Misplaced Pages

This editor is an Experienced Editor and is entitled to display this Service Badge.

Kudpung is the name of a village in Isan, Northeastern Thailand. It also the main home of this contributor to the Misplaced Pages, a semi-retired British academic who was born and raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, England, in 1949. My father was one of the boffins who who contributed to the development of Radar during WWII. I left England in my early 20s after taking a first degree in Business Studies to spend six years in Lower Saxony with BAOR, followed by a further nine years in West Berlin where I studied Applied Linguistics, Communication Science (media), language pedagogics, and Applied Foreign Languages. I play the piano, the organ, the drums, and the vibraphone and while in Berlin I specialised in jazz and toured much of Europe with bebob and fusion bands. For a short while In the early 1980s I presented a daily programme on a Spanish radio station.
In 1988 following several years of involvement with the Avignon Festival, I moved permanently to the Provence where I taught languages and marketing in a regional university, and developed media and marketing solutions for Rhône wine, while producing a few acres of Grenache for the Lirac AOC.
In 2000 I settled in Thailand where I ended up teaching in a public university in Bangkok, designing teacher training programmes for the The Ministry of Education, and finally developing the languages department of a teacher training facility for a large group of independent schools, and collaborating on the development of new Cambridge University ESOL exams. Over the years, I have published a lot of stuff on linguistics and travel, and a series of English language text books (2004) specifically for use in Southeast Asia.
I retired from academic work in 2008 to my Thai home in Kudpung where I occupy my time with translating, writing, composing, and running a small consultancy. I return to Malvern regularly. My daughter by a previous marriage is a chair professor in a French university.

This user has been on Misplaced Pages for 18 years, 11 months and 29 days.

i've been editing Wikipdia for a fairly long time, and my work has been mainly taken up with creating and improving Wine, Thailand, Worcestershire articles, and more recently, getting the county project up and running. Knowing that my research is fairly thorough, and that I'm able to write reasonably neutral prose, I had never really considered nominating anything for Good Article. The Malvern article because of its brilliant teamwork, was to be the exception, and it taught me that good, friendly, and motivated collaboration can turn almost any article into a potential GA, or even FA candidate.
Although I spend quite a bit of time (in bursts) on the Misplaced Pages, my article space edit count is very low because:

• I concentrate on providing content and references for articles.
• I prepare my work and new creations in my sandbox before posting to article space.
• I spend a lot of time discussing improvements with other editors.
• Wherever possible, I group my edits to avoid cluttering edit history logs.
• I don't use automated tools to make thousands of changes per day without at least reading the offending articles.
• I don't believe high edit counts, bloated self-prommotion, and arrogance, are qualifications for barnstars or adminship.
• I believe untidy, immature, and messy user pages, especially of admins, are a sign of untidy, immature, and messy minds.
• I don't go out of my way to find fault and revert good faith editing errors - I put friendly comments on talk pages instead.
• I don't get involved in edit wars, especially when they are started by admins.
• I stay reasonably civil at most times, even in cases of condescending and WP:BITE behaviour by by admins.
• I know for a fact that some admins misuse their powers, but I know better than to argue with them.
• I don't waste my breath on adolescent admins who treat every mature, experienced editor like a newbie.
• WP:ANI almost always concludes in the favour of admins and self-appointed Misplaced Pages policemen.

I was once asked why I don't submit a WP:RfA. The answer was for all the reasons above, and a complete failure to understand how arrogant, foul-mouthed fifteen year olds get the admin tools.