User:Michael Devore

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You are not cool. I told you I would do it ;) just kidding ha ha. This guy is probably one cool cat. keep it cool

True, being not cool is one of my many faults. Please note that future feedback, compliments, complaints, and observations on my copious personal failings work much better as a post to my talk page: User_talk:Michael_Devore -- Michael Devore 02:37, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Returning to the regular user page content...

When I first started using Wikipedia in 2004, to me it was mostly a curiosity. Wikipedia had interesting information on occasion, but a large number of articles were in bad shape. Through 2005 and 2006, I noticed things slowly and steadily getting better. Eventually, Wikipedia improved past the curiosity stage and became a useful online tool to me. Twice, when I was really bored, I fixed a few typos and reverted vandalism. But Wikipedia then still seemed sufficiently lacking that I wasn't optimistic about making any real difference.

The beginning of 2007 was a turning point. I came to realize with a bit of surprise that the state of Wikipedia articles is now vastly improved. Random page checks may be clean of obvious problems more than twenty times in a row. Compared to the past, a great many articles are not only informative, but well-written—a few to a professional level. And that did it for me; Wikipedia was good enough and worked well enough to make me want it to work even better.

Although it has flourished to this fascinating resource, Wikipedia remains riddled with typographical errors, vandalism, and general user silliness as compared to old-style encyclopedias. My main contribution to the project has been—and is still—fixing typographical errors and reverting vandalized pages. However, for a change of pace, and because I not uncommonly run into articles that need more help (sometimes a lot more help) than basic copyediting, I also cleanup, rewrite, redirect, reference, tag, clear tags, propose for deletion, even disambiguate and debate Wikipedia articles. And yes, Wikipedia also has other serious problems, for example losing too many talented editors to internal and external bickering and stupidity. Those are not battles I am equipped to fight. Here I claim my turf.

On the unlikely chance that a user needs to contact me privately about my edits, a valid e-mail address is listed on my home page. Because I am, no doubt, a crabby old man, casual and alternate topic inquiries via e-mail are strongly discouraged. In contrast, I am far less crabby on my preferred-contact Wikipedia talk page: almost polite, in fact.

This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Michael_Devore.