What Got Cut:Things I thought of including in my answers but ended up leaving out
User:Mradyfist first made me fully aware of Wikipedia; he is an avid reader of articles, but has only
two edits. I now have around 4000.
I am in four Wikiprojects now; the only one I have made what I would call "major" contributions to is
Wikiproject Porto.
Spanish is a very common language here in Minneapolis (and is one of four official languages here; the other three are
English,
Hmong and
Somali.) Portuguese is exceedingly rare. I grew up in the vicinity of Spanish language speakers and I actually use it at work most days. I'm still not the greatest at it and it's more useful for conversation than for writing encyclopedia articles (my first article attempt on ES.WP was deleted as "illegible"... Ouch!)
I want to get ahold of a textbook to fully learn Portuguese, despite my limited resources at the moment and the rarity of the language in my area. Besides my major interest in it now, I want myself to be a good ambassador to Portuguese editors, and I have some very basic communication skills, but I can do more for editors such as
this guy, rather than just the passive interpretation of the language that I have exercised up until now (although it's easy to read with a background in Spanish.) I wanted to be pt-2 by the end of the summer, but that may be a somewhat lofty goal at this point... We'll see.
I have patrolled
Category:Conspiracy theories a few times... I've helped in cleaning up a few of these pages, directly or indirectly (this is how I found
New Chronology (Fomenko).) You should try patrolling certain controversial categories sometime; patrolling this category has given me experience in cleaning up some of the ugliest articles on Wikipedia, and experience in the effective application of the undue weight section of
WP:NPOV.
Grandmasterka05:01, 12 July 2006 (UTC)reply