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It's been over four years and over 1,400 edits, and I'm finally getting to this user page thing. Oh well!
Welcome to my user page! My online moniker is Grettoonist, and I've been editing Wikipedia since 2020, and have thoroughly enjoyed making contributions to the site. I'll admit, I've become a bit of a Wikipediholic, but I assure you I can stop editing sidebars whenever I want to. As a politics student, I have mainly been interested in helping political education, whether that'd be improving articles to ensure accuracy of topics, or adding routes of navigation to allow them to easily expand their knowledge on a given subject. A key tenet of my edits to politics articles has been socialism, which has been an interest of mine for years, and, while editing as neutrally as I can, it has been in my interest to further an understanding of socialist philosophies and events. What has kept me going all these years, continuing to edit Wikipedia has been the sense of community, learning about and adapting to the guidelines of the site, and improving on my edits. I am confident to say that Wikipedia has had a profound positive impact on my life. And if you're reading this user page of mine and you're a Wikipedian like myself, it's great to be part of this community!
As for a limited autobiography, I have had various interests that have played into what to focus on when editing Wikipedia, including my love for film studies, animation, comics and history. In terms of my political views, I have no objections to calling myself far-left, though I maintain that I have founded my views on reason and logical conclusions. I started out as liberal-leaning, then with social democracy, then democratic socialism. I've dabbled with Marxism–Leninism to an extent, but considering that almost all of my gripes with the ideology had been addressed to some extent by Trotskyism, which in turn has had a prominent influence in the British left, I'd say I'm currently leaning Trotskyist. And to tie this back into Wikipedia, part of reading on the article on Trotskyism and its source helped me realise that my views already align quite well with Trotskyists', which is emblematic of how educationally useful the site is in compiling resources and informing readers, myself included. Still, I remain open-minded and am willing to engage with other ideologies.
What have my Wikipedia activities been?[edit]
My first edit was on 30th March 2020, for List of accolades received by The Dark Knight, when I corrected the article on where the film ranked among the highest-grossing films. Since then, I have been quite busy, and have learned a lot on the way. Here are the highlights of my contributions!
- Back in July 2020, when I noticed a space in the infobox of the film Animal Farm that was not needed, I removed it, and considered it a one-off. However, I've become obsessed with finding random spaces everywhere on the site, especially in terms of extra paragraphs, and taking them out. Since September 2020, my edit summaries for these has mainly been "Removed the unnecessary space." My reason for making these edits for the longest time is part of my philosophy that even the little details count, and serves to make Wikipedia ever so slightly more professional.
- When I noticed in May 2020 that the TV special How the Grinch Stole Christmas! had "animation" in the genre section of its infobox, I quickly took it out. Soon after, I started systematically going through the list of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and checked each one to see if they too had "animation" as a genre of theirs. My gripe with this is that animation being a genre has always been a misconception that frustrated me, similarly to Brad Bird, due to how it undermines the medium's creative potential. It's indicative of the way that cultural misconceptions can influence the accuracy of Wikipedia, given that this seems to mainly be a Western phenomenon.
- Another systematic round of edits I made back in 2020 was regarding the spelling of the Western genre, namely the lowercase "W" present in many references in articles of Western films. I went through the lists of Western films to identify which articles weren't spelling it the 'official' way. Although I continue to remove unnecessary spaces when I can spot them, I don't really care about this spelling enough to pursue articles that don't use it. By September of that year, I stopped doing it.
- In May 2023, when I was dissatisfied with the communism in Italy template and started a topic on its talk page to broaden its scope, I realised for the first time that I could just do it myself on my sandbox. So I did, and since then, I have been experimenting with different ideas in my sandbox, namely on the subject of politics, which became the central focus of my contributions to the site since getting more invested in political education and research into ideologies. For example, in May 2024, I created a version of the communist parties template that included international organisations with the intention of showcasing the change to the talk page before adding it myself, and it was successful, albeit the final result has been more watered down. Less successful was the proposition of a multiple image for the lead section on dictators, which did not go through. Still, the use of my sandbox has allowed me to broaden my own scope on how to express my ideas, and pursue them should I be confident enough that they'd make a good addition.
- When I saw the Stalinism sidebar seemed a bit lacklustre in June 2023, I opted to expand all aspects of the template, from the concepts to the people to the related topics. It was quite a bulky edit, but I was proud to have made such a substantial contribution. Since then, I have been passionate in the value that sidebars and footers have in allowing for efficient navigation through subjects for readers. The expansions of these sidebars I'm particularly proud of are the ones for the Maoism sidebar in August 2023 and May 2024, the Trotskyism sidebar in May 2024, and the republicanism sidebar in June 2024.
- On 26th February 2024, while scrolling through the article for the Communist Party USA, I noticed its infobox contained Browderism. Once I clicked on the article, I was very dissatisfied with its lack of content and otherwise shabby appearance. After considering whether to nominate the article for deletion, I figured that with time to kill, I could explore the subject and expand the article. Taking partial inspiration from the Maoism article, I expanded everything about the article by the end of the day, making it my largest edit to date.
- I would say the contribution to this site I'm proudest of is the creation of the American anarchism sidebar. While studying political ideologies, anarchism came up alongside liberalism, conservatism and socialism, and so the fact that those latter three ideologies, alongside libertarianism had their own sidebars for those movements in the U.S., but not for anarchism, I believed there was a gap to be filled. I started to develop a hypothetical sidebar in my sandbox on 5th March 2024, which I then completed over the next couple of days. Then on 11th March, I created it for Wikipedia, and arguing for its existence on the WikiProject Anarchism talk page was a big step for me when interacting with this site and its community.
These contributions reflect where I am right now. I'm still learning as an editor and I'm still wanting to be active on the site.
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