User:John Shandy`

One of many reasons we edit Wikipedia.

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This user has been on Wikipedia for 14 years, 10 months and 23 days.

This user has helped promote 8 good articles on Wikipedia.

This user tries to do the right thing. If they make a mistake, please let them know.

en

This user is a native speaker of the English language.

This wikipedian is a
Citizen of the World
(Terra, ⊕).

This user enjoys the subject of astronomy.

Hello, I'm John Shandy`, but you're welcome to call me Shandy for short. My most active areas of interest are: international finance, development economics, international development, international relations, geopolitics, risk management, astronomy, and secular humanism. I enjoy meeting new people from around the world and sharing culture. I am a natural born skeptic, but an eager and optimistic problem solver. If there's anything else you might like to know, just ask. :)

My evolving interests are: primatology, comparative cognition, and evolutionary psychology.

I suffer from a gradually developing point of view that our three pillars of verifiability, no original research, and neutral point of view are indeed the most important policies for Wikipedia's mission and quality, but that the most consequential & aggressively-enforced policy, biographies of living persons, is in the long-run a disservice to the three pillars and to the reader. I have found information about the actual legal and financial impacts to the Wikimedia Foundation from litigation or threats of litigation by living persons to be extremely lacking. It seems that fear and a culture of longstanding compliance driven by that fear, are the leading reason why our biographies of living persons articles will ultimately neglect to cover genuinely verifiable information that may cast living persons in a problematic or morally-questionable light. It is an expensive insurance policy, to protect against what I increasingly perceive to be a mismeasured risk. As such, I generally avoid editing biographies of living persons to avoid brushes and abrasions with the policy and its most stringent adherents.

Significant contributions

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Quotes

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
— Voltaire

A man's dreams are an index to his greatness.
— Zadok Rabinowitz

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome universe that utterly dwarfs - in time, in space, and in potential - the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
— Carl Sagan

Life is sacred, that is to say it is the supreme value to which all other values are subordinate.
— Albert Einstein

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
— Carl Sagan

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
— Anais Nin

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.
— Anne Tyler

Barnstars

	The Good Article barnstar
	For your successful improvement of International Finance Corporation, among others, in order to achieve GA status. Keep up the good work! benzband (talk) 21:05, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

	The WikiProject Globalization barnstar
	For work on World Bank-Related articles! Thanks for bringing International Finance Corporation to GA Status! Meclee (talk) 22:00, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

	The Original Barnstar
	Nice work on Global financial system, it's a major improvement from what it was just a few months ago. LK (talk) 02:22, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

	The Citation Barnstar
	Thank you for expanding 1994 economic crisis in Mexico and adding sources where needed. Your job is extraordinary! Happy editing, ComputerJA (☎ • ✎) 02:49, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

		The Good Article Barnstar
		Thanks for being such a cooperative reviewer with Global financial system and I wish you good luck with it for FA. Happy holidays! --Brandon (MrWooHoo) • Talk to Brandon! 18:01, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Committed identity: 299a80ab3c3baa9e1167ccc326a88c24ca91b4b6f3b0a3a4b20ed49928c169af04faf5d06f44907d5df6eaa0c5d605d221ee495f14233c0500946a63b954997e is a SHA-512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.