From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Just a quick note of introduction. Like any good Wikipedia page (though I'm not claiming this to be a good one ;) ) it'll undergo its fair share of edits (hopefully by me primarily, after all, I'm the world's leading authority on me :) )

Canuckguy the Wikipedian

I first logged on to Wikipedia in late July, 2005.It is a great tool and a laudable goal, and I'm glad there are people that have more time than I to make sure that Wikipedia becomes what it is meant to be.

I've learned that after a while on Wikipedia, people tend to develop "pet projects", focussing on a specific area to improve the encyclopedia (vandal watch, article improvement to FA status, etc.) I seem to have not become immune to that, and my self-proclaimed focus areas are:

  • Redlink fixing: Whenever I see a redlink on a page, my attention is instantly drawn to that. Many of the redlinks I come across can be fixed simply by changing the redlink to the name of an existing article that exists that the original link placer didn't bother to check for (often just a simple mispelling). If I had the time (and, in many cases, the knowledge), I'd even make an article for the redlink (I have done this on at least one occassion: the former redlink for Beechy, Saskatchewan)
  • Cartography: Has always been a passing interest of mine, and in that vein I made BlankMap-World6.svg in hopes that the cartographic areas of Wikipedia could be improved. Again, if I had the time, I'd work on creating some of the world maps with the above map as a template, for now my effort is focussed on making the template the best it can be, while still being useable and understandable for all.

Canuckguy's area of expertise

My main area of expertise is national anthems. (Yes everyone has to have a weird hobby, that's mine.) In my looking about Wikipages on anthems, I hope to flesh out the incorrect info on them so that the Wikipedia is better, at least in the tiny little corner relating to anthems. (Unfortunately, I don't have the time to add to the many stubs on anthems out there. I have my own page on anthems to look after, and my extant knowledge can be found on there too. It seems that people are familiar with my page, as it is a link on several anthem articles on Wikipedia, but I don't feel I should add it as a link myself on the national anthems page (or any other page for that matter), due to conflict of interest. I'll leave that to my minions of fans.  ;)

I consider myself somewhat a " geek of all trades", I know a little about a lot of things, so you'll probably see my grubby little handprints all over Wikipedia.

Canuckguy's pages created

  • Image:BlankMap-World6.svg. My first stab at SVG, and also meant as an improvement on the other SVG world maps on Wikipedia. (For which, I received a Barnstar! Yay!!)

Hi Mate great world map and i like that you've keep the apple pay map updated but could you please update it to add Greenland in Blue as its available their as the country comes under the financial regulation of Denmark this link confirms what I'm saying please scroll down to Denmark https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206637 thank.

  • Beechy, Saskatchewan. Created to make an article out of a redlink and because I know a bit about the town, have visited there several times, and have a connection (several relatives live there, and many more hail from there), felt I was knowledgeable enough to add the article. (This was featured in the "Did You Know?" on the Main Page on May 20, 2007. Yay again!!)
  • List of countries by formation dates. I didn't create this one, but having visited the page and having seen a lot of information missing on an otherwise stellar article (and being a field I have been interested in for a while, to whit, national data), I took it upon myself to add all the missing data, which I did over a two-week period. So more of a "made major contribution to". (It seems that now the page has had another major redesign, completely different from the version that I helped on. But then, that's what Wikipedia is all about, right?)