User:Wassupwestcoast

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Wassupwestcoast is taking a long wikibreak and will be back on Wikipedia in June - but maybe not to September - because it is more fun to be outside. If the weather turns miserable, I will be back.

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 Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself.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:Wassupwestcoast.

Hi, this is the user page of Wassupwestcoast (talk • contribs • count). Wikipedia is full of surprizes and eye-openers. I've just gone through the worst editing experience ever on Wikipedia. To recover, I will be a WikiSloth. I will contribute to articles solely on hedonistic intellectual enjoyment. As an admin, I can help with silly messes. Vandals may be irritating but are not harmful to Wikipedia's credibility. Silliness is always easy to identify and repair.

Given the dysfunction that now prevails in the Wikipedia community, and the fact that effort on Wikipedia is anonymous, unrecognized, and unrewarded, the most appropriate course for me is to avoid all stress inducing aspects of the project and maximize leisure time pleasure. I will treat the project as a fun hobby. I will not concern myself with the success or failure of Wikipedia. Perhaps Wikipedia will squander the labor of talented volunteers. Perhaps Wikipedia will squander the good will of readers as inferior and biased articles increasingly predominate. Such matters are of no consequence to me.

The truly weird and harmful to Wikipedia's credibility as an encylcopedia are those editors who insist on content that diverges from the Real World^TM's understanding of a topic. Wikipedia policies on no original research, on verifiability, on reliable secondary sources mean nothing to these editors. Fringe theory, the righting of great wrongs, recentism and exceptionalism are four of the hallmarks of the truly weird. Sometimes, though, the editor may be simply incompetent in the subject. One of the funnier bits of academic psychology published in the last decade received the Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.^[1] The paper is Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. The abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.^[2]

Please contribute and write articles. Write in the active voice. Write articles for someone who knows nothing about a topic but needs to know now. State the obvious, which should be obvious to you as the writer but is not necessarily obvious to the reader. Usually, such a statement will be in the first sentence or two of the article. Writing an obscurant Wikipedia article is eccentric. Yes, the previous sentence is an example of a poor sentence. The journalistic shorthand of who, what, where, when, why and how is still applicable. Every English teacher and style guide says to also omit needless words. Yes, also is a needless word and it is splitting an infinitive. Wikipedia article should provide an overview of a topic while omitting the detail. They are not PhD dissertations or monographs. Picture the reader as a bright and literate twelve-year old. They can read well but not too well. They know more than a fifth grader but less than a university student. Many things are still surprising to them.

The Economist provides a good outside and on-line style guide.^[3]

For some humour, see Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.^[4]

• Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory.

• Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence.

• The Wikipedia FAQK

Contents 1 Autographs 2 Projects in which I'm an active participant 2.1 My worthwhile contributions 2.2 Page I'm working on 2.3 Sandbox 2.4 Wikipedia helpful pages 3 About me 4 Anonynmity 4.1 Books 4.2 Movies 4.3 On-line 'personality' quizes 5 References 6 Barnstar yard 7 The inevitable userboxes

[edit] Autographs

If you wish, sign here by editing this sub-section:

1. Thanks for signing mine! Bmg916^Speak 13:20, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

1. All the best from a different west coast! ... dave souza, talk

1. I wanted to thank you for your interest in the Long poem article. We're newbies, but cool cats like you make it both exciting and more accessible. So thanks again for all your help so early on! Jgroom (talk)

1. Thanks for all your help on William Wilberforce and cheers from near the east coast! – Bruce Agendum (talk) 10:14, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Projects in which I'm an active participant

I participate in the following projects:

Project	Portal
none	none

[edit] My worthwhile contributions

Class Icon	Article	Class	Contribution
	Invasive species	This user helped promote the article Invasive species to good article status.	Collaborative to GA. Listed on August 2, 2007.
	Dunstan	This user helped promote the article Dunstan to good article status.	Collaborative to GA. Listed on August 20, 2007
	Harry and the Potters	This user helped promote the article Harry and the Potters to good article status.	Major or sole contributor of content to GA. Listed on September 6, 2007.
	Gene Robinson	This user helped promote the article Gene Robinson to good article status.	Major or sole contributor of content to GA. Listed on December 10, 2007.
	Introduction to evolution	This user helped promote the article Introduction to evolution to featured article status.	Collaborative to FA. Listed on January 29, 2008

[edit] Page I'm working on

I'm a participant at Wikipedia:One featured article per quarter.

Article	Goal Class	Sandbox	Watchlist / Editing
none.	none.	none.	none.

[edit] Sandbox

For my sandbox see here

[edit] Wikipedia helpful pages

For my page of helpful pages see here and here

[edit] About me

I live in southern British Columbia. I registered on Wikipedia on September 6, 2006. I received a BA in Classical Studies at Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec and a B.Sc.(Agr) in Plant Protection at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College & Dalhousie University in Bible Hill, Nova Scotia. Unless the topic involves farming or Western Europe between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E., I have no formal expertise. If the topic does involve either of those two areas, I only trust secondary sources. I have been the co-author of peer-reviewed scientific papers published in fields that are not related to my undergraduate degrees but are related to my undergraduate studies. I studied math and statistics up to the third year university level. I did write an essay that came in second place in a contest of the Weed Science Society of America. I was once a reservist in the 744 (Vancouver) Communication Regiment. Military topics do not interest me.

[edit] Anonynmity

One of the hallmarks of Wikipedia is anonymity. The original supposition was that all editing would be by IP accounts only and there would be no user pages. The idea was to avoid social networking and - like a good Puritan - get down to the business of work. The problem with that ideal is the obvious: none of us in the real world works in anonymity. We all know something about each other; we know that the grocery store clerk is an albino; we know that some of our co-workers are older or younger; we know the names and the names of children of people we think only as an acquaintance. Therefore, in the interest of skating close to the boundaries of anonymity, I will let you know something about myself by way of the books I read and the movies I watch.

[edit] Books

The last five books I've read starting with the book I'm currently reading.

The last five	Title	Author	Year	Notes
1	Paranoid Park	by Blake Nelson	2006	Very good. recommend.
2	The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl	by Barry Lyga	2007	Surprisingly good.
3	The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable.	by Nassim Nicholas Taleb	2007	Thought it was a math book...still interesting...sometimes a tad polemical.
4	New Essays on Huckleberry Finn	edited by Louis J. Budd	1985	Good.
5	Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (Bloom's Guides)	by Harold Bloom	2005	Standard student study guide.

[edit] Movies

The films we've seen in 2008: ranked by how much I enjoyed the film.

Rank	Title
1	Son of Rambow
2	Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
3	Michael Clayton (film)
4	In Bruges
5	The Spirit of the Marathon
6	Ben X
7	Nim's Island
8	Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
9	Smart People
10	White tuft the little beaver (film)
11	The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
12	Speed Racer (film)
13	Then She Found Me
14	Charlie Bartlett
15	I'm Not There
16	Starting Out in the Evening
17	There Will Be Blood
18	All Hat at Rotten Tomatoes
19	Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
20	I'm Not There
21	Married Life (film)
22	Stop Loss
23	Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert in Disney Digital 3-D
24	Fool's Gold (2008 film)
25	Iron Man (film)

Every movie we saw at my local theatres in 2007 ranked by my enjoyment of the film.