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 20 years and 23 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.