User:Thomson200

Thomson200
Thomson200
Born	Unknown name; Unknown birthdate; Georgia
Nationality	American
Occupation	Entry level Wikipedia editor/citations finder
Years active	2005-present

Thomson200, formerly known as Thomsonmg2000 and Thomson, is an editor on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. He mainly edits articles on sports or music. Most of Thomson's contributions come in the form of adding citations and contributing to an article in a way that noticeably improves it. Occasionally, he will start a new article or revert funny vandalism.

Biography

Thomson200's original name, Thomsonmg2000, was derived from the Thompson submachine gun and not from Thomson and Thompson. He accidentally left the p out of "Thompson" while registering the name for Wikipedia, but decided to stick with it because it was a unique name.

Thomson originally joined Wikipedia in November 2005. However, he did not start editing Wikipedia articles on a regular basis until March of 2011, hence the reason he is still only a Novato. Between 2005 and 2010, he made mostly cosmetic edits. A significant portion of his edits were also on his user page. However, he still made some notable contributions to Wikipedia during this time period, such as creating The Geto Boys and The Resurrection, as well as uploading a couple of public domain photos. On his Wikipedia edits during the early years (i.e. 2005-2010), Thomsonmg2000 said:

“

Anything I wrote on my user-page and any edits I made on talk pages and articles (or anything stupid thing I wrote on the internet) during those six years is not indicative of what I believe in now. Back then, I did not know anything about properly referencing sources, I was a little too obsessed with the 'In popular culture' crap, I had questionable tastes in music, I thought everyone on Wikipedia would care about my userpage (when in reality no one does) and I was more amused by profanity than a hyperactive ten year old on caffeine. To paraphrase Ben Croshaw:^[1] those edits came out of a dark time in my life from which I have determinedly moved on without a backward glance.

”

The first articles Thomson began regularly editing were college athletic pages, such as Nevada Wolf Pack and BYU Cougars. Another article he contributed significantly to in March of 2011 was on the Cleveland Browns relocation controversy, a task he found frustrating because many of the important sources were behind paywalls.

A large majority of Thomson's edits are in music album articles. Thomson first began contributing to album articles when he created Cave Rock on April 12, 2011. After that, he began browsing album articles to expand. Thomsonmg2000 decided to concentrate on indie albums because he found many of those articles were either stubs, biased, used bare urls, had link spam, lacked citations and, in general, looked as though it was edited by someone who had absolutely no programming skills whatsoever. The first article to receive Thomson's treatment was Why There Are Mountains on May 1, 2011. Originally, Thomson's expansions mainly involved putting reviews into prose format and adding personnel and charts. As he became more confident with his edits, he began adding background, musical styles and other prose sections to the article. Thomson considers Father, Son, Holy Ghost, an article he created on August 8, 2011 and has contributed a vast majority of the edits to, a breakout article for his editing skills and confidence.

Despite editing mostly indie music articles, Thomson still works on sports articles. Most of the sports articles he have created/significantly edited are season lists. Thomson created most of the lists with the help of Notepad++. Thomson found that the most difficult season list to create was the List of Atlanta Braves seasons, mainly because Thomson had to go through 141 seasons and make sure the win-loss, awards, league finishes and post-seasons were correct, as well as making the sure the code worked on Wikipedia. For the college football seasons lists, he uses the Copy & Paste Excel-to-Wiki Converter to speed up the process.

Another type of contribution Thomson makes is adding images to articles. In addition to uploading his own photos, he also uploads Creative Commons Flickr photos onto Wikimedia Commons, as well as finding fair use images of deceased people. He finds it odd that there are no free images of Bill Parcells or super bust Ryan Leaf, yet there exists a plethora of free photos of obscure New York bands Cymbals Eat Guitars and The Men (seriously, no one who contributes to Wikipedia ever thought about pointing a camera at them?).

In 2013, Thomsonmg2000 changed his name to Thomson200, citing that he does not edit articles about guns, nor was his account created in 2000.

Editing Philosophy

Thomson uploads all of his high resolution photographs to the public domain. He does this in order to avoid the legal complexities associated with copyrights and Creative Commons licenses.

When it comes to editing, Thomson believes heavily in citing sources; he gets frustrated when an editor writes paragraphs and paragraphs without citing a source. Thomsonmg2000 also supports the extermination of all peacocks and weasels from Wikipedia. In turn, he purposely avoids editing articles which he has very strong feelings about, unless it is reverting vandalism on said article.

Criticism and controversy

Thomson has been accused of hypocrisy after he decided to write his userpage biography in the third person.^{[citation needed]} Some^[who?] users found found his biography to be narcissistic and even condescending. Thomson was known^{[by whom?]} for his Don't-give-a-fuckism attitude and had been criticizing (in his head) other users for wasting time on editing userpages most netizen would never see. Thomson had also been against condescension.^{[citation needed]} Thomsonmg2000 has yet to respond to these criticisms.