User:Academic Challenger

Hi there. On Wikipedia I will be calling myself Academic challenger, because I am interested in academic subjects. On usenet I call myself William S.C. Joseph. (Incidentally, I have discovered that two participants on my favorite newsgroup, soc.history.what-if, are also wikipedians). I also have a real name, which I call myself by in my life outside the Internet, but I will not disclose this name. I am a young male American college student currently studying and living in the western United States. My main interests are history and politics. Most of my contributions here will be about these subjects. I also like to study religion and science. I enjoy literature and music (mostly classical music) very much. For outdoor activities, I like swimming and skiing. I first discovered Wikipedia sometime in 2001, while doing a google search on Ragnar Lodbrok (may be wrong spelling, I'll fix that link later). I was impressed, but got sidetracked and did not stay that time. I discovered it again in late August 2003, while doing a google search on political assassinations. This time I immediately decided to start contributing. I contributed for about three months before deciding to create an account. For most of that time I have had the Ip number 68.116.64.92. I have added much to the List of assassinated persons, which has grown to twice the size it was when I discovered it in August, partly through my contributions. Though I am interested in history from all different time periods, you will notice that most of my edits have been about modern/recent history and politics. This is because I have found that the information about ancient and midieval history has been worked on by users more knowledgable than I, while the areas I work on are somewhat lacking, at least compared to the amount of knowledge I have, or at least can easily dig up from other sites, like rulers.org and the Congressional Biographical Directory. For example, political information about certain countries tends to linger for several months or even more than a year without being updated. The CIA Factbook is a good resource, but it is only accurate for a few months. My current most important project, however, is to make sure that all of the United States senators have articles. My goal is to have that done by the end of December. Hopefully