User:Hemmers
My key areas of interest are firearms; target shooting sports, and target shooters. I've been contributing to Wikipedia on-and-off since 2008.
I'm enthusiastic about WP:Globalise/WP:BIAS, particularly because our US colleagues make so many valuable contributions when it comes to firearms, but which can sometimes result in half the citations about a French firearm being from high quality - but US-centric - publications of the NRA of America. To this end I have created a number of articles for under-represented shooting sport organisations around the world and spend a fair amount of time looking for quality local references. As of 2023, I have started spending more time on articles for female athletes as women are significantly under-represented on WP. My starting point in this is mopping up the red links in articles such as 2014 ISSF World Shooting Championships.
My approach to Wikipedia is WP:Sofixit, as eulogised below. Templates have their place, but I dislike high-volume/low-byte editing. NPP, typos and clean-up are important, but go and write some stuff periodically - it's good for the soul and reminds you how hard it is to write quality prose. I'd rather see someone write one excellent, well-sourced article that is useful to people, than add a thousand commas of dubious grammatical merit. This is why I do not have edit counters on this page. </pompous puffery> It is for this reason that I am also active on Commons, adding media to support articles here. Word to live by:
The theory that I find most credible as an explanation of the decline of the community since 2007 is the end of the "SoFixIt" culture and its replacement by the templating culture which some consider newbie biting and which has lead to hundreds of thousands of articles disfigured by garish templates calling attention to problems that somebody hopes someone else will understand and fix. By WereSpielChequers, [1].
04:07, Friday, March 14, 2025 (UTC)
Below are some of the Wikipedia articles that I've significantly contributed to or started. I don't own them, but I want to make sure that they continue to be accurate and well-referenced.
Conflicts of Interest
[edit ]I have edited articles on topics where I have a personal connection/interest. When doing so, my aim is to neutrally improve Wikipedia's coverage, and I use references for as many facts as possible (often not including facts that I can't find references for). I've included notes about any COIs in the table above, with more details below.
- ^ I am a member of the National Smallbore Rifle Association. I have never worked for them.