indiana with a severe sight-impairment disability who got into bicycle and auto racing, who helped and promote sealed beam headlights, opened what is believed to be the first automobile dealership, and caused the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to became paved for safety reasons. He was the driving force behind the Lincoln Highway (the first U.S. transcontinental paved roadway), and the north-south Dixie Highway which led to Florida where he became a real estate developer and helped turn a barren and isolated beach area into the resort city of Miami Beach, Florida. Although he lost his fortune in the U.S. Stock Market Crash of 1929, and died in modest conditions while fighting alcoholism, considering himself a failure, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential in Florida history. As I believe seems true with better Wikipedia articles, this article benefited especially well from collaboration, with some good tweaking by User:Niteowlneils, help from User:slambo, and assistance with factual review and additional image sources by User:SPUI. The public domain images are from the U.S. Library of Congress and the Florida Photographic Collection.


 * Pioneer Zephyr became a Wikipedia featured article in March, 2005. This is an article created by User:Slambo with whom I collaborate on a number of railroad articles and WikiProject Trains. I contributed some content, images, and started articles for some of the red links. However, my role was secondary to his efforts on this one, which also had a minor tune-up from User:Niteowlneils. The story is about the train that was the original "Silver Streak", which was the forerunner of streamlined Burlington  Zephyr passengers trains, and the source of the name for two films (1934) and (1976). A fun article to write and read. The PZ and several related historic trains are on display for Wikipedia readers who want to go see them. I've seen the PZ in Chicago, and I really enjoyed the exhibit. Working on the article made me want to visit there again. Hope you also enjoy it!


 * SS Andrea Doria was featured on the Main Page in August, 2005. I was five years old when the famous passenger liner collided with another and capsized and sank in 1956. I read the first book about it, Collision Course by Alvin Moscow, in the early 1960s, and have always maintained an interest in the years since. Two newer books also focus on the incident, and reading all three provides great insight and balance No one ever determined for sure what cuased the collision, so each can form his/her own conclusion! This article was started by another, but I contributed substantially to content. It is a fascinating transportation-related subject, controversial to the present-day.

My "pet" article
For a long time, I have had some fascination with the many places which are no longer in Virginia, for whatever reason. The lead article for my WP work on this regard is Lost counties, cities and towns of Virginia. My goal is to capture a comprehensive list and present some interesting factually accurate information about some of these, and I have attempted to include any that might be of interest, including some very obscure ones.

As a general convention, if the subject existed primarily or only before the Commonwealth of Virginia existed, as in the colonial period, I use a article title that does not include the word "Virginia". If it was later, or if clarity is needed, I use Virginia in the name of the article. (IE New Norfolk County, vs Norfolk County, Virginia).

I intended Lost counties, cities and towns of Virginia as a "fun" article. See comments on its Talk page at Talk:Lost counties, cities, and towns of Virginia. As others have added to it, it has become very educational to me as well.



Links to my other user pages

 * User:Vaoverland
 * About Me
 * My Philosophy as a WP Administrator
 * Did You Know?
 * My Talk page


 * updated Vaoverland (talk) 08:49, 10 November 2008 (UTC)