My name is Fiona, and I know more about Stephen Sondheim, William Finn musicals, Sammy Davis, Jr., Motown, and the folk, soul, rock, pop, and jazz scenes of the 1960s and 1970s than is really necessary. The depth of my trivial knowledge is largely irrelevant though, as I mainly make cosmetic edits. You can usually find me on pages in those subjects systematizing and contributing to the trivia sections, collating lists, and editing infoboxes, or making general grammatical, technical, and organizational edits on pages across many subjects.
I really did not expect anyone to actually read this so feel free to stop now if you don't care about my life and love of wikis. Basically, if I could do anything better, please tell me. I'm new to having an actual account and making substantial edits on Wikipedia, and I have spent a lot of time on other wikis as an admin (and thus doing more hierarchical organization, vandalism/spam control, and inter-user conflict work than actual page edits), so bear with me because I'm probably doing things wrong that I don't realize are different here.
George Rhodes (musician): I need help on this! I'm not super familiar with the jazz scene in the 40's/early 50's, and I think most sources discussing his early work are print-only, I've gleaned as much as I can from online sources, might be more in some jazz encyclopedias. Most of my background knowledge of George is from reading too many Sammy Davis Jr. biographies, so the biog is very Sam heavy right now...
I started casually editing Wikipedia around 2006, and did so anonymously for years, until I made an account on a whim in September of 2014. Prior to finally making this account, I had been an active member, administrator, and moderator of several other wikis. Those experiences made my decision to stop lurking here feel like finally coming back home to join the family business after going off on my own and gaining experience working for independent start-ups.
That being said, please let me know if you have any concerns or comments regarding my contributions, or any advice for me.
I absolutely love research, databases, information science, typography (especially page and text formatting), statistical and theoretical analysis, linguistics, library science, and data analysis. I make far too many spreadsheets for it to be considered healthy. I own far too few books and records to justify the extensiveness of my personalized library classification system (a pointlessly complex combination of LCC and DDC). Ultimately it all boils down to two major passions: data and structure. The way we organize, distribute, access, and display information, and how information systems are arranged and operated is endlessly fascinating to me. That is why I love being a part of Wikipedia (in addition to the whole "freely accessible information by the people for the people" deal).
My data systems obsession also might partially explain why I am in the field of psychology. I think there are many psychological components in information science, and many instances in psychology where information science can inform our knowledge of how the human brain functions, internally and in conjunction with the external world. To me, they are very interrelated (as are most seemingly distinct fields, especially with psychology, as human knowledge and thought is a part of psychology, no matter how much some philosophers want you to believe there is such a thing as complete objectivity).
Information science is like anticipating the way the human mind's internal systems will attempt to connect to the external world, and then implementing systems in that world which are compatible with organization of mental systems. Psychology is like utilizing and understanding those internal systems which comprehend and interpret data received from external systems, and how the mind's internal organization uses and arranges that new data within its existing framework. To misquote Telly Monster, "It's all data systems, man! It's great..."[1]
As I mentioned, I'm studying psychology, and don't even have my degree yet, so I'm hardly qualified in anything I just spoke about. I have a deep passion for many subjects, but I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable on them as I'd like to be, nor am anywhere near having expertise in them. Except, possibly William Finn musicals... it is very possible I am close to becoming one of the world's leading experts on that subject.
Uniformity in formatting is my life blood. Lately, I have also been hung up on fixing time relative references in low traffic pages, and adding temporal templates. I also find myself automatically text editing for brevity, clarity, typos, and uniformity of grammar within the article, which is what the majority of my anonymous edits have been historically. Nothing gets my goat more than an accidental tense change, or nonuniform orthography of proper nouns.
Also, I want to take this opportunity to apologize to prose purists for my gratuitous list-making, but finding different ways to say the same thing over and over again does not help anyone, in my opinion. Also I just really love lists. And infoboxes. Probably because at times I have a very difficult time focusing on too much information at once because of my ADHD, which is definitely a reason I love clear and effective formatting and uniformity: so I know where to look and what I am looking at.
I'm not sure what the point of user pages are here, but I almost definitely missed it... Especially seeing as I really am irrelevant to almost everyone else at this point. But I wanted to get down my thoughts on why I'm here and what my goals are, for myself.
Feel free to comment here if you have specific concerns about a page I've listed, are currently in the process of heavily editing one of them and want to give me a heads up, or have already completed one of my specific goals
list playbill and musical theatre vinyl collections inventory on page, so you can determine if information from those materials would enhance any articles
check Commons and Wikipedia uploads to see if licensing for all images was cleared, double check about Carnivals in Flanders poster.jpg being PD
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