User:Upgrade/Bio

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About me

Update history

  • I suppose I started with curiosity. Back in October '11, I already had racked up several thousand hours on Team Fortress 2 despite the game only becoming recently Free-to-play in June '11. I had trouble keeping track of all the new weapon stats so I lurked on this Wiki. I became fascinated with the back-stories of the classes and would spend hours reading through the update histories to see how the game has evolved. I also spent a gross amount of time in the List of references pages which no doubt colored my initial writing style. I frequently consulted the Recent Changes page and Discussion pages to see what other editors were doing and tore through the Style guides and Editing guides to educate myself on Wiki-Etiquette and Template structures.
  • So in January '12, I officially joined and made my first edits. All of which were removed or overridden.
    Naturally most of them were Bugs or Trivia additions. I had overlooked what was truly considered to be pertinent. Just because I found it interesting doesn't necessarily mean that it is essential. To this day I still have trouble with those sections often resorting to numerous references and fact-checking before even considering putting it in.
  • I became rather disheartened until I received and email from the Wiki. Someone had posted on my talk page! It was an actual person recognizing me as a new editor.[1] Slightly encouraged, I lurked some more making minor spelling corrections and small edits in hopes that no one would notice my edits and subsequently change them for reasons beyond my comprehension. I would get positively giddy when someone replied to my Discussion comments. Another person actually thought my ideas were pertinent! Or, at the very least something worth talking about.
  • I took steps to make myself appear more competent or inflate my user name with a false sense of seniority. I managed to modify my User Page that it wouldn't show up red-linked when I made edits. I archived my talk page so that the Welcome template wouldn't be the first thing that editors would see on my talk page. I even somehow created a custom signature based on an Art Deco motif, a favorite art style of mine.
  • I knew some of my edits were finally being accepted, or perhaps tolerated, when I no longer saw the dreaded: Undo edit by Upgrade. I also learned how to add pertinent trivia (mostly by sneaking them into larger, more important edits of mine). I then went sneaking off into "no-man's land" or the "pages that everyone has forgotten about and desperately need updating". That's when my first big edits started rolling in.
  • The Halloween Costumes page was originally in a sorry state, sparse and outdated with none of the presentation of the other Wiki pages. I had passed on by leaving an Update History remark. But I came back to it and made a major overhaul: moving pages, updating links, finding sources, uploading photos, cleaning up descriptions, and in summary leaving it nicer than I had first viewed it. [2] I then went on improving many pages marked the the "Update" tag, even going so far as to recall my French classes to translate some outdated French pages especially after the item sets split (I'm still a little rusty, but I always have mon dictionnaire at hand).
  • I still feel that my greatest (and strangest) achievement to date was to go through all the Patch Notes and compile all the ones that referenced Localization files when Valve started messing around with their descriptions.
* Lately I've been working on several things trying to spruce up an improve where I can. Perhaps I'll update this later on to include my darker moments.
  1. It wasn't until later that I realized that the person, although very nice, was a Russian translator who had used the generic Welcome template and added it to my talk page amongst a whole laundry list of new users.
  2. Of course, the majority of the page has been replaced with a template following the Great Item Sets Split of 2012, but hey, it's a small victory.

Userboxes

Things that I'm inordinately proud of: