I finally registered on Wikipedia in February of 2006. Previously, I had made minor changes to articles; we will see if I undertake more ambitious projects. Feel free to drop me a line (politely, I hope!) on my talk page.

As far as I can tell by the welcome messages, I registered a mere nine minutes before Wikipedia's one millionth user. So close to fame....

I have found that people like to ask about my user name. No, I'm not Harry Potter. And no, I don't live in Arizona. The answer is much more mundane: Back in the '90s, I liked to play a computer game called Heretic, and I rather liked the weapon called the Phoenix Rod. Something about lighting enemies aflame brought out the vicarious pyro in me, I guess.

I tend to prefer making minor changes. Does that make me a WikiGnome? Meh.

I rarely edit these days.

Picture of the day

Ernest Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. He and three companions established a new record Farthest South latitude, 112 miles (180 km) from the South Pole, as part of the Nimrod Expedition of 1907–1909; Shackleton was knighted on his return home. He planned the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 but his ship, Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and then sank on 21 November 1915. The crew escaped and used the lifeboats to reach Elephant Island and ultimately the island of South Georgia in a stormy ocean voyage of more than 700 nautical miles (800 mi; 1,300 km), Shackleton's most famous exploit. He returned to the Antarctic in 1921 with the Shackleton–Rowett Expedition but died of a heart attack on South Georgia, where he was buried at his wife's request. This photograph of Shackleton was taken by George Charles Beresford before 1909.Photograph credit: George Charles Beresford; restored by Adam Cuerden

Archive – More featured pictures...

For my own use:

• My edit count can be found here. On second glance, the information does not seem to get updated. I'm positive I have more edits that that. Anyone know where I can go to find out?

• Aha! Here is a newer tool that does for now. My particular user stats with this counter: [1]

• A faster counter, without the cool graphs is here.

• Another option: Wikichecker.

• To break down Wikipedia page history statistics: [2].

• Wannabe_kate is down. Here's a new one with a similarly cool monthly graph feature: Soxred93's tool. And a new version.

Wikipedia article traffic statistics: http://stats.grok.se/.

These can be found at Wikipedia:Template_messages/User_talk_namespace.

From the article on trousers: "Removing one's trousers in public is, in the main, considered taboo."

Fantastic edit summary: pun indented.

From Serial_comma#Unresolved_ambiguity: "This is ambiguous as it stands, but even if a serial comma were added Mandela could still be mistaken for a demigod."

From Falsifiability#Inductive_categorical_inference: "It is impractical to observe all the swans in the world to verify that they are all white."

Here's an amusing bit of vandalism: [3].

Also: [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] Rickroll Home Taping Hitler Has Only Got One Ball where a catapult takes aim.

Are a waste of time. Mine and yours.

This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Phoenixrod.