Hello! Welcome to my User Page. I am Operator873 and I'm a Wikimedia Steward and a sysop and CheckUser on the Simple English Wikipedia. If you're reading this, I assume you are curious about who I am. I am a veteran of the US Air Force and was Honorably Discharged after six years of service. Since then, I've worked in various law enforcement positions over the last 15 years. In 2018, I resigned and left the career field to pursue my dream: Network Administration & Security. I'm now a Systems Engineer and my work involves supporting servers, network operations, and firewall maintenance.

My focus on Simple English Wikipedia is countervandalism, anti-spam, content control, administrative upkeep, and Long Term Abuse investigations. You'll occasionally find me working on creating, simplifying, or improving articles; but I'll be the first to admit, this is not my strongest skill. I enjoy helping new users and explaining Wikipedia policies and procedures that are difficult to grasp.

On other wikis, I've formerly volunteered as an OTRS Agent, and on English Wikipedia, I currently work at ACC creating accounts. I'm quite active in the global effort against vandalism and spam as well. Off wiki, I develop bots and scripts that support on-wiki operations like Bot873 which is called GlobalSysBot on IRC.

I have a bot that reports edits to my talk page so if you leave me a message there, I will respond quickly if I'm available. However, if you need assistance quickly, I'm always online and reachable via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in the #wikipedia-simple ^connect channel. My nick is Operator873 just like here on Wikipedia. If I'm away and unable to respond to your message, please feel free to ask anyone else in the channel. If you need to report an emergency, use the magic word: !admin@simplewiki

Have fun! Be kind! Be bold! And, whatever you do, don't bite the new editors!

If you need to reach me, please feel free to leave me a message on my talk page or you can usually find me lurking in the #wikipedia-en channel on IRC .

I do make mistakes, occasionally. If you disagree with the actions I took, ask me about it and I'll be happy to discuss it with you, if needed.