User:Xover

Obsession
My obsession—the chief impetus—on Wikipedia is the topic of Shakespeare; and in particular the biographical and historical aspects of that topic. I am particularly interested in the articles covering the man himself—William Shakespeare and Shakespeare's life—as well as those for his immediate family: Judith Quiney, Thomas Quiney, Hamnet Shakespeare, Susanna Hall, John Hall, Thomas Nash, Anne Hathaway, John Shakespeare, Richard Shakespeare, Mary Shakespeare, Joan Shakespeare, and William Hart. This fixation on biography has also metastasized to an interest in the variously significant biographers of the Bard: Nicholas Rowe, Edmond Malone, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Edmund Kerchever Chambers, and Samuel Schoenbaum. And once you're into the biographers, it is all too easy to digress into the ditto editors: Lewis Theobald, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, &c.; actors and actor-managers like Colley Cibber and David Garrick; and painters and artists such as William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and John Boydell.

My chief focus at the moment is to keep an eye on the purely biographical bits of William Shakespeare, Hamnet Shakespeare, Judith Quiney, and Thomas Quiney; as well as attempting to rewrite and expand Edmond Malone to a point where it's a candidate for GA; which will probably be followed by a similar attempt with Susanna Hall (and, if I can find suitable sources, the same for John Hall).

Being pretty obsessive by nature, I'm also planning to take a sweep through the various Shakespare-related categories on Wikipedia, starting at Category:William Shakespeare, and making sure they are all properly tagged with the WikiProject banner, have the appropriate structure and membership, and attempt to resolve the circular mess and overcategorization in some areas. And should that prove insufficiently pedantic, it might be followed by going through all the pages with WP:BARD templates and add categories.

Contemplation

 * Susanna Hall
 * Rewrite and expand.
 * John Hall
 * Rewrite and expand.
 * Elizabeth Barnard
 * Write.
 * Edmond Malone
 * Finish expanding
 * Check the journals for suitable articles (James M. Osborne in particular)
 * Consider what needs splitting into sub-articles
 * Stub out and add todos for sub-articles (including the Ireland and Chatterton forgeries, maybe the variorum editions?)
 * Diversify sources
 * Copy-edit
 * Nominate for GA
 * Request peer-review
 * Nominate for FA
 * Is there a featured topic lurking here?
 * Give the Scholars a once over?
 * James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps
 * A. L. Rowse
 * The other early editors (Rowe, Ritson, Steevens, Johnson, Reed, etc.)?
 * Shakespeare's life
 * Shakespeare's reputation
 * Start a run through the individual sonnets, starting with Sonnet 1, and bring them up to GA, one by one?
 * Make list of available reference works? Wanted reference works?
 * Do some merge work on Folios and Quartos, Foul papers, Bad quarto, First quarto, Second quarto, First Folio, Second Folio, and False Folio?
 * Do some merge work on Shakespearean dance and Old measures?
 * Nominate Riverside Shakespeare Company for GA? FA?
 * Low-hanging-fruit: High importance, Stub quality
 * More low-hanging fruit: High importance, Start quality
 * Fripp's work needs to be added to Wikisource

Immodesty
Not being overly prone to excessive, or even moderate, humility; I've some achievements on Wikipedia of which I am sufficiently proud to wish to, well—not to put too fine a point on it—shove them in the face of any poor confused soul stumbling onto my user page. In no particular order, these are the articles Judith Quiney, Thomas Quiney, and Hamnet Shakespeare which I rewrote and significantly expanded; and which subsequently were reviewed as fulfilling the Good Article criteria. My exuberant pride in this should not, of course, be construed as a slight against those other editors who went before, contributed during, or have come after, to the articles in question: the sense of achievement is entirely subjective, and the validation from external review, here, mere scorekeeping.