User:Shimgray

(Since someone was wondering - yes, I was absent for a month and a half. This wasn't me storming off or the result of growing disillusionment, I just had unexpectedly bad internet access for a while...)

Userpage on Wikimedia Commons

Userpage on Meta

I'm Andrew Gray. The username comes from a nickname, oh, seven years ago; I conflated it with my surname, and discovered to my delight it's (almost) unique. So it proves a handy name for this sort of thing. (The actual name, on the other hand, is very non-unique - there's a thousand of them in the country - and it just confuses matters if I use it. At university, I got email for an emeritus professor; an old acquaintance contacted me a while back to ask when I'd become a professional herpetologist, which came as a bit of a surprise. You get the idea.)

I registered back in late October 2004; I think I became aware of Wikipedia in 2003 via Usenet, and filed it away for reference. I've edited fairly consistently since I registered, and have been handling the crazies who write to us for over a year. It's enlightening to realise quite what bizzare things people think we're doing or planning.

A short list of articles I've created, or been heavily involved in working on, is here; the long recurrent themes are generally the result of finding a big empty field of coverage and an easily-accessible source at the same time. (We need more articles on laws. Far, far more. But our coverage of 19th century Members of Parliament is implausibly good. It's strange)

A quick set of notes on the traffic we got due to the 2008 US election is here.