User:Ashley Mark Pomeroy

I was born on 19 March, 1976. I live and work in Wiltshire, in the South of England. I am English. I went through school and college to university, where I spent two years failing to maintain an interest in computing. I did not graduate. Since then I have worked as a freelance writer, mostly for computer games magazines, although I also wrote a pair of books for a publishing company that sadly no longer exists. [1]

Concurrently I worked as an in-house copywriter for Loot.com, a dot-com that boomed and busted. After that I have worked as an audio typist, a receptionist, an assistant to a leather goods importer, and a civil servant for the Ministry of Defence. I currently work as an audio typist and general dogsbody for the NHS.

I read the Daily Telegraph. I read it every day. I agree with every word in it. Other newspapers do not satisfy my urges. I do not own a television. I use the internet to keep abreast of popular culture. I am very much like yourself and have the same hobbies and interests.

I currently have the following books within arm's reach:

• Yes, Prime Minister: Volume One, by the Right Hon. James Hacker, ISBN 0-563-20469-9
• The Fall of France, by Julian Jackson, ISBN 0-19-280550-9
• A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaikin, ISBN 0-14-024146-9
• Six Days of War, by Michael B. Oren, ISBN 0-141-01435-0
• Our Dumb Century, by The Onion, ISBN 0-7522-1743-7
• Armageddon, by Max Hastings, ISBN 0-330-49062-1
• The Winter War, by William R. Trotter, ISBN 1-85410-932-4
• The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks, ISBN 1-4000-4962-8
• Revelation X, by the Church of the Subgenius, ISBN 0-671-77006-3

And there is a second tier beneath that. I recognise the lunacy in writing out a list of the books and their ISBN numbers, as if you are going to pat me on the head for being able to read. In my defence, I am in an energetic mood, and I believe that if you are going to do something, you might as well finish thoroughly that part of the thing that you can be bothered to do for the moment. I will not be energetic forever.

The earliest trace of myself that I can find on the internet is dated 26 February 1995. [2] I am also available in visual form at Flickr [3], and in aural form at Myspace, [4] where I use the name Compact, because Ashley Mark Pomeroy is not a rock name. I very occasionally dip back into Everything2, where I am still surprised by my articles on the Suez Crisis [5] and Operation Eagle Claw, [6] albeit that they are chatty, unsourced, War Nerd-style editorial articles rather than proper highbrow posh stuff.

I was active on Wikipedia from late 2004 for about a year, and then I became bored with it after racking up a couple of thousand edits. I initially treated it as a means to show off, but it became a drudge. I mostly edited for style, although I wrote a couple of articles, and thoroughly improved some others. I still edit intermittently. It seemed an entertaining place at first, because it was small. As it became larger and more powerful it became less amusing. I am worried that one of Google's top search return providers for almost all medical conditions is written by anonymous, unaccountable people who, in the event of a disaster, can simply whistle, walk away, and argue that no-one was supposed to take Wikipedia seriously. It is a toxic combination of factors. Wikipedia's legal problems are currently limited to defamation, but one day someone will burn themselves on a Pop Tart after reading an article in Wikipedia about Pop Tarts. Perhaps something worse will happen. It will be interesting to see how Wikipedia copes with that. I hear they plan to preload it on the free laptops that will go off to Africa, and that there will be a print edition.

Let's see how Citizendium turns out. I imagine that it is not all that hard to fake an identity on Citizendium, and even known and named academics occasionally engage in fisticuffs and petty disputes with each other. In the real world most murderers are known to their victims; positive identification is no bar to bad behaviour. But then again Citizendium is not the real world, and no-one can reach through the screen and bop another user on the nose, at least not yet.

V0.8