• Brian McNeil
   —  Wikinewsie

As it amuses me to frame it, "I'm so old I was born before Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon"; albeit, only during the preceding February. That was in central Scotland, which I've now moved back to after over fifteen years based in/near Brussels, Belgium. Good to be back? Take a look at some of my photos, and you decide.

As far as Wikinews goes, I first edited in January 2005. I didn't do much more until September that year when I wrote my first full article, Wal-Mart accused of workers rights violations. Since then, I've been main author on over 100 articles; done in-depth coverage of Thailand's insurgency problems in the Muslim-Malay southern provinces; documented the downfall of Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand's then-Prime Minister; dabbled with reporting on newsworthy Wikimedia items such as the US government's vandalism, the "vetted" version "Wikipedia for Schools", and the making of the 2,000^th Featured Article on English Wikipedia, with some more-recent 'crossover' work involving significant image contributions to Wikimedia Commons. The handful of Wikinews Featured articles shown below may not seem a lot, but at present the project has little more than 100 in total from over 16,000 published.

In the intervening time since first becoming involved I've moved up to be one of the project's bureaucrats and administrators. In 2008 I was invited, expenses paid, to attend the annual Wikimedia Conference, Wikimania 2008, held in Alexandria, Egypt; Craig Spurrier and I spoke, and answered questions, on Wikinews—attempting to encourage attendees to try and contribute to the project; I also managed to write about the US State Department's Diplopedia, which uses the same software as Wikipedia. Subsequent to that I was given privileged contact information with Google News, leading to the English-language Wikinews now being listed in Google News.

A few photos of Craig and I talking at Wikimania are available on Wikimedia Commons; I prefer not to use those here, as those poor photographs are an unpleasant reminder of then-unknown health problems. Later in the year I spent seven weeks in a Walloon hospital having a blood clot removed from my leg, the responsible two-centimetre vegetative growth (my conscience) excised from my heart, and being treated with extremely high doses of antibiotics for a serious chest infection—that's doses measured in grammes, not milligrams.

Whilst still in Belgium, I instituted the current archiving policy, applying and refining it, as I put around 4,000 articles into an archived state. I have extensively worked on the Style Guide, various other guidelines and policies, plus the current welcome template {{howdy}} and the {{press release}} template for those non-clueful enough to try and get those on a neutral news site.

I also set up the wikinewsie.org domain, predominantly used to give accredited reporters more professional email addresses. If you want to help keep that running, donations would be very, very welcome! Given some of the stories we've covered, I'd love to move the hosting from the U.S. to Sweden and switch to SSL for the entire site.

When I'm not testing the limits of what might be considered 'sanity' on this Wikinews project, I have been known to dabble in other arts. May 2010 saw me invited to visit Norway where a good friend I previously entrusted with some poetic musings had released a first album/CD with his band, The Windmill. Including one track where my poetry had been fused with music and the given credit enabled me to join the UK's PRS for Music, possibly even having an opportunity to receive royalties for my musings. I took the photo to the left at the launch concert using a Nokia 3G phone.

The nine-years-in-the-making album, To be continued... has – to-date – received particularly favourable reviews in the Prog-Rock press. It is available via iTunes, several other online stores, and a physical copy (on CD) shouldmay be ordered on the band's website. (If you need any more convincing, check out this review on Background, a Dutch Prog-Rock magazine. )
In February 2011, the album received a "Best Classic Rock Album of 2010 (Newcomer)" award from Norway's Rock FM. Later in 2011, I was again able to visit Norway where the band were supporting Fish— former front-man of Marillion

Table of contents

Scotsman... with a Box

Accreditation Details   •  Alt. Email: <firstname>.<lastname>@gmx.co.uk   •  GPG Key ID: C03BC391EFD52BB9   •  Fingerprint: 7C3D FFD5 5ED5 B80F 1D18 A52B E84C 8928 6ABC A7AD}}

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• If you want to know some of the more odd things I get up to, give The Credit Crunch Blues a listen, the lyrics are mine.
• Or, take a peek at my first article in a national UK publication.
• Plus, there's my newly set-up site, The Edinburgh Resurrectionists.

Useful 'bits'

Misc.