| 14,000+ | This user has made more than 14,000 contributions to Wikipedia. |
| esol | This user is NOT a native speaker of English and uses English as a Second Language. Please be patient with tipos typos and error grammars! |
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Personal introduction
Hi!
I try not to make a personal website out of this page, and only put things here that could be useful for Wikipedia.
But now I thought I would explain my username, because people might wonder why I chose that. Here were my thoughts:
- I wanted a name that had nothing to do with my real name. I don't want people that I know to find me here because they look up my name in Google. Not that I have anything to hide here, but I don't want to have to discuss Wikipedia things in real life, there are better things to talk about.
- I wanted a name that would be easy to say and spell. That makes it easier for other users to remember me.
- At the time, I was listening to U2. In my opinion, the best thing about U2 is the soundscaping of The Edge. Mullen drumming patterns are okay, but they don't make the music stand out. Clayton's bass is mediocre (for such a band), but The Edge works around it. Bono's singing is actually good, but I never really care for singers or lyrics.
- And I could not get the song "Feliz Navidad" by José Feliciano out of my head.
- The combination of the things above make it EdgeNavidad. If I would have picked a name on any other day, it would have been different. At this moment, U2 is not even in my top ten of favourite bands, and thankfully "Feliz Navidad" is no longer in my head.
Other than that, here are a few facts about me, that you can also see in those boxes here:
- I am a member of the WikiProject Cycling. For some reason, I am interested in Tour de France history. I am not a professional cyclist or connected to a cycling team or organisation or anything.
- I have reviewer and autopatroller rights on Wikipedia. I don't know what that really says about me, but maybe it shows that I have not been vandalising in my edits on Wikipedia.
- I am not an administrator on Wikipedia. I don't even know exactly what an administrator does, but it sounds like something that takes a lot of time, and gives little in return. Thankfully other people want to do this.
- I have made over 14000 contributions. This shows I am not new here.
- I have made five articles "Good Articles": the 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906 and 1907 Tour de France. The plan is to have many more Tour de France article in this Good status.
- I have a PhD degree. Not in anything related to Tour de France history, so this says totally nothing about my authority on that area. I hope to finish a book someday about some of the aspects on Tour de France history, but even when that is finished, I will not make edits on cycling articles as if I was an authority myself: I only reproduce what other people found.
- I am not a native speaker of English. In my daily job I have been using English for several years, writing reports, journal articles and book chapters, and talking to colleagues not born in my country. The English in my work output has been said to be perfect; my most common mistake is combining different variaties of English (mainly British and American English). The things I write about in Wikipedia are of a completely different topic, and I regularly struggle to find the right words, and have the feeling that I express myself with a vocabularity of a five-year-old. Actually, it is the other way around: the 'difficult' words are easy for me, it is the 'simple' words that are problematic. The 'difficult' words in English usually have a Latin or Greek base, so they are shared by most European languages. Words for herbs and fish are not, so in a fish restaurant I am lost. I know that a "cod with parsley" is a fish with a herb, but I would have to look up which one.
- What this has to do with Wikipedia: I am aware of my limited skills. If I made a mistake and you repair it, I'll learn from it. I will not feel bad. It is easier to fix the mistakes in my prose than to come up with a version from scratch. So I am confident my net contribution is still positive.
And this is about all that I want to say about myself.
OK, maybe I should add something more, for full disclosure. This is not my first Wikipedia account. I have had an account before, but then I felt it took up too much of my time, and left Wikipedia. (By changing the password to something random, thus preventing myself from logging in again.) Some months later, I wanted to edit again, so I created this account. My previous account was never blocked (or even warned). I did make some mistakes with that account: I once copied stuff from a website here, changing little bits in each sentence, thinking this would be allowable. After my edits were reverted by another user, I learned that I had been wrong, and never did this again.
I am sure that with this information it is possible to find out which previous account I am referring to. I choose not to link to that account here for personal reasons, and I hope everybody can respect that.
Useful pages
Sample biography for a dead cyclist can be found here.
Sample biography for a living cyclist can be found here.
Tour de France yearly articles
In 2009 I started to systematically improve the Tour de France articles, see this diff for the status at that moment (63 stubs!). I did a lot of the early improvements, and in 2016 the Tour de France task force was started; the overview of Tour de France article status is now maintained by that taskforce.
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