User:Tannin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] User page:

Hi all. I'm new here as of mid-December 2002, and still in the Wow! This place is amazing! stage. (I have a sneaking suspicion an absolute certainty that this is a stage from which there is no escape.)

I'm based in Ballarat, Victoria and have a varied background. My degree was in the social sciences (with majors in research methods and psychology, minor in statistics) and I've worked with computers for over 20 years, but my main areas of interest are history and biology (which is really just history writ large, if you think about it that way). I'm responsible for (or possibly irresponsible for) for a long-established site mostly to do with computer history, which can be found here, though I don't get to update it very often these days.

I am notorious for appalling spelling, for being grumpy on Fridays, and probably for leaving dozens of things lying around half-finished.

Jack of all trades, master of none, I've made or threatened to make decent contributions to:

Photographs

Natural History

Modern history & related topics No prizes for guessing that my particular interests are the Napoleonic Wars, the Pacific Theatre in WW2, and aircraft generally. (I love anything with wings, with or without feathers.)

Sociology is an area that Wikipedia covers very poorly at present: many major sociological issues and concepts are not present at all, and as many others have incomplete, abbreviated or downright misleading coverage. It's been a long time since I used to teach sociology but now and again I get annoyed enough about the gaps and errors to devote a few hours to covering the basics. So far, I've worked on:

Aircraft and airlines

Computer stuff: I try to avoid this, but now and again I give in to my professional urges and take a hand in things like:

General Interest

The best ones? Well, the best one is always the next one! But I like these in particular:

[edit] Not quite so old user page:

I used to love this place. For a year and a half I spent endless hours here, writing and re-writing entries, and uploading images of wildlife.

One day about a week ago I spat the dummy out. I got so bloody tired of seeing so much good work destroyed by a tiny minority of well-known problem users that I quit.

You see, being committed to a project like the Wikipedia is sort of like being committed to a certain sort of marriage. You go along saying "I'll just be patient" or "maybe if I try harder" or "I think it's time for a different approach" or "can we sit down and talk this thing over". You do that for ages. And then one day you realise how long you've been doing that for, and you realise that nothing at all has really changed, except maybe got worse, and you realise that you have been kidding yourself. It's never going to "just get better". It's broken. That's when you move out and start doing something useful with your life.

I guess that one of the things that really brought this home to me was that, quite by chance, I've had to spend a good deal of time working on some other multi-contributor cooperative web-based projects lately. Somewhere along the line I had forgotten what it was like to work with people who want to work with you toward a common goal, as opposed to putting up with the disruptions and distortions and evasions and downright lies that we get so used to here. (You want examples? Try Wik or Nico or RK. There are others of course, but those three will do to illustrate my point. It's easy to tell who they are. Just ask yourself if User X does more harm to the project, or good for it.)

Maybe one day the Wikipedia community will get its act together and do something to encourage people who actually contribute to the encyclopedia instead of pandering to the trolls and the fanatics and the lunatics. Maybe.

Maybe one day in the future I'll drop by and see that the 'pedia has reformed itself and started to value contributions more than confrontations, and start writing articles here again. Maybe.

But maybe hell will freeze over first.

My fond regards to .... where do I start?

To Abe and Angela and Anthere and Camembert and Danny and Eloquence and Jim and Jimbo and Patrick and Raul and The Anome and Theresa and Tim and Uncle Ed .... and .... there are so many good people here! I've only mentioned a tiny few, and missed out hundreds. Good luck to all of you. Travel well, write great content, and for the love of mike get organised!


Best wishes to you all,

— Tannin 13:20, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Current user page:

... er ... Nothing here yet. I seem to be so busy with other wiki projects of late that I only get to drop in once in a while. We have had the good, and then the bad, so I suppose this current section ought to be the ugly.

Tannin 04:27, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)