User:Ashley Pomeroy

My full name is Ashley Mark Pomeroy and I have been a named Wikipedia editor since late 2004. I am one of the most prolific and longest-serving British Wikipedia editors, having amassed several thousand edits on a wide variety of topics. I'm really smart! Thankyou. On a personal level I was born in 1976, in England, where I continue to live. I have no great love of England or Britain. I live there because I speak the language and I'm not wealthy enough to give up work entirely and travel the world. "He is not married, has no children, and does not live in Surrey."

I wrote and continue to write the book on Kodak's early digital SLRs and Iannis Xenakis' UPIC music software and John Harris, the sci-fi artist; I built a little memorial for eccentric punk band X-Ray Spex; I am the reason why Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn't a mass of Python-esque in-jokes. Did you know that obscure British actor Richard Attenborough was in the underground cult film Brighton Rock? Wikipedia didn't until I put that in. Truly I am the best of them all.

I continue to edit according to my whim and the laws of chance. Unlike so many editors I am not a monomaniac who has set upon himself to sort out the Israel / Palestine conflict once and for all right here on Wikipedia. I have never had an abortion; Sarah Palin looks good in running shorts; I am not religious; I do not care what happens to turtles in the Gulf of Mexico; the Holocaust most definitely did happen and if you were self-respecting Nazis you would be proud of it, rather than trying to hide it. Each of my edits, whether it is the deletion of a comma or the insertion of a thousand words of sourced, cross-checked, well-written information, is imbued with great diligence and deep thought.

Wikipedia has a number of cults and editing philosophies. I have nothing to do with them. Limited people with small minds. I edit entirely according to the context and the needs of the article, with the aim of producing something that will be readable and accurate and hopefully make me look good as well. I concentrate almost entirely on producing content for the encyclopaedia rather than spending time with the bureaucracy that surrounds it. There are people who spend their time on Wikipedia voting on whether articles should be deleted or not, and there are people who spend their time inserting or removing dozens of templates and tags. By all means carry on. You throw your time away; I'm not going to stop you. You have a role, a melancholy one that will never be rewarded or even recognised by history.

In addition to my contribution as a writer and researcher, friend and entertainer, lover and face-toucher, my photographs illustrate a goodly number of Wikipedia's articles. They are produced with the same immortal soul and technical daring as my writing, and I include several examples on this page. Do you see the lovely way the images flow, without bunching up, and how the page looks fine on widescreen and conventional monitors, even at 800x600, within the constraints of Wikipedia's mark-up? That didn't just happen, you know. Here are some more:

On a political level I hate authority. The government doesn't care whether you live or die; only that it remains in power. The government will lie cheat and steal, and do everything to ensure that it remains in power. A government that is not in power is not a government, it is just a sad collection of cash-strapped nobodies. Government will send you to your death rather than lose face. It will persist in a mistake in order to retain authority, even if people have to die in order that the government does not lose authority.

I believe that all forms of government, of organisation, eventually fall apart. The good ones and the bad ones, if only because the energy required to maintain deviations from the norm eventually runs out. The only way to protect an organisational system from corruption is for its members to adhere strictly to a set of just instructions, such as a constitution or a holy book. But no matter how clear or well-written the instructions, people will misinterpret and reinterpret them. Even if total stasis was achieved the organisation would become adrift from time. The rest of the world would carry on and become more advanced. It is impossible to preserve an idea or set of ideals for the future, unless that idea could somehow achieve global domination, but it would still fall apart from within. The only way to survive is to adapt and change, in which case exactly what is it that survives? What prevents an adaptable, changing state from mutating into a tyrannical form?

I spurt the majority of my creative juices onto my blog, Women and Dreams. "the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned."