User:Chris Stangl
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The anonymity of the Internet has historically damaged the credibility of most of its attempted academic, educational and artistic endeavors. I believe it is important that participants in a project like Wikipedia are forthright about their identities, interests, and personal biases, that their contributions may be better understood and respected.
After fighting the uphill battle against illiterate contributors, conspiracy nuts, and bad copywriting, labor on the Johnny Gosch article eventually validated my worst concerns about Wikipedia's open editorship. After cursory "discussion" by editors who don't seem to have read the article, the important Gosch-related biographical article on private investigator Ted Gunderson was deleted. I've had other contributions deleted, but always understood why. Vandals are one thing; the random deletion of useful articles just because major contributors happen to be logged on for a few days to defend them is another. Oh well. Free speech is designed to break hearts.
Wikipedia does not, will never, and cannot work. Its nature makes it useless and untrustworthy as a research tool. The math doesn't work out: one bad editor can work faster and do more damage than a thousand hard-working good editors. The page deletion policy likewise can undo months of good work in a day. But it's fun. It's totally dumb, but it's fun.
Contents |
[edit] About myself
I am an illustrator, writer, and native Iowan, living in Los Angeles, California, in the historic, beautiful Los Feliz neighborhood. My first day perusing Wikipedia, I noticed that the article on Pikachu was twice as long as the entry on Eleanor Roosevelt. They are both good articles, but this indicates something is amiss.
My major personal interests are film, comics, literature, Winona Ryder, coffee, Disneyland, collecting monster toys, and cluster headaches.
I maintain a film analysis and criticism blog called The Exploding Kinetoscope
[edit] Wikipedia focus
I mostly began editing out of irritation over copy editing and grammar issues. This has expanded into interest in NPOV and trying to prevent articles on popular culture subjects from becoming fan pages.
My interests and editing focus are cinema studies, particularly film history, analysis, fandom, and home video, American popular literature, especially detective and horror fiction, vintage video games, board games, fanfic articles, Disneyana, "alternative" comics, and the graphic arts.
[edit] Stephen King
I am involved in attempting to cleanup and organize all articles related to the fiction and films of Stephen King, and slowly reworking the biographical page. The articles on every book need major cleanups, the stories need expansion from stubs, and the films need to be separated from their literary sources. The main article would do well to follow the example of the models-of-form to be found in the H.P. Lovecraft and Robert A. Heinlein articles. I'm particularly interested in the Dark Tower books. My pet peeves on the topic are the spelling of the title It and the inclusion of Dark Tower-related details of interest only to hardcore fans bogging down summaries of other novels.
[edit] Johnny Gosch
Once my driving pet-article, fellow Iowan and missing person Johnny Gosch, is the first article to which I made major contributions. The article was originally lacking in any hard data, and it was for a brief while among the only useful information sources on Gosch on the internet.
[edit] Archie Comics
I would like to see cleanup and creation of a uniform format for the group of articles on Archie Comics series, especially the core Archie titles and character biographies. Thus far, I am mostly doing copy cleanup, and built an infobox for characters.
[edit] Wikipedia contributions
[edit] Articles I've started include:
[edit] Film and video |
[edit] Pop culture junk |
[edit] Other major contributions
[edit] Primary author |
[edit] Extensive work |
