Hi, I'm VampWillow and live in Highgate London, England adjacent to the world-famous Highgate Cemetery. I use this pseudonym almost everywhere online as I am active at a national level in UK politics and, whilst I have very few issues with people knowing about me, I dislike the way that assumptions can be made when only partial information becomes known to the public. "I am the sum of my parts, not just the individual facets".
Why Vamp Willow though? Well, I am clearly very geeky, I like pointy things (stakes, needles, knives, etc), am bisexual (with a strong lesbian bias), and have red hair. I also think a certain Willow Rosenberg is very fanciable!
Missing imageWikimeetlondonPic9-24.jpg Signing the guestbook at the very first WikiMeet - in Londonuser:MykReeve user:VampWillow
I was born on
Friday 13th April and have added a number of people and updated the links on that page for others that I share a birthday with. My first recorded WP edit with this username was
Westminster System (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Westminster_System&diff=2710195&oldid=2710157) on
March 10th 2004. I made a number of small & minor edits before creating the ident (and then forgot to
log in repeatedly too, and don't recall which pages I did anyway!). On May 2004's
list of
Wikipedians I'd already made it to number 1,864 of 19,353 back then. By
June 16 2004 I'd jumped to 509th place (up 1396) and was #527 on the all-namespaces count. I'm also present on other wikis with occasional edits too and shot through my thousandth edit here on
12 June, reaching #2000 at 00:52 on
July 4th. I've since lost track of what number I've reached ...
I've worked in IT for most of my life, although for a short while was in the entertainment world as a sound engineer / lighting designer and tour manager. I am very active in and around the Westminster Bubble for the LibDems as well as in LGBT politics, being one of the founders of the UK Chapter of the Lesbian Avengers and also of the London Lesbian and Gay Centre (LLGC).
I have an MBA from the Open University Business School, I sometimes play softball (1B,2B or C) when I manage to escape my computer room. I drink a perilous amount of coffee, am polyamorous, and drive a Mazda MX-3 car.
I was present at the first ever WikiMeet in London on 5th June 2004, and some others since.
On 24 June 2004 I was nominated for Adminship, which I was happy to accept. After 25 votes in support (and none against!) Secretlondon 'made it so' at 15:09, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC). Between 18 August and 1 December 2004 I was a recovering Wikipediholic and since then I try to limit myself in the amount of time I spend here (but often don't succeed!).
So far, I have Created, carried out major Rewrites of, or Merged/Split/Disambiguated
225
articles while making over 4000 edits to over 1700 pages ...
Books
Conceptual and Disambiguation pages
Dance, Theatre and Stage
Film, Television and Radio
Food and Drink
Music
Organisations
People
Places
Politics and Events
Constituencies
Science, Technology, Medicine and Law
Transport
Venues and Festivals
redirects
new redirects (and related content at the target) amongst many include
categories
and the early categories of and initial links to ...
... and their related pages (and many elsewhere too), as well as making contributions about railways, London, other roads, current events, UK and regional politics, geography, sports ...
I also came up with the tempate {{MergeDisputed}} on the grounds that there was otherwise no way to mark a disagreement with someone's use of the {{merge}} template which is worded as a fait accompli, and the UK map option {{mmuk mapdet}}.
Art
Apart from reworking various logos I also create lineart (examples images here) and (photos here)
QuikLinks
Real Name
Won't be linked to here. If you work out my real name (not that difficult, I know) I'd appreciate it if you didn't post it alongside the use of or in reply to a post with this name on it; I am trying to keep Google and other spiders clear of making the link and so far have managed to do so. Its the politician in me not wanting to complicate matters! Thanks ;-)
Elsewhere
- my website (http://www.vampwillow.com/) (under this pseudonym anyway)
- My LiveJournal (http://vampwillow.livejournal.com/)
Categories
WikiWomen, Queer Wikipedians
Footnote
My favourite authors are Robert Anson Heinlein and Anne McCaffrey. From Heinlein comes my love of freedom, polyamory and SF, plus my favourite quotation (I've crossed through the ones I've yet to try!):
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects."
