User:Calton

This Wikipedian is deceased. His user page is preserved here in his memory.

It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that.

The above obviously includes the various trolls, spammers, quacks, greedheads, and crackpots -- and their enablers -- who hang out at ED and WR. I also seem to have attracted the unwanted attention of a crackpot spamming "psychologist", an indefinitely banned (for good reason) spammer, a serial plagiarist from Colorado, an egotistical ex-publisher of a freebie magazine in Tokyo, and an indefinitely banned anger-management poster child socking from the Czech Republic (and his reincarnated sock). If you're one of the those various trolls, spammers, quacks, greedheads, crackpots, and/or their enablers, welcome! Now get lost.

This user has been vaccinated against COVID-19.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 19 years, 8 months and 27 days.

This user is one of the 1000 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

This user contributes to Wikipedia Asian Month.

• User:Calton/SpammerList
• User:Calton/Watchlist - Sockpuppet IP list
• Some pictures I've taken and which are used on Wikimedia projects. Ansel Adams I'm not, but I might as well be useful.

Yes, I took the picture on the right. Yes, I change it frequently very occasionally. Yes, they're all used on Wikimedia Commons. Come back often for a new, marginally-in-focus picture! Collect them all!

I'm a Westerner living in the Tokyo area, about 170 miles (270 km) south of Fukushima. I've never been this close to a potential nuclear catastrophe, and I can't really say that I've enjoyed the experience.

I first became aware of Wikipedia when I began using it to look up some technical terms, since I was an English-literature major screwing around with computers, not vice versa. Being of a copy-editor bent, I noticed typos, misspellings, and generally screwy language occasionally, and after a while I realized that I could in fact edit them myself. So I did. Soon, I was hitting the random page button, just for my own amusement, and I got sucked in.

Now, this has turned into a relaxing break from my required copy editing: I get to exercise my pedantic tendencies, without the responsibility of deadlines or deliverables. I've occasionally gotten a little deeper into things, and have written a few articles from scratch.

This whole project is infectious: hitting the random page button, I encounter whole swatches of text and knowledge areas requiring work, and I suddenly feel compelled to try to do something about it, even if I didn't have any particular interest in the subject to begin with. For example, I did a massive edit (for style, organization, and a general readability) for the submarine USS Trout (SS-202). I have no particular interest in the military, especially not the Navy, yet I found myself sucked into doing this. Same with entries on community colleges and Booker Prize winners.

It's kind of like my current project -- if you can call it that -- of eliminating spam and MySpace-like vanity pages disguised as editor pages. This started out as a simple task which I figured to complete fairly quickly, but the more I dig the more I find. A few years back, over a six-month-or-so period, I figure that I tagged maybe 1,500 so-called user pages for oblivion, of whom maybe 3 have since done any editing whatsoever. And I keep finding more to this day, not to mention the brand-new ones cropping up daily, including obvious vanity articles that have been userfied by other editors who ought to know better.

So far I have added a few articles and stubs (and yes, I plan to expand the stubs if I can), but mostly it's janitorial work. As I told one troller, It's clean-up duty, mopping up after the dishonest, incompetent, and fanatical. Can't imagine why you'd have a problem with that.