User:Ynhockey

About me
I'm Yan Nasonov from Petah Tikva, Israel, going by the alias Ynhockey because I once played hockey and have had this alias for over 10 years.

I was born in Novosibirsk, Soviet Union. My family moved to Arad, Israel in 1993 and to Petah Tikva in December 2000. I have also lived in Burnaby, B.C., Canada in between the years.

I served in the IDF's Military Police Corps (for anyone who cares, I wrote that article) until 2008. Since 2010 I have been studying computer science in the Open University of Israel, among other activities.

I am also a former board member of Wikimedia Israel and was on the local team that organized Wikimania 2011 in Haifa. Unless otherwise stated, neither my comments nor actions on Wikipedia reflect the positions of either the chapter or the foundation.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia
I found out about Wikipedia around 2003 (might've been even 2002) but never bothered to edit or register. I can't remember why now, but it's probably because I didn't think I could add anything useful (even though at that time Wikipedia was very small). Also I only started to read Wikipedia namespace pages in 2005, and therefore didn't know any policies and made many edits which might constitute as vandalism (both using an IP address and this username). Now I understand Wikipedia better though, contribute frequently, and do some sysop chores (mostly speedy deletion).

Contributions

 * See main article (it's an actual article with contribution details, not the special page).
 * See my edit count on enwiki, hewiki.

I've contributed to Wikipedia in different areas (mostly minor edits, although I don't self-identify as a WikiGnome), but notably have edited and/or created many Israel-related articles. I'm also responsible for writing about much of the Bleach-related content on the project, although in 2008 about half of it was merged to create a mess of long, unorganized articles, causing me to disengage from editing in that field.

Since my early days on the project, I've mostly shifted to editing Israel-related articles (Israel's geography, history, people, organizations). Unfortunately, nearly every significant edit I've made to an Arab–Israeli conflict-related article so far has been dubbed by opponents, directly or indirectly, a POV push. This is considering my views are not extreme by any measure; I've seen more extreme users blasted to the moon and back for their edits. I strive to avoid articles about the conflict, because the dispute resolution is a long and tedious process, and the time it takes to reach a compromise is usually equivalent to the time it takes to make 100–1000 good minor edits.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to write many good/featured articles as compared to my edit count. This is mostly because of sourcing problems, especially in IDF-related articles and articles about fiction. However, I try my best and have come a long way from never using sources (indeed, most active Wikipedians didn't at the time—I'm talking about 2005–early 06) to sourcing every single statement I add (again, going along with the general Wikipedia trend, which shifted to heavy use of sources). DYK has also recently become a sort of milestone on Wikipedia, but I have not been able to jump on the bandwagon in this area. It is a good motivator to write better articles from the start instead of expanding them later, but all in all, I don't really care about DYK as of this writing. From 2011, I have also been participating in some of the copyedit and wikifaction drives, as well as the major backlog elimination drive. I have eliminated hundreds of articles from the various backlogs, but so far it hasn't made much of a difference.

Since getting a decent digital camera in early 2007, I have also been contributing with photographs, including panoramas, which can be seen in some good/featured articles. Mapmaking is another interest of mine as far as images go, and many of the Israel-related maps on Wikipedia were drawn by me at some point or other.

I also contribute to the Hebrew Wikipedia sometimes. Certain issues discourage me from becoming a full-time contributor, but I've made around 650 edits at the time of this writing (including 15 new articles). I do not generally edit the Russian Wikipedia.

In 2010 I became a member of Wikimedia Israel, and have helped organize numerous projects, most notably Wikimania 2011 and Wiki Loves Monuments in Israel and internationally (2014). I attended Wikimania in 2011–2016. I served on the board of Wikimedia Israel in 2013–2016.

100 wikidays
In December 2019 I made an attempt at 100 Wikidays. After just 9 days/articles, I realized that such a strict regimen was unfortunately detrimental to my personal life in more than one way. It was a lot of fun though. Most of the articles were written in English, and they are of decent quality (C-ish, but I will let others decide). It was possible to continue this for much longer with articles on the Hebrew Wikipedia, by translating long articles from English into shorter ones—I did this for three articles, which I will expand later. It took a fraction of the time that writing original articles would. However, I didn't feel that this was really fair, and this is the other downside of 100wikidays—one has some time to write an article each day, but whatever the result, there is very little to no time to expand it later, within the 100 days. This can leave serious omissions or incomplete information, and after the context switch it's more difficult to back to an article.

I therefore stopped the run after nine short days, and will focus on improving the articles I managed to write. For those interested, the full list is here.

Note on account usage
It should be noted that because I help organize some outreach activities, especially in major GLAM institutions, sometimes I will create new user accounts from my account (because the institution would be blocked for creating too many accounts too quickly). I will have logged in from the institution's IP and all those accounts will have as well. Some of these accounts, or someone in the institution, may go on to vandalize Wikipedia (hopefully not!) and I'll be happy to cooperate in any investigation, although my means to help would be limited.

Literature
Below is a partial list of literature I have (what I thought was most relevant to Wikipedia), so feel free to contact me about it (like if you need a direct quotation, excerpt or translation). Please note that if applicable, the book title and author name presented here are how they are written in the book, and do not always reflect the way I write it in sources. As of this writing, the list includes only books in physical format, not in digital format which I also have a few of.

The idea for this list was shamelessly plugged from User:Ceedjee.

Random picture
Sometimes I go out and take pictures of things, and other times I draw. Here is a random picture (to be updated once in a while):



For a list of my images on Wikipedia and Commons, see Images.

Contact information
Most of the time, if you wish to contact me, please use the Wikipedia talk page.

If you want to be in constant contact, please use the Skype user name ynhockey. Send e-mail to ynhockey at gmail dot com.

Finally, do not leave messages for me on the Hebrew Wikipedia (or any other project) which are related to the English Wikipedia. I will usually ignore these messages.

Page views
Page view graph for this page:

Navigation
This is a list of sub-pages of this page. They are mainly for navigation. You may or may not find interesting/useful information there:
 * User:Ynhockey/contributions
 * User:Ynhockey/Images
 * User:Ynhockey/refs and User:Ynhockey/commonrefs
 * User:Ynhockey/materials
 * User:Ynhockey/Country stats

Lists of red links for article creation:
 * User:Ynhockey/Lists of Israeli persons
 * User:Ynhockey/Israeli organizations
 * User:Ynhockey/FSU
 * User:Ynhockey/Generals
 * User:Ynhockey/Localities and buildings
 * User:Ynhockey/Military units
 * User:Ynhockey/Missing in Hebrew
 * User:Ynhockey/Streets in Tel Aviv
 * User:Ynhockey/Zionists

Completed and existing article/image lists:
 * User:Ynhockey/MKs (complete 17th Knesset)
 * User:Ynhockey/Canucks players (complete)
 * User:Ynhockey/IsraelFPs
 * User:Ynhockey/Israel Prize winners (complete)

Some other pages I follow:
 * Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Israel
 * WikiProject Israel/New articles
 * Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Israel-related articles by quality statistics

Other useful pages on Wikipedia:
 * Template messages/Cleanup
 * Template messages/User talk namespace
 * Category:Candidates for speedy deletion
 * Category:Israel articles missing geocoordinate data
 * Unassessed WP Israel articles
 * WP Israel watchlist
 * Cleanup for WP Israel
 * Purge this page

Personal tools:
 * Google Maps link parser
 * Coordinate template parser for location maps
 * Parser for (some) refs
 * WikiMarkup / WikiText rules for Notepad++

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