I also maintain accounts in French Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, German wikipedia and Norwegian Wikipedia, as well as Wiktionary and xxxx, although don't use any of them much.
It's come to be time for me to write a user page, fittingly at the end (more or less) of my intense involvement with Wikipedia for the last couple of years - as the original version archived here was written early on in my Wiki experience and I never did keep full track of what articles I've made and what areas like categories and different topics I've been fool enough to touch on. This page will try to summarize what I think I did was worthwhile, what subjects and treatment issues will always mean a lot to me and what article areas I hope others will develop and expand upon.
You'll find me all over Wiki talk pages, often tangled up in some conflict over some nonsense or other but also digging into materials and issues and coming up with ideas about what should be in an article, or as usually more controversially and sometimes heatedly, what is or isn't in it, and how it's put. I'm a big opponent of "false history" and get pretty sharp-tongued if it's truth I'm trying to get at. I've been told I should go blog, that I'm on the attack (ah yes, but only ever in self-defence from those doing the accusing...), or that whole topic or evidence/material areas are off-limits, but rather than deliberately be an ogre, I see myself as more irascible, crotchety, plain-talking, blunt and...hmm..."spicey" and also not ready to suffer fools gladly. For this reason I've been on the carpet on a number of interesting occasions, even got myself blocked once - but all in the name of NPOVizing articles, making sure the articles reflect the public interest and open information above those of the individual or subject they're about. The same applies for issues in the history of British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, Canada, the First Nations and some of the Native Americans, the various ethnic and settler histories; making sure all sides are told, and that the language of an article doesn't either turn someone off, or launch an edit war. But sometimes that, of coure, can launch an edit war, in one spectacular occasion beginning with an unreported mutual 3RR between "sometimes" vs "usually" vs "often". The arcane information war that began out of that is too comlicated to even begin explaining, but it's also the exhaustive kind of thing that takes a lot out of my enthusiasm for what Wikipedia is and what it can be. Even without such distractions I've come to the conclusion there's just too much to write up, even just here within British Columbia; you could spend a lifetime (unpaid) and still not address everything here that would need coverage; that Wikipedia one day conceivably could is itself amazing, huh?
But as life would have it, and by choice also, I'm pulling up stakes in short order and, other than webmail, won't be plugged into the internet for most of the summer. Not foreseeably anyway, but you never know; but saying that I spend too much time here and have too much else going on to be around here much more, even just answering questions and helping out on some pages and in category/wikiproject issues etc. A guy's got only so much time to live, and this last while - days on end - that I've been in Wikipedia, it's kept me from generating much of an income and furthering certain career goals. So......
I never did get a chance to fully rework the main article linked in this title, although I dabbled with it some, as also with the history section of Vancouver (some of which might now be migrated to History of Vancouver, as was discussed at some point but I haven't been paying attention). Certain topic areas within the history of British Columbia are for some reason of vital interest to me, although fairly arcane in the modern consciousness as well as largely undealt with in modern academia: the boundary disputes and the imperial claims, inter-tribal politics and warfare, the more radical events in recent provincial history, e.g. the Salmon War, the Solidarity Crisis, Ledgegate, and the litany of scandals stretching back into the colonial period which are the very definition of the place's political history, as are simultaneously the eclectic and extrovert cast of characters who populated those stories. Tying together the history of early British Columbia and Washington Territory/Oregon Territory post-1846 has become of major interest to me, and even in areas such as shipping/ships, railways and mining - even forestry - the two can't easily be separated if the whole story be told; the mutual dynamic of the Klondike (which forced the hand of Britain and the US over the long-dormant issue of the Yukon Ports). But those are just key moments; I've become interest in the Pacific Northwest as a whole entity from what is known of pre-Contact histories and through the era of the marine fur trade to the launch of the land-based fur empire, and its loss to American aggrandizement and British imperial indifference. The Canadian national historical mythos and its abbreviated version of British Columbia history have failed the Pacific Province miserably, and that's even without the usual discounting of the interconnectedness of what went on south of the line after 1846; the Cayuse and Yakima Wars "we" washed our hands of, or Aberdeen did so when he signed the Treaty of Washington consigning the populous nations of Puget Sound and the Columbia Basin to the obvious fate that awaited them at the hands of the Americans; the genocidal campaign of extermination in California that began as soon as Mexican rule ended was not unknown in Victoria, but easy enough for London to know (and no doubt they knew); so I have found an interest in such things as the Yakima War and the Stephens Treaties and the complexity of Kootenay/Boundary-Spokane-ID-MT mining/railway economics. All fascinating, any one of which could take a lifetime to fully explore and write up - as is also the case with my parallel interests in bc's ghost towns, mountain ranges, canyons, historic ships, a certain range of biographies that have taken my fancy, and more and more on my home country, the Bridge River-Lillooet, as well as anything to do with the early Lower Mainland and, because of that, adjoining parts of Washington. The interconnectedness of various BC towns, socially/personally and in business, with the US and the differentiation of ethnic settlement across various teowns/areas are also areas I think worthy of being documented. The focus on BC history, especially at the natinoal media/politics level, has been on the ethnic discrimination histories only, as if that's all BC was about. That does horrendous discredit to the complexity and richness of BC history, and there are various topics where my position is, matter-of-fact, that "political correctness is inherently POV", and others where Canadian national vanities/mythologies I'll take on with a pitchfork, as also with attempts to whitewash articles for any cause, be it that of a politician/political party or an ethnic agenda or anything else. I get called all kinds of things because of this, and have WP:Civil cited at me over and over, usually by the rudest and most obstinated, obstructive people who resort to rules when their position is untenable...but my position is and always is "just the facts". The politicizing of facts, whether by judgemental language and the pretention that opinion/anlysis constitute fact or simply by the omission of inconvenient facts, are things I just can't leave alone. Well, if I'm around, and I won't be. But the following list of articles and their talkpages are places where I've either sharpened my teeth, or had them broken, or at least had to use them to some effect in order to make sure truth is maintained and/or respected, instead of overwritten or deliberately obscured (even well-meaningly). Skookum1 04:28, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
