Battles of Cabin Creek

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The Tiffin River as viewed from Goll Woods State Nature Preserve in Fulton County, Ohio.

About

My first Wikipedia edit as a registered user was on 1 March 2005. After a unanimous RfA, I became an administrator on 11 December 2007. If you want to know more about me, you must be either lost or bored. Either way, this page is me in a nutshell. — Kralizec! (talk) 18:05, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Ancient history

Born in rural Ohio in 1973, I am of Scotch-Irish descent and am the only child of a working-class father and white-collar mother. I was raised on a steady diet of PBS and attended the same public school district all 13 years. During my teen years I was a very active hospital volunteer, and I attended weekly Presbyterian church services with my grandparents from the time I was in seventh grade until I graduated from high school and moved away to college.

One of the best parts of my childhood was my family's love of travel. Of the 17 years I lived with my parents, we took multi-day, out-of-state vacations during fifteen of those years. Virtually every summer we would pack up the camper and enjoy a 5 - 15 day, 1500+ km long road-trip to somewhere interesting (four of our vacations saw us travel over 3000 km!). (see Travel below)

My Bachelor of Science degree was earned from Bowling Green State University where I initially majored in Health Care Administration, but eventually changed to Management information systems. Along the way, I also picked up a minor in Interpersonal communications. In college I was involved in student government and the Honors Student Association (despite not being an honors student). During four of my college years, I worked in the university's network services department. I also did a three month internship with a software developer in New England.

Recent history

In 1998 I married my college sweetheart. Our son was born in 2003; he is named after his great great great great great grandfather who emigrated from County Down, Ireland to the Colony of Pennsylvania in the mid-1700's. Our (fraternal) twin daughters were born in 2005; they are named after their various grand and great grandmothers. Our family also includes a dog, cat, and three tanks of tropical fish. The username 'Kralizec!' has been my handle (or .nic as we used to call it back in ye olde unix days) since 1993.

My employer from 1998 to 2008 was a midwestern bank, where I held a variety of information technology jobs. From 2003 to 2008 I served as a team leader in the company's network monitoring department, which because I worked four ten-hour days each week, I was able to keep our kids home with me three days every week (enabling me to enjoy being a semi-stay-at-home dad). After my employer was eaten by a competitor and I was subsequently downsized, in April 2008 I began doing IT contract work in the banking industry. Once my kids got old enough to join Scouting, I rekindled my love of the great outdoors, and stayed on as an adult helper even after my eldest Eagled-out.

Beliefs

Personally, I self-identify as being an agnostic secular humanist. On the American political spectrum I am a Moderate Republican with mostly conservative fiscal views (including being an advocate for fiscal responsibility) and moderate social views (including strong support for same-sex marriage, the environment, and the Lincoln Project) ... however some of my more conservative friends accuse me of being a Republican In Name Only. Despite being agnostic and a devout believer in Evolutionism, I semi-regularly attend services at our local Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Interests

My interests and hobbies include spending quality time with my wife and three kids; travel (see below; by age 29, I had already been to 30 U.S. states and territories, 2 Canadian provinces, and 6 Australian states and territories); reading books (science and science fiction) and magazines (The Economist, National Geographic, Newsweek); amateur photography (primarily digital these days, via my Canon PowerShot SX200 IS); tropical fish (Mickey Mouse Platys); and strategy games, both on the computer (RTS, turn-based, and the historic city building genres, with Ikariam being my current top "time waster") as well as more traditional board games (such as Axis & Allies, Shogun, A Game of Thrones, Power Grid, etc.). Despite having never played any of the previous Pokemon card or console games, I am an avid Pokémon Go player on my smartphone. Additionally I often say that gluttony is my favourite sin, with Japanese cuisine (specifically sushi) and Chinese cuisine (especially Mandarin and Szechuan style) being my most favourite.

In my free time I moderate an email list on Palladium RPG's and often frequent the message boards at RPGnet.

Travel

Here are the places I have been to. Concept and general layout stolen from User:Calton who got it from User:Guettarda who borrowed it from User:White Cat.

By nation

The countries I have been to:

Spent years:  United States

Months to weeks:  Australia  Canada

Weeks to days:  Austria  People's Republic of China  Germany   Switzerland

Less than a day:  France  Japan  Liechtenstein

Detailed by region

The provinces, states, and territories I have been to:

Spent years:

 United States

 Ohio

Wikipedia

Philosophy

Initially an adherent of Inclusionism, a few years ago I became a subscriber of Eventualism as a response to the large amount of non-notable, in-universe cruft seeping into the project. I also feel that process is important to the smooth operation of the project, however the natural prevalence of Instruction creep gives me pause.

Edit history

My first (anonymous) Wikipedia edits were in 2003. It was not until early 2005 that I finally broke down and became a registered user.

Pet peeve: Articles that link to disambiguation pages instead of the correct article are the bane of my existence. My personal nightmare must be the Oil disambiguation page with its 1000+ links. Arg!

Milestones:

Administrivia

As a Wikipedia administrator, I am involved in several "back office" areas of the project. On a daily basis I process requests at Administrator intervention against vandalism as well as Requests for page protection. Additionally I often participate in administrative discussions at the Administrators' noticeboard and Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. I also frequent Village pump (policy) for the discussion of existing and proposed policies and guidelines.

When it comes to blocking editors, I take the official Blocking policy very seriously. Sometimes this causes frustration for vandal fighters, as I will not make punitive blocks, and as per WP:IPB I do not hardblock IPs for long periods of time. Additionally as the blocking policy states that editors should be warned when their behaviour conflicts with our policies and guidelines, the length of time that I am willing to block an unregistered editor is directly proportional to the number of times that members of the Wikipedia community have tried to educate the IP. If an IP has only received one or two warnings, unless it is an especially egregious case of vandalism, I will rarely block the IP address for longer than six or twelve hours. Conversely, IPs that have received at least four warnings are rarely blocked for less than 31 hours.

Regarding other administrators, I feel that wheel warring is incredibly harmful to the project and as such I personally follow a zero-revert-rule (0RR) for the actions of other admins. If you disagree with another admin's administrative action, either take it up with that individual or bring it up for a community review at WP:AN/I. That said, if another administrator notices that I have made a mistake, they should feel free to correct it without any need to contact me first (however a courtesy note on my talk page would be appreciated so that I may learn from my mistakes).

Community recognition

On occasion my efforts have been recognized by members of the Wikipedia community.

Projects

Current

To date, I have had varying degrees of involvement with the following projects:

  • Australia - concentrating on the nation's maritime and military history
  • Maritime warfare task force - emphasis on world navies and naval battles
  • Oklahoma - mainly related to tourism areas in the state
  • Photography - amateur photography with a focus on architecture, landmarks, landscapes, and nature
  • Ships - primarily ships from the pre-Dreadnought era through the Cold War, with emphasis on WWI, WWII, and Cold War ship classes
  • Templates - focus on navigational templates
  • User warnings - keeping up with the latest discussions and developments, especially relating to new vandal warnings

Former

Projects from which I have retired:

Recent changes patrol

While not a member of the recent changes patrol per se, there are several articles I watch very closely in order to prevent vandalism. They include:

Contributions

This section is pretty long and boring ... but a lot shorter since I forked the category, disambiguation, photography, and template sections to their own pages. This area serves primarily as my own reference, especially when I need a template for starting a new article, category, template, or disambiguation page.

Articles

Listed below are the articles I created, de-stubbed, heavily contributed to, or are just generally proud of my contributions to:

Photographs and images

To date, I have uploaded more than sixty of my own images to Wikipedia. They include photos taken in Australia (Northern Territory, Victoria), Canada (Ontario), the United States (primarily Ohio and Oklahoma, but also including Illinois, Michigan, and West Virginia), and a couple of map illustrations.

Disambiguation pages

Despite my disdain for them, disambiguation pages do serve a purpose. I have even created a few.

Categories

So far I have created over fifty categories. A large number of them have a naval theme and stem from my participation in WikiProject Ships.

Redirects

For ease of navigation, I have created heaps of redirects during my time here at Wikipedia. However, when I create a redirect, I am always sure to use one of the tags specified in Wikipedia:Redirect.

Templates

Templates can be a powerful navigational tool for browsing closely related topics. Currently I have started or heavily edited around twenty-five templates, many of them in conjunction with my participation in the Ships WikiProject.

Contact info

  • Email me