User:Checkingfax


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Persoonia terminalis is the 5millionth article on the English Wikipedia

Biography v1.0.0.2


The mission of this user is to improve the encyclopedia and have fun doing it. On-wiki and off-Wiki, this user is a self-taught jack of all trades, master of none. He is a self-described bone-white male. He has been diagnosed by his doctor as being "fat and fit". His doctor wants him to intake more salt to keep his blood pressure up. His friends are jealous of this, but frankly this user does not like salty food (except for chips, pickles, and anchovies). His cholesterol is the lowest ever recorded at his hospital, without the patient being dead or born prematurely, and the hospital was founded in 1941. His earliest childhood memory is at age 2-1/2 when he saw his baby brother through the maternity window on Main Street at the same hospital where this user was born. This user clearly remembers his parents parking on Main Street and everybody walking up to the window while the nurses showed off baby bro. He has attended school but lacks degrees or diplomas. He has many inactive or expired memberships, trainings, professional certifications, and professional licenses. School was a place to spark individual learning at his own pace and he thrived under those ground rules. His parents also gave him complete freedom in his actions and lifestyle although he did get scolded once and was shell shocked when his mother said "I am going to tell your mother". He has never been spanked or grounded nor has he ever spanked or grounded his children. They have both gone on to become hyper-educated diploma waving skilled professionals with advanced degrees, training, and residencies.

He has no focus on Wikipedia and shies away from no topic or article, although with Special:Statistics ( to refresh numbers) articles on the English Wikipedia he has not even scratched the surface of the topics out there. His favorite Wikitask is helping others, for helping is the fastest way to learning. He has a thirst for knowledge and soaks things up like a sponge when immersed in them. He learns by doing, not by talking about it. If you need help, him and he will put his shoulder to the wheel with you. On-wiki he is currently active in many projects with the highlights being Tip of the day, The Wikipedia Library, and Today's articles for improvement (TAFI)—‌which comes out weekly and is only one article. LOL. He was a double alpha tester for The Wikipedia Adventure, an early adopter of Visual Editor, and uses Flow on his talk page on meta. He was one of the first question-answerers at The Teahouse but never got invited to be or signed up as an official Teahouse host. However, the rest of the answerers pretty well have it covered and no Teahouse question goes unanswered. He has never read any documentation end-to-end on Wikipedia as it is too much to internalize. He reads snippets on a need-to-know basis. He abhors Wikilawyering. If he sees abuse on Wikipedia he will deal with it. He spends almost most no time on Wikipedia noticeboards, preferring to deal with things personally. He avoids conflict, but can take the heat. He has learned the most by helping and listening to female editors (or self-described females). Only a small handful have been prickly to engage with. He has also benefited from engagements with editors with disabilities, LGBTQA editors, and COI editors. Scroll up and down this page for more of the fine points on this users' other on-Wiki involvements; you can stitch together facts displayed in the plethora of userboxes this user has posted.

Off-wiki he enjoys spending time with his small remaining family, his slowly dwindling pool of best friends (they are dying off for sudden and unexpected reasons). He enjoys the concept of going out to the movies but his butt hurts at the two hour mark, and the movie must be very engaging to distract him from the butthurt. He prefers dramas, well written action films, romantic comedies, chick flicks, and documentaries. He used to get free entrance to a movie house that showed three different art films every night. He also got free admission to a regular movie house in town. His father wore many hats and for several years was a top level administrator at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and a filmmaker. 16mm films were frequently rolling in this users household (such as Bullitt or even Gone with the Wind—‌illegal to possess at that time). He enjoys almost any kind of music and is enamored by live music and is in awe of musicians. He has been to Pageant of the Masters three times (back then owned and narrated by Thurl Ravenscroft—‌the voice of Tony the Tiger). He followed Ravenscroft backstage once and Ravenscroft gave him and a group a nice brisk tour. He has been to The Glory of Christmas and The Glory of Easter multiple times at the Crystal Cathedral and was awestruck by the set, the live animals, the performers, and the performance. He witnessed and got gassed in the People's Park riots (in multiple years). He gets invited out to eat now and then but then has to pay. When he invites people out to eat he always pays for all invitees. He dislikes being the subject of charity or being the subject of a spotlight. He has had stage fright since the age of five when he did his first school stage play, but he sucks it up and has moderated groups of up to 30 people, managed the efforts of up to 300 volunteers, made short presentations to audiences of up to 600, and been interviewed for TV segments a few times.

In his younger days he enjoyed gardening, creating textiles, pottery, glass blowing, yard work, archery, sailing, power boating, snowmobiling, rock climbing, swimming, hiking, flag football, handball, bowling, photography, film making, home improvement, shopping, traveling, four wheeling, motorcycling, playing in the mud, wrestling (doing it, not watching it), cooking, volunteering, and so on. He used to read long novels like Clavell's Shōgun, Tai-Pan, Gai-Jin, King Rat, Noble House, and finally Whirlwind, plus the whole Hemingway series. As a child he read a detective or mystery novel daily like Perry Mason, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or anything by Edgar Allan Poe, and at the library he liked to read magazines like Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Psychology Today, Consumer Reports, and National Geographic. At the grocery store he occasionally sneaked a peak at Playboy and Penthouse but he only read the articles. He loved Mad magazine especially the "Spy -vs- Spy" page. He also enjoyed the entire Pippi Longstocking series. As a whippersnapper this user enjoyed thumbing through the World Book Encyclopedia reading every article he landed on. He also liked to thumb through the dictionary looking for new words. He tried to learn a new word every week for a while but he gave up. He has been active in the Internets since 1996. He is a web host for 30 Internet domains. He misses his mom, dad, pets, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and all his close friends that have passed on.

Gizmos
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Statistics

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 * Total pages on the English Wikipedia: Special:Statistics
 * Backwards count from articles 5,000,000 on the English Wikipedia: five-million
 * Total Wikipedia edit count: Special:Statistics
 * Total active editors on the English Wikipedia: Special:ActiveUsers

Userboxes
 {Here}  are my contributions to Wikipedia.

Did you know
These DYKs were featured in the primo spot on the main page along with an image:

→ [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know&oldid=695484851 link]

→ [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know&oldid=699946862 link]

→ [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know/Queue/1&oldid=701199284 link]

→ link (nom #1)

→ link (nom #5)

These DYKs were featured on the main page but without an image:

→ [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know&oldid=704758665 link]

→ (cannot find here)

→ link (nom #2)

→ link (nom #3)

→ link (nom #4)

These DYKs were pulled from the queue for being focused unduly on negative aspects of living persons:

→ [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know&oldid=702183898 link] (pull[ed] Jonas Åkerlund (politician) per "Articles and hooks that focus unduly on negative aspects of living individuals should be avoided.")

The Wikipedia Adventure badges
Checkingfax was a double alpha-tester for the Wikipedia Adventure.

Tools and tricks

 * Category:Redirect templates

Bookmarks

 * [//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words Magic Words]
 * Method of Style/Layout
 * [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup#Linking_to_old_revisions_of_pages.2C_diffs.2C_and_specific_history_pages Wiki markup complete list]
 * Yadkard: Fills in bare URLs
 * Wikipedia Reference Search—‌a Google search that only returns sites vetted by Wikipedians

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