Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-11-28/Essay
The Six Million FP Man
Sometimes, we all reach milestones in our time at Wikipedia. Sometimes you reach 100
And sometimes, no one else cares about this fact.[1] So how does one write an article about oneself while not appearing completely vain and self-promotional? Well, one doesn't, but let's do it anyway because it'll be at least a couple years until the next milestone.
Option one: Select some of your favourites
Why not make a gallery of your favourite restorations, showing off how much work you put into these? For example, you could go to your user page and copy over the conveniently pre-formatted list you made, that shows before and after!
BEFORE | AFTER |
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It's a good start! But maybe some sort of animation too?
...Perfect!
Option two: How about a history?
You could describe how you got into your field of editing. For example, I got into image restoration through an image that I don't even count as one of my "official" list of featured pictures anymore (I do my official count based on the ones featured on
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Original
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Restoration
By 2009, I was scanning my own books, and doing rather impressive images from Gustave Doré. Would I do it different now? Well, I'd probably fix up the border a bit, but it's not bad. It's also so large that I couldn't upload the original file, because Commons wasn't configured to allow anything as large as a lossless file of that type has to be:
2010 saw the stitching together of the poster of
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Before
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After
In 2016 I went to
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Victoria Clafin Woodhull
I was originally planning for Ulmar to be my 600th featured picture. However, the vagaries of "Does
Option three: Talk about the thing that pushed you over the top
One could discuss the thing that pushed you over the top, and how it relates to your history in Wikipedia. While I don't talk about it much, I have eight featured articles, my first, from October 2006, was W. S. Gilbert, and that really got me into Wikipedia as a whole.[2]
So, when choosing something significant to my Wikipedia career....
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Before
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After
I had been looking for a high-resolution picture of him for, well, over a decade, probably. I stumbled upon the Digital Public Library of America, decided to give it a go, and found this, of all places, in the University of Minnesota library collections. But then, I suppose it's always going to be somewhere a little unexpected if you checked everywhere you expected. I think this is one of my featured pictures where zooming in is necessary to really tell the work done, but having an image of him that can be safely zoomed in to about a foot wide or so is probably going to be very helpful to a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan societies out there.
Oh, and to answer the obvious question, Arthur Sullivan is, if anything, harder to find an image of than Gilbert. I mean, I did, he's Featured Picture number 601, but it wasn't easy to find.
Was kind of odd, though: I found him in a collection I thought I knew very well already. Which just goes to show you, I suppose. Anyway, he will hopefully be joining many more in the next months and years. See you for Number 700!
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