Boswell1740

This is the profile page for what one veteran Wiki-editor calls a “normal” person, hoping to survive among the many “troubled souls” and a “mobocracy” (his words) who seem to hold sway over acres of Wikipedia. I felt driven to start editing here anonymously a decade ago, out of exasperation at the misconceptions, unreliability and exaggeration in subjects about which I have expertise, from high culture to low politics.

Having fought my corner and delivered “Talk” broadsides against Wikipedia’s climate of “negative chaos” (again, his words), suddenly last year my contributions were being published on first save, and not undone the next day, as if I’d magically earned some spurs.

In gratitude, I’ve finally signed up to start creating articles representative of a British upbringing. As a polymath with insights gained in publishing, media, communications, education, arts and sciences, this will involve Scottish common sense, rigorous fact-checking and wishing hard upon that star to arrive at editorial impartiality.

My nickname here honours both a giant of English biography, the candid yet good-humoured James Boswell, and his devotion to Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first popular and creative Dictionary of the English language, which settled for us today many ambiguities of usage. Boswell’s name itself became a byword for an observer of others at close quarters, magnifying glass and rhetorical dissection kit always at hand.