User:Calton

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"It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that."

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Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California.

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Some pictures I've taken and which are used on Wikipedia. Ansel Adams I'm not, but I might as well be useful.

Yes, I took the picture on the right. Yes, I change it (mostly) every day. Yes, they're all used on Wikipedia/Commons. Come back each day for a new, marginally-in-focus picture! Collect them all!

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I'm a Westerner, living in Tokyo, Japan, where I work as a copy editor/rewriter for a large Japanese electronics company.

I first became aware of Wikipedia when I began using it to look up some technical terms, my being an English literature major screwing around with computers, not vice versa. Being of a copy editor bent, I noticed typos, misspellings, and generally screwy language occasionally, and after a while I realized that I could in fact edit them myself. So I did. Soon, I was hitting the random page button, just for my own amusement, and I got sucked in.

Trying to impart common sense into the clueless is a tough job, one which you do particularly well. [1][2][3]. As such, you the very first of Raul's common sense bricks. Raul654 22:58, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Now, this has turned into a relaxing break from my required copy editing: I get to exercise my pedantic tendencies, without the responsibility of deadlines or deliverables. I've occasionally gotten a little deeper into things, and have written a few articles from scratch.

This whole project is infectious: hitting the random page button, I encounter whole swatches of text and knowledge areas requiring work, and I suddenly feel compelled to try to do something about it, even if I didn't have any particular interest in the subject to begin with. For example, I did a massive edit (for style, organization, and a general readability) for the submarine USS Trout (SS-202). I have no particular interest in the military, especially not the Navy, yet I found myself sucked into doing this. Same with entries on community colleges and Booker Prize winners.

It's kind of like my current project -- if you can call it that -- of eliminating spam and MySpaceLight pages disguised as user pages. This started out as a simple task which I figured to complete fairly quickly, but the more I dig the more I find. Over the last six months or so, I figure that I've tagged maybe 1,500 of so-called user pages for oblivion, of whom maybe 3 have since done any editing whatsoever. And I keep finding more, not to mention the brand-new ones cropping up daily, including obvious vanity articles that are userfied by other editors who ought to know better.

So far I have added a few articles and stubs (and yes, I plan to expand the stubs if I can), but mostly it's janitorial work. As I told one troller:

It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that.

[edit] International Travels

Spent years:

Months to Days:

Hours:
To go some day:
	Idea and layout stolen from User:Guettarda who borrowed it from User:Coolcat

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