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For those interested in linguistic skills: I used to be as fluent in German as I am in English today, and I can still follow German spoken at speed almost perfectly, but speaking and writing German properly myself has become rusty over the years. Nevertheless, I started my first German WP article in 2021 – Dodge WC series (De) was still absent / nonexistent there – until this year !
French, I had for six years in highschool, and always did my homework and had good grades. So upon graduating I could actually converse, but years of neglect mean that my French has largely departed me, and I only occasionally attempt to decipher the odd French article, when I can't find info on a topic of interest in my other languages.
- This editor has been contributing to Wikipedia for more than ten years now, but is not a member of the Ten Year Society, which claims some 855 members as of Oct 2021.
- For the rest, this user finds it odd to speak of himself in the third person ..
- This editor has been contributing to Wikipedia for more than ten years now, but is not a member of the Ten Year Society, which claims some 855 members as of Oct 2021.
I'm a Dutchman who started editing on Wikipedia in March 2007. Usually the English language one. A lot more readership there, and thus more worth my while, than investing in the small pool of Dutch speakers in the world. The majority of whom speak English anyway .. Nevertheless, I have on occasion edited the Dutch and German WP's, as well as Wikimedia commons.
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And because no editor is truly neutral, for the record: I am a formerly Christian, now non-religious person with social liberal political positions. I am not a pacifist — history demonstrates that freedom must be fought and won repeatedly, or at least be guarded by a strong, credible defense force. To give you an idea: I am a fan of Bill Maher.
Being a firm proponent of Jimmy Wales' open content ideal for the project, I mostly used to edit anonymously, and only logged in when I had to, for instance when I decided to start a new page. But I made my last will and testament in early 2017, and for those interested decided to create a bit of an overview of my two cents on Wikipedia, possibly with the odd comment here and there about information I suspect is true, but for which I can't find a hard source.. Although I did't usually log in, I racked up over 300 edits as GeeTeeBee until I changed my habits, and have started to log in regularly, since about 2017.
Back in 2007 I was interested in cars and vehicles, especially off-roaders, military and amphibious vehicles, or even better: a combination thereof !
For instance I started new pages for some vehicles, that were at the time not yet represented on WP:
• On 9 March 2007 for the M422 Mighty Mite — the smallest jeep ever used by the US military, that would still be considered a car rather than an ATV in most parts of the world. The first series was as short as todays two-seater Smart car.
• On 13 March 2007 for the Ford GPA or Seep — the amphibious version of the original World War II jeep (in this case of the Ford GPW version of it). Most of them went to the Russians in WW2, who then created their own version, so:
• On 17 March 2007 I also started one for the GAZ 46 — the Russian swimming jeep.
• On 25 March 2007 for Amphibious ATVs — to give them a separate place from the later non-amphibious straddled ATVs.
• And on 15 April 2007 for the M520 Goer — the US Army’s standard heavy tactical truck before its replacement by the HEMTT. It was amphibious and much used in the Vietnam war.
Additionally I spent a lot of work on the Willys MB – the World War II jeep – starting by taking the page from 7,246 bytes to this 18,988 bytes version, mostly in March 2007. In the same period I labored the Amphibious vehicle page from 4,399 bytes to this 23,732 bytes version through May 2007.
After close to 700 edits my internet provider changed my original ip-address 81.68.141.254 several times from March 2008. For instance to 82.156.239.39 until May 2008, and then to 82.156.235.218 through June. Then later it became 83.84.130.102, and in 2014 I worked on Roads in the Netherlands a lot, under 84.106.90.249 (834 edits).
From late 2014, another ip-address again (1,271 edits), done a lot on: Intermodal container, Serious Request.
.. Click on any of these ip-addresses to see what topics I used to frequent.
After years of low key, small-scale edits, I started tackling bigger stuff again in 2014. What got me started was the incredibly dull lead section about my own country. Now, the Netherlands is far from the most exciting country in the world, but it really deserves so much more than this old version ! So I decided to be BOLD and rewrote the lead, carefully moving anything I took out of there to other sections, so as not to offend any other editors, until I ended up with this better lead. On the last day of June I then also added a Music paragraph to the Culture chapter, later followed by a film and television section.
Subsequently I started work on the Netherlands' transport paragraph, bringing me back closer to my 2007 interest in motor vehicles and crafts. Only this time I stuck with the infrastructure needed, first continuing with Transport in the Netherlands, not only taking it from this 10,972 bytes version to this 27,114 bytes level, but also moving the excess detail on road transport to a new page: Road transport in the Netherlands.
After all that, I felt I had acquired enough knowledge to create Roads in the Netherlands, which is almost entirely my own work, and the biggest page I wrote to this day.
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Since then I've covered a few other topics, for instance the Dutch College Tour TV talk-show that has featured the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Shimon Peres and Madeleine Albright, just to name a few. In late 2014 I put a lot of work into the Serious Request page, about a type of fundraising radio events pioneered in the Netherlands, and adopted in a number of other countries, from 39,196 bytes to 88,391 bytes. In 2015 I made a similar effort improving the Intermodal container page from 37,815 bytes to 71,677 bytes. The last time I created a new page was a return to physical infrastructure: the Nescio Bridge, an exceptional cycle and footbridge in Amsterdam.
In 2018, I got interested by World War II's Dodge WC series, which, although built by the hundred thousands, and performing well in theater, these unsung heroes never came close to the post-war fame of the jeeps and the deuce trucks. Highly ironic, because its first generation, called G-505 by the Army, actually was the first light truck, that the U.S. troops called a 'jeep' in World War II. And moreover: this diverse family of mechanically largely uniform light trucks could also literally be considered the U.S. military's first High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle series...
And to top it off: the WC-53 model, marrying a closed carryall body to a 4WD light truck frame, has been called the world's first SUV.
Where vehicles are concerned, a page on the Eindhoven University of Technology's Stella solar powered vehicles was also needed. Not only did they win the 'Cruiser class' of the World Solar Challenge all four times since its inception — the cars were also successfully road registered as street-legal, and can be considered the world's first solar-powered family cars, having four/five seats and sufficient luggage space.
Traffic crossing this waterway is so busy, that the new bridge with five lanes for motor vehicles, was required in addition to the Botlek tunnel NL right beside it, that already carries six lanes of the A15 motorway.
As to future efforts ? — I feel that the new Botlek vertical-lift bridge in the Rotterdam Port area deserves an English language page. I suspect it constitutes a world record in terms of total combined surface area of its two lifting sections, which are each some 90m long by 50m wide.
Also the recently opened Koning Willem-Alexander road tunnel in Maastricht is of international interest, because it is one of the few stacked / double-deck tunnels in the world, and possibly the world's biggest. It is 2.3 km (almost 1.5 miles) long, and carries a two by two lane Dual carriageway / divided highway, with full-width hard shoulders on each level.[1][2]
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To conclude until further notice a fun fact: did you know that the city of The Hague has a building (officially called Castalia), that in street slang is called "The Tits", whereas Amsterdam has a bridge (the Enneüs Heerma Bridge) that is nicknamed "The Bra" ?
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Being worked on