User:Dankirkd

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] A Little About Myself

I am a regular reader of Wikipedia and occasional contributor to this fine resource.

My interests vary, but I've found that my initial dislike of wikis melted away once I became familiar with MediaWiki, at which point I created the Elephant Talk wiki site, which melded my desire to better understand the software with my interest in the band King Crimson. It also was a perfect fit as I wanted help maintaining what was once a typical Web site, and converting it to a wiki meant everyone could help update content.

I am also deeply interested in the congressional race in my home district the 8th District in Washington state between the incumbent Dave Reichert and the challenger Darcy Burner. As such I have contributed to both of these pages to help fill in the blanks, add citations and references, or other information, such as about my congressman's congressional voting record, which I admittedly follow very closely as an interested constituent.

My other contributions have tended to be related to local or political content as I've bounced around pages. I'm not terribly adventurous here, but I did create the initial page about Debra L. Stephens, the latest member of the Washington Supreme Court, and it is nice to see that it has evolved through edits by other people since.

But that's what makes Wikipedia so great. We all collaborate and improve the content every day, and sometimes in record time after an event takes place, which is often truly amazing.

I am always learning, and although I've built my own wiki site with MediaWiki, albeit using an old version (1.5.8) due to hosting limitations where I only have access to older versions of PHP and MySQL, and I'm an application developer in my day job, I'm a newbie when it comes to the fine art of editing Wikipedia pages.

Assistance, suggestions and recommendations are always welcome.