User:Brian McNeil

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Brian McNeil

  — Wikinewsie

As I amusingly like to put it, I'm so old I was born before Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon; my birth was during the preceding February. That was in central Scotland, which I've now moved back to after around fifteen years based in Brussels, Belgium. Leases run out on properties, and relationships become strained. So, some sadness there, but I'm back in touch with old friends I've not seen in years in far-from-sunny Scotland.

Do you have a better passport photo?
Image: Photo booth.

As far as Wikinews goes, I first edited in January 2005. I didn't do much more until September that year when I wrote my first full article, Wal-Mart accused of workers rights violations. Since then, I've been main author on over 100 articles, done in-depth coverage of Thailand's insurgency problems in the Muslim-Malay southern provinces, documented the downfall of Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand's then-Prime Minister, dabbled with reporting on newsworthy Wikimedia items such as the US government's vandalism, the "vetted" version "Wikipedia for Schools", and the making of the 2,000th Featured Article on English Wikipedia. The four or five Wikinews Featured Articles shown below may not seem a lot, but in total the project has only a little more than 100 out of 16,000 in that category.

In the intervening time since first becoming involved I've moved up to be one of the project's bureaucrats, administrators, and checkusers. In 2008 I was invited, expenses paid, to attend the annual Wikimedia Conference, Wikimania 2008. The event was held in Alexandria, Egypt; Craig Spurrier and I spoke, and answered questions, on Wikinews, attempting to encourage attendees to try and contribute to the project; I also managed to write about the US State Department's Diplopedia, which uses the same software as Wikipedia. Subsequent to that I was given privileged contact information with Google News which eventually saw the English-language Wikinews listed in Google News.

I instituted the current archiving policy, applying it and refining it as I put around 4,000 articles into an archived state. I have extensively worked on the Style Guide, various other guidelines and policies, plus the current welcome template {{howdy}} and the {{press release}} template for those non-clueful enough to try and get those on a neutral news site.

Lastly, I set up the wikinews.org domain, predominantly used to give accredited reporters more professional email addresses but also hosting a couple of, currently inactive, blogs and a closed MediaWiki install for confidential story development.

"I'm an analyst, this is me analysing the news." — Brian McNeil
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Accreditation Details


Accredited reporter.svg

Reporter: Brian McNeil
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, Europe
Email: Email via Wikinews | Brian.McNeil@Wikinewsie.org
Tel/Voicemail: unlisted
Other contact methods:

  Skype: brian_mcneil (Message first!)

  (Check OpenGPG key for signature verification and confidential communications.)
Alternate Email address: <firstname>.<lastname>@gmx.co.uk

Disclaimer: "Accredited Wikinews reporters do not represent the Wikimedia Foundation, but are trusted contributors whom the Wikinews community has certified for the purposes of gathering information related to Wikinews articles."

Contents

My first edit was January 15, 2005; it just does not seem so long ago. In addition to the above accreditation I have been granted Administrator,Bureaucrat (I get a floor polisher and a mop & bucket), and CheckUser status by the community. I serve on the current project Arbitration Committee which is — thankfully — inactive. I'm on the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications Committee; an OTRS volunteer helping manage the press queue, and have over 100 articles to my name.

I have accounts on Meta, Commons, Wikisource, and Wikipedia, as well as a few on other languages for interwiki.

If you want to know some of the more odd things I get up to, give The Credit Crunch Blues a listen, the lyrics are mine.

Useful pages

Non-Wikinews stuff

My Contributions

Quotes



"Take your t.v. tube and eat it
And all that phony stuff on sports
And all those unconfirmed reports
You know I watch that rotten box
Until my head begin to hurt
From checkin' out the way
The newsmen say they get the dirt
Before the guys on channel so and so"
– Frank Zappa, from Trouble Every Day


"There is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States"

  • George Orwell


"There is a war on drugs, and the people who are ON drugs are winning."

Trophy cabinet

Miscellaneous stuff

Media mentions

Work in progress-projects

Works elsewhere

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