Hello, and welcome to my userpage!

My (user)name is J.delanoy.

I've been a member of Wikipedia since early October 2006, and I became active in late 2007. For quite a few years, I was very, very active in anti-vandalism work, mostly using tools to assist me. However, as my interests in real life have changed, my editing has become very sporadic.

Everyone goes through cycles of interest in the course of time, and my own life is no exception. I really enjoyed my experiences on Wikipedia, and being involved in the community meant a lot to me. It seems strange to be speaking about this in the past tense, but I logged on today and realized that even with this edit, I have not even made a dozen edits in all of this entire year. As much as I am sad to finally admit this, since I really did love being a part of this project, a tremendous amount has changed in real life for me, and it is impossible to imagine that things will ever be the way they were six years ago in 2008. I think it is finally time to accept that it is unlikely that I will return to the editing levels that I maintained before.

Completing my university studies, starting a professional career, and the other things that come with being an adult have taken an increasingly large proportion of my life, and I simply do not have the amount of free time that I had in the past. Although I can't point to anything specific as a cause, my interest in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects has waned as time has gone on. I definitely do not hold any grudges against anyone on this site, and I certainly don't have any vendetta against the site itself, or anything like that; I simply am not as enthusiastic about these projects as I used to be, and I am okay with that.

Still, it is interesting and somewhat unbelievable that I created this account eight years ago. So much has changed on this site since I began editing. Looking back to the start of 2008, I see a project that was slowly but surely being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of vandalism. This is the primary reason that I became involved in this project to begin with – I saw too many pages defaced while I was researching for school projects, and I wanted to help out. The rise of automated tools like Twinkle and especially Huggle tilted the balance in the other way, in spite of growing pains (you young whippersnappers may not know this, but when Gurch first began distributing the tool, things got so out of hand that Huggle was almost banned in the spring of 2008. Whether it should have been, and whether it is ultimately a good or bad thing is an entirely different issue, but in my opinion, its introduction and widespread use is the single point at which the project gained the ability to combat simple vandalism in a substantial and meaningful way). At the time that I began using the tool, I will admit that at first the "RPG" aspects of being a "Defender of the Wiki™" appealed greatly to me. However, after the initial rush, large-scale antivandal work lost its earlier charm (I still have no idea how I sustained the editing levels I did in 2008. I must have been crazy). The deployment of more advanced tools such as the Edit Filter and especially an artificial neural network in combating vandalism has tremendously reduced the average lifespan of simple vandalism, and I couldn't be more happy with being made (mostly) redundant :-)

At the same time my initial antivandal zeal faded, I became more involved in the project community, and a number of friendships with people I met on this site grew. I still maintain contacts with many of these wonderful people via other media. Later, being entrusted by the community with checkuser and steward privileges allowed me the satisfaction of helping a large and varied group of people, including more than a few in ways that extend beyond matters on this site, or even in cyberspace, into the real world. It is humbling to know that because of editing a free online encyclopedia project, I was able to play a part, however small, in rendering real, real-life, necessary assistance to complete strangers, on the other side of the planet, when I spoke not a word of their native language, and they barely spoke any of mine.

As far as the future goes, I have no plans to scramble my password or some similarly drastic measure. I never really liked the idea of "officially" retiring, but currently, my plans are to allow my admin, checkuser, and steward flags to expire naturally, as the vast majority of the areas I think I am likely to become involved with in the future do not require access to these tools. I still fix typos and other similar small issues when I see them, although I generally do so anonymously. Also, and this may amuse those who knew me back when I started editing, there are a couple of articles that are rattling around in the back of my brain that I just may expand at some point to stop them from bothering me ;-) I check in on my talk page and watchlist occasionally, and I have my preferences set to email me when someone modifies my talk page. On that note, the email attached to this account will remain active for the foreseeable future, so if you need to contact me privately about something related to my checkuser or steward actions, you can still use the EmailUser function.

The rest of the content that was on my userpage when I wrote this remains below. Most of the changes and updates to this page were made via User:J.delanoy/userpage, which was transcluded (albeit obfuscated) into this page for many years due to an extremely high amount of vandalism to my primary userpage, and then simply through force of habit.

It's been a ton of fun, and I don't plan on disappearing anytime soon. I'm just not as visible as I once was.^[59]

J.delanoy^gabs_adds 01:52, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

I am an administrator and a checkuser here on the English Wikipedia. I'm also a Steward on all Wikimedia Foundation wikis. That means I am here to help. It does not mean I am better than other people or that I have any special status here. It just means that I can push a few extra buttons to help out with the maintenance of this project. If you need help with something, feel free to ask!

Having access to these tools does not mean I don't make mistakes. If you think I did something wrong, please tell me.

If you need assistance using the vandalism tools I mentioned, I can probably help you. I also have a fairly good grasp of some of the more complex areas of wikimarkup, so if you have a question, I will most likely be able to help. I am not very good with Javascript, but if you are having trouble getting scripts to work correctly, I may be able to fix the problem if it turns out to be very simple.

If you need to contact me privately regarding a CheckUser request or other matter, you may do so via wiki-email. If you have an IRC client, you may also make a request in a private query. I can be found in #wikipedia-en on the Freenode IRC network, usually with the nick jdelanoy.

Thanks for visiting my userpage!

J.delanoy^gabs_adds

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