Telephone friends and ask them
I understand your points MissionJim and I will state this for now. I looked in here to see what was taking place in all areas. I have nothing on my user page mainly because I am rarely ever in this area. I was passing through one day and filled in a bit of information and then moved on to the areas that I am usually in. What I dislike about a User Page is that the world can read it. Google picks them up so with the opening in the wall I'm not inclined to tell the world about myself but I would do that with an administrator via e-mail if it were necessary. Besides, the user pages I have seen look like to me that some people are bragging and too it obviously takes a lot of time to make them pretty and I spend that time doing what I was doing just before I came here moments ago -- transcribing an entire book dated 1849. Transcription is what I like best. I ended up here only because I wandered into my talk page and found an invitation by Phillipe whom I have never heard of. I contribute to wikipedia, wiki commons a little and place transcribed books on wikisource. My entrance here is unusual but because of the polite invation I participated. Back to my book for the night. Oh! I rarely am offended by anything anyone writes. I have been in a lot of discussions and debates on listservers and my hide is thick. I am not inclined to get offended. I myself am on no task force and have no desire to be on any. I am mainly just posting books to wikisource at this point and I enjoy doing this. I came here by invitation to try to help with ideas. I may think about doing a User page but to me it seems like a waste of time when I can work on transcribing books to wikisource with the spare time I am allocated.
Very Respectfully, --Brother Officer 08:19, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
Brother Officer; It is very interesting to hear that you enjoy transcribing. I have wondered how Wikisource process occurs. Do you type every word, or do you have some OCR tools that help you digitize the info? I had considered posting a book that I have, but I decided that I would prefer spending my time doing research and organizing information in articles to make them easier to read.
This is a good example for one of the other threads that talks about how there are many ways to contribute. It also points out that everyone has specialized interests and skills.
I understand why you wouldn't want to post a lot of personal info on your user page. I do find it helpful though when people provide some information on their interests and background. Even though all the info provided could potentially be fictitious, I feel that most of the time people try to be accurate. It gives me the sense that I am talking to a real person.
Thanks for contributing.
Mission.Jim
I'm willing to converse on just about anything but are we not off topic here? I don't want to get into trouble by writing here. I detest arguments and attempts at put-downs. Are you and all others here administrators? Following your lead and in reply to your questions, long ago I typed old books by hand. They were old and rare books in universities and one could not check them out. (I also buy and sell old and rare books but this is a new three year hobby.) Therefore, I wrote the books down on paper and later typed them into computer. I have a lot of determination. I often like tasks others don't want to consider. The victory of accomplishment with such things is that much greater. I like the challenges. With books I now use OCR but because they are old books one has to do editing by hand. OCRing old books isn't the only thing I like. It's just what I am doing now. I like just about everything. I've started many topics on wikipedia and contributed to many more. Now I am working on old books. They're fascinating, a step back into time. Wikisource itself has many options but I choose to work on my own projects. I do type out portions of the many volumes of books wikisource has. Those are already scanned and the image is beside the scrambled text that has to be looked over and corrected. I work on articles and books that I have an interest in. I don't care much about modern books unless they are a spin-off from old books. I don't care for fiction (except a few classics) aside from it being on television. BTW, have you ever met any achiever whose time is not limited? :0)
Kind regards, --Brother Officer 21:26, 29 November 2009 (UTC)