User:Sswonk

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Definition

The user Sswonk is Steve Swonk, a late baby boomer living in the northeastern United States. A late boomer was someone born in the last part of the two decades following World War II.

Editing Background

I'm well read and well educated, and began editing here in March 2007. I edited articles about Quincy, Massachusetts, local neighborhoods, roads, events, and so on. Eventually I became immersed in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and contributed scores of images and created multiple articles. I debated policy with Jimmy Wales at one point, I recall it was about how to retouch historic photographs.

In August 2009 I became involved with the Ireland article naming discussion, and started to become disillusioned — that is the word — with the entire Wiki project governance. It became apparent, and can be shown, that Wikipedia is heavily biased towards a British viewpoint. I hold that the article about the country, Ireland, should be named "Ireland". The article about the large North Atlantic island where that country is located should be named "Ireland (island)". That is my view. It was not supported by voting in 2009 nor in subsequent votes.

Charles III stated^[1] in 1994 that when crowned he would seek "to embrace all religious traditions and 'the pattern of the divine, which I think is in all of us.'" As Defender of the Faith, he is charged with being supreme governor of the established church. In the UK, there was reluctance to accept the Irish nation as legitimate after its creation, so — yes this is an opinion — British governments referred to the new country Eire as "The Republic of Ireland". Ireland, the proper noun, was the name of the island, not the sovereign state. If you are starting to get a little bored of what you are reading, or feeling that "not sure where this is going" feeling, then you get where I was following a year and a half of arguing about what to me is obvious about the name of the sovereign state and the Wiki article about it. Why am I talking about "Defender of the Faith", what does that have to do with naming an article?

After that, and other arguments about why do people in the United States always list the name of the state after a place name, like "Springfield, Ohio", why can't it just be "Springfield" — that is when I started to realize the thicknesses of the heads involved in arguing with staunch subjects of the Defender of the Faith. Charles has the right idea, what is in his church and what goodness he wants to defend is in all of us.

I ended up getting very upset with some Wikipedia administrators and left the project in 2011, frustrated with the intransigence of established editors who had the power to ban me. Too often a sort of racist assumption was made about me and my friends that I couldn't justify. Still, there is plenty to love about England. I am fascinated by history, and there was peak electrical activity in my brain when I recently binged The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970 TV series). Do not mess with Dorothy Tutin. Many years after her death, the actress was so present as Anne Boleyn, so complete a performer on my television that I often think about that program and the history it discussed. All of the players were magnificent. But, would Dorothy Tutin be on my side of that argument over the Wiki article? Would she argue that the best way to disambiguate an article about a sovereign country is to change the title of the article to match something the country wishes not to be called? It makes me sad to think about the ill health of common sense, and I don't like arguing with the spirit of a dead actress because I am so silly from trying to nurse it back to health.

In 2025, the British government has started to arrest people for supporting Palestine Action, a non-violent group of anti-genocide protesters. So I am back on Wikipedia, sensing that Britain has run amok. That concept of an established church is antithetical to the modern thinking of a great number of world residents who happen to speak English. That matters. Amo l'umanità, tranne quando viene incorporata. Sono molto grato.