User:Jim.henderson

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WP:TEL This article is within the scope of WikiProject Telecommunications, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to telecommunications on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project as a "full time member" and/or contribute to the discussion.

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[edit] Autumn 2006

I'm Jim Henderson, a telephone switchman in New York City since 1969. Also a bicycler and fan of technical history and astronomy, and a BBS operator from 1991 to 2005. Born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, lived as a child in Madison, Wisconsin, Knoxville, Tennessee and Plainview, New York, grew up in Manhasset, New York, dropped out of New York University and became a denizen of the Inner City, specifically Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan.

First try at editing Wikipedia was the addition of new material to Juno Online Services article in mid September 2006. Then came revisions of Reed relay, Marker (telecommunications), Wire spring relay, 5ESS, Signaling System No. 5 and others that an old switchman would know about.

In October, added to articles on History of Brooklyn and various parts of Brooklyn and other parts of Long Island. Also greatly expanded articles on New York Telephone and Panel Switch and reorganized the terribly disorganized DSLAM article even without knowing much about the topic.

You will notice I've got no bumper stickers saying where I eat and what's my religion and how I stand on political and Wiki issues. That's partly because I don't know how to do that, and mainly because I figure Wikipedia is for matters on which I am particuarly competent.

This user remembers using
a rotary dial telephone.

Ah. So, here's my first sticker, installed a few hours after dialing a phone call to Brooklyn with the rotary on my red Western Electric 500 type phone.

[edit] Spring 2007

Well, it's been an interesting winter and spring, more than a third of a year, learning how to do this by editing and adding large or small bits to about 2000 articles and making a few from whole cloth. Lately editing some bicycling articles, especially since getting knocked off my bike on April 3 by a limousine and thus having a broken collarbone and more time indoors.

I've let my watchlist grow to over a thousand articles, and vigilante duty towards grafitti now takes much of my time. Also moved the majority of articles out of category:telecommunications to more specific subcats, and did other things with related categories, not that cat work is the most important part of Wikipedia but it still ought to be done right. I ought to do more merger work with small stub articles. Did that with Main distribution frame, Borough President and a few others. Maybe the New York City water supply system and its related tunnel articles will be my next victim. Still having fun, and that's what it's about, right? Jim.henderson 06:30, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Early 2008, to do

So, now my watchlist has grown to about 2,600 items. No discipline; most days about 500 are recent and leave no time to do much except check, revert and tweak them as they enter or leave the active list. Big Wiki news personally is that a couple months ago a relative gave me an old Nikon Coolpix 2200 camera with broken zoom, so I've been learning how to take wide angle photos of various places in easy bicycling range and uploading them to various articles. Come springtime my intention is to buy a new non broken camera and go to those places again and reshoot with better hardware and much better understanding.

Dead of winter would theoretically be spent quietly at home, so I ought to be able to find time for some of the items on this list:

Probably most of this is just pipe dreams. So, on Feb 8 I bought a new, non broken Canon A570IS camera at a nice sale price (a later model came out). Springtime always means more bicycling, and now it means more pictures to review and upload.

Meanwhile on March 21 I added Carterfone to my watchlist, bringing the total to 3000! A few minutes later I removed Quack.com but will certainly give in to the temptation to add more.

In late April 2008 I joined Commons so my pictures might be more widely used. My username there is the same as here.

[edit] Million monkeys

Friends in a mailing list were characterizing the articles they had seen, without understanding how Wikipedia's work is done. I decided to spice my explanation with a little humor:

SF> Wikipedia sometimes tries to collect all information - maybe
> at least when it is variant names. (I suppose the editors are
> less prone to take out variant names tahn anything else)
One of the pleasures of being a Wikidpedia editor is seeing the precision with which we illustrate the poetic hypothesis of the million monkeys. There really are a million editors, or a few million. We aren't trying to produce something as difficult as poetry, but on the other hand we aren't as polite as monkeys, so it evens out. Instead of each sitting quietly at our own keyboard blithely tapping out gibberish, we're all shrieking, constantly correcting each other, shoving each other around, biting our neighbor's fingers, frantically banging several keyboards as though one weren't enough, and generally getting a lot of exercise. Somehow out of all this comes a very large encyclopedia, and sometimes good in parts.
We like to think of ourselves as lone wolves, but really we've got all the fierce independence of a herd of sheep. When one of us puts "zip tie" as an alternate name in the Cable tie article, another has to add "tie wrap" and then comes "mouse belt" and "rat belt and every other pleasantly silly nickname a work crew invented on their lunch break.
One might think when we reporters get too silly, a sober editor would come in and crack down on us, but remember we aren't reporters; we are the editors and there isn't much of anyone to crack down on us except each other. It's kind of like a computer that has installed too many "security" programs downloaded from Internet and all of them hitting each other on the head instead of looking for real viruses, except it works better than an overly "secured" computer. There are a couple thousand "Admins" who have powers such as banning an editor and locking an article from tampering by newbie editors, but they operate more like policemen than like newspaper editors; they keep busy chasing genuinely malicious contributors and have little time to worry about incompetent ones, which is to say the majority.
And yet, it works. At least, often it works. The encyclopedia says much, seldom says things that aren't true, and sometimes says something intelligible; even useful.