Norcalal is my online nickname.
I'VE BEEN ON HIATUS FOR A LONG TIME (MOST OF THE LAST 4+ YEARS). The crazy politics of the world, the trend toward the lack of civility, and it's relationship to a disrespect for facts and scholarship led me to break from the Wiki. I logged in February 19, 2018 to take a look at my profile, but I don't see this or anything online the way I did back when I began my interest in the encyclopedia in 2006. I'll take a look around, but the trepidation is well-founded, so I can't be sure I'll stay. Some of the strange interactions with agenda-driven editors before my break years ago make much more sense now that I've seen how crazy society is becoming. Even my heartfelt desire that articles be thorough and well-rounded, and thoughtful and interesting may not be strong enough to battle trolling and carefully (subtle?) veiled negative agendas of those who play games here. Those battles are no fun, and, over time, they are soul crushing. These editing battles are especially intense in the cases when the persons behaving that way aren't quite aware or are just incapable of being deeply honest regarding motivations for those agendas.
Attempting to Control a subject/article or details of a subject for the sake of control OR a political agenda sucks. Spirited discussion for the sake of clarity and improvement of a subject/article, though challenging, was usually always worth it in the end. Over ten plus years (including witnessing increasingly intense attacks), I noticed that there were too many issues with editors whose goals were aligned with the former rather than the latter.
Back to my online name: It relates to my being a California native from the far North Coast. I am a lifelong student of Social Science and I am a trained Historian. I once very much enjoyed this work as it relaxed me. But more than that, I truly wanted youngsters to find accurate, interesting articles when they made searches.
In past years, I worked on many, primarily California-related articles since I became a member of Wikipedia on November 18, 2006. There were far too many errors in many articles about topics that I have considerable knowledge to share. In my work I sought a more accurate, complete, thorough encyclopedia of all relevant knowledge on a subject. In the early years I grew to enjoy the process of article refinement around here and enjoyed building consensus with serious, sensible editors.
The now out of date list shows some of the articles I focused on...articles which I have had the pleasure of working to further develop or create from scratch.
