User: Ambi
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
I'll be a candidate in the elections for the seven places on the Arbitration Committee that will be taking place throughout the first two weeks of December. You can see my statement here and endorsements by others here. I'd appreciate any support I can get.
I'll be away from December 7 until December 12. I may have some internet access once or twice, but I doubt it. If you need to get in touch, leave a message on my talk page or email me, and I'll get in touch as soon as I possibly can.
I have been told that my user page is vague. So indeed, this must be remedied. Well, to a degree anyway.
So, my name's Rebecca. Or Beck, if you want. Either is fine. I'm Australian. I like Canadians. I'm currently celebrating the end of thirteen years of schooling, and spending my summer writing articles here, before I take off to university in February (hopefully doing law, but I won't know that until December). (Not that being at university will cut back my wikipediholicism much either...)
I've been a Wikipedian since July 2003, and sysop since July 2004, but have only been active since early 2004. I occasionally edit on Simple. I'm also, in theory, a sysop at WikiSource but quit the project in May 2004 over new, messy categorisation policies. In total, I've made over 3250 edits, as of November 2004. In addition to my work here, I'm also a meta editor (think sysop) at the Open Encyclopedia Project, or Open Site.
My interests, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, involve improving Wikipedia's coverage of Australian topics, mostly through the Australian notice board, which I started. I've done a lot of work on improving Wikipedia's coverage of Melbourne, over the last year or so, writing a fair few articles also contributing a few photos. More recently, however, I've been working on Wikipedia's coverage of Australian state politics. My main project at the moment is working my way through the current members of the Victorian Legislative Council, trying to get a decent (non-stub) article on each, and maybe even one or two featured articles out of it.
I'm also quite interested in some more obscure topics, such as those related to the Caucasus, the Balkans, and secessionist states. In this way, I'm grateful for the arrival of Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias, and I'm currently one of several trying to reorganise it and breathe some life back into it. I've seen just how painful a lack of information can be in these areas - writing articles on the leaders of Abkhazia was quite a challenge.
I've also spent quite a bit of time maintaining and overhauling the articles related to the Pulitzer Prize. I still do lots of odd little articles around the place, too - for instance, I've written quite a few articles on activists under authoritarian regimes who have made huge sacrifices in order to pursue justice, such as Chico Mendes and Larisa Bogoraz.
I've got a few projects up my sleeve for the coming summer. Once I've finished the members of the Victorian Legislative Council, I've got quite a few other state parliaments in need of similar treatment, including the much larger Victorian Legislative Assembly. I'm also determined to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Australian womens sport - where our coverage of male-oriented sport is reasonable, we have practically nothing on netball or women's basketball or cricket in Australia.
My work with Wikipedia has even led to threats to sue me for enforcing an Arbitration Committee's ban (as of November 2004)! Of course, this was done by approaching the American Federal Trade Commission (some jurisdiction problems there, I'm afraid) through a form on their website, and complaining about "abuses of sysop power, censorship, overt insults and promoting media violence". You just couldn't make this stuff up.
