Seancdaug

A self-portrait...?

Contact info
Name	Sean Daugherty
Email	[email protected]
AIM	WildfireDarkstar
ICQ	20801608
This contact box formatting is adapted from Kelly Martin's user page, on the premise that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

enThis user is a native speaker of the English language.

merThis editor is a mergist.

catThis user believes in the importance of proper categorization.

This user tries to do the right thing. If they make a mistake, please let them know.

My current wikistress level:

Ho-hum...

My name is Sean Daugherty. I also occassionally go by the nom de plume Wildfire Darkstar when I'm feeling particularly melodramatic. I've been a contributor to Wikipedia since August 2004, and a registered editor since November 2004. Despite appearances, I am not an administrator: I always traipse around like I own the place.

As of November 2006, I am essentially inactive. It's been several months since my last edit, and my current schedule is such that I do not foresee being able to dedicate much time or effort to the encyclopedia for the foreseeable future. I will occasionally drop by to check my messages, and to respond to any questions or comments concerning my previous activities, but until further notice I am withdrawing from active status.

The unauthorized autobiography

I hail from, and live in, Rockville, Maryland, a mere stone's throw away Washington, DC. As depressing as living near so many politicians sounds, it's a nice place to live, and I can't help but harbor a weak sense of civic pride. I'm currently attending graduate school the University of Maryland College Park, where I'm working slowly towards a Master's degree in both library science and history. I'm an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, a strong advocate of traditional hand-drawn animation, and a moderately active gamer (though strictly offline at the moment).

I'm pretty far left-leaning, politically speaking, though I try to stay away from articles dealing directly with touchy political issues. I'm just not very religious, although I am interested in world religion from a social history perspective.

Contributions and wikideologies

I've been far less active of late, and most of my contributions have been of the minor, random page fixing variety. I don't see myself drifting away permanently, but I don't have any current plans for a grand comeback, either.

Of course, I believe in the standard principles and goals of Wikipedia. Some people might well argue that I'm a tad overzealous. I suppose that's right. While I accept and understand the rationale behind ignoring all rules, I remain personally skeptical that bypassing established policies and guidelines, even with the best of intentions, leads to what is best for the encyclopedia in the long term. I think it's vitally important for all of us to be good role models, and illustrate our adherence to and respect for the framework of the project, including consensus building in all but the most extreme of circumstances. I'm an wikigalitarian (patent pending): I believe firmly that Wikipedia should remain free-as-in-speech, and dislike the idea that there should be any restrictions placed on editing beyond basic, temporary measures needed to prevent serious vandalism. There shouldn't be a stigma attached to anonymous, unregistered contributions, and the value of an editor is no more nor less than the value of his or her contributions to the project. At the ground level, I'm a mergist, albeit one who also feels strongly that conciseness matters. Wikipedia shouldn't try to be everything to everyone, and more isn't always better. All articles should ideally be written with the uninitiated in mind, and should provide only the level of detail necessary to convey an introductory familiarity with the topic. Too much detail is distracting, and forces the reader to sift through a higher volume of text without the familiarity necessary to seperate the wheat from the chaff, and to seperate important key points from less essential details. Articles should provide links to more detailed information (provided of course that the information is accurate and reliable), either on the Web or elsewhere, but should itself operate, like other encyclopedias, as a general reference, not the be-all and end-all. I've gotten into arguments with other editors over various elements of my editorial philosophy, and while I always try to remain civil and open-minded, I think my attitude on this subject has been responsible for alienating more of my fellow editors than anything else I've done. Sorry, guys.

Thanks to my librarian training, I'm something of a stickler for proper categorization: I think the categorization system is one of the most powerful and misunderstood tools available to us Wikipedians. I often wish more editors understood basic tenets of cataloging, including the difference between precombination and postcombination, given the importance of such concepts to successful article categorization. But I won't bore you any further with my angry young librarian rant. In the extremely unlikely event that anyone has actual interest in hearing me go on about the topic, feel free to drop me a line.

Current projects

As always, I'm toiling away at various Final Fantasy articles as usual, but otherwise just puttering around, adding to or correcting random things that attract my attention. I've embarked upon an ambitious project to add full citations to a number of computer and video game articles. So far, I've worked substantially with Nintendo Entertainment System, History of the Nintendo Entertainment System, 1983 in video gaming, and 1971 in video gaming.

Cool people who probably don't know who I am

• Andrevan — He's just neat. Not only did he correct a number of really stupid, bleary-eyed mistakes I made over on the NES page, but I'm using his user page as a template for this one (not that you could tell by looking...)
• Premeditated Chaos — Has the potentially dubious distinction of responding to my first ever request for speedy deletion. She also has a nice user page.
• khaosworks — Caught a bunch of really stupid mistakes I made whilst editing a variety of Doctor Who-related pages, and just generally deserves credit for taking charge of the Doctor Who pages and whipping them into reasonable shape.
• cuaHL, DarkEvil, Hibana, ZeWrestler, JiFish — Regular contributors to the Final Fantasy WikiProject who've remained steadfastly dedicated to the project and its goals. Way to go, guys!

Random legalese

All right, everyone who cares about this sort of thing should take note: as of Wednesday, February 1, 2006 at 4:40PM, I'm changing my contributions license. In practice, this means that every edit I've made before that date is multi-licensed under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. None of my edits after that date/time are available under any CC-BySA license version predating version 2.5. For my more recent edits, the following legalese applies: