User:Masoninman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm a science journalist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I write about nearly any area of science, from physics to archeology, for a variety of outlets, including National Geographic News, New Scientist, Nature, Science, Seed Magazine, Inkling, and others.

My homepage, with most of my articles on it, is: masonmade.com.

A few weeks ago, I had a strange day. I was talking to a scientist for an article I was writing, and when I asked him about light-harvesting structures in bacteria, he said, "Just look it up on Wikipedia." Then later, when I was talking to my editor about the same article, and we were arguing a bit about how solar cells work, she said that I should look at the Wikipedia page on solar cells.

I still won't assume something I read on Wikipedia is true and use it in an article—I'll always check the facts with experts or against books or journal articles. But Wikipedia is often the place I start researching things.

But I'm a stickler about misspellings, grammar, and so on, and it's hard for me to look at Wikipedia pages and not tinker with them. I try not to spend too much time working on these pages, because it's easy to get sucked in, but I don't get paid for it. I'm hoping that others will find my articles helpful in improving Wikipedia, though.