I'm Hemmers

My key areas of interest are firearms; target shooting sports, and target shooters. I've been contributing to Wikipedia on-and-off since 2008.

I'm enthusiastic about WP:Globalise/WP:BIAS, particularly because our US colleagues make so many valuable contributions when it comes to firearms, but which can sometimes result in half the citations about a French firearm being from high quality - but US-centric - publications of the NRA of America. To this end I have created a number of articles for under-represented shooting sport organisations around the world and spend a fair amount of time looking for quality local references. As of 2023, I have started spending more time on articles for female athletes as women are significantly under-represented on WP. My starting point in this is mopping up the red links in articles such as 2014 ISSF World Shooting Championships or Shooting at the 2014 Asian Games. As of August 2026 I am pleased to have started 31 biographical articles, of which 28 highlight female athletes, mostly from non-English speaking nations. I remain conscious that only 2 of the 31 articles feature athletes from the Global South. European subjects are easier to cite due to a familiar alphabet and good media coverage, but I endeavour to do better.

My approach to Wikipedia is WP:Sofixit, as eulogised below. Templates have their place, but I dislike high-volume/low-byte editing. NPP, typos and clean-up are important, but go and write some stuff periodically - it's good for the soul and reminds you how hard it is to write quality prose. I'd rather see someone write one excellent, well-sourced article that is useful to people, than add a thousand commas of dubious grammatical merit. This is why I do not have edit counters on this page. </pompous puffery> It is for this reason that I am also active on Commons, adding media to support articles here. Word to live by:

The theory that I find most credible as an explanation of the decline of the community since 2007 is the end of the "SoFixIt" culture and its replacement by the templating culture which some consider newbie biting and which has lead to hundreds of thousands of articles disfigured by garish templates calling attention to problems that somebody hopes someone else will understand and fix. By WereSpielChequers, [1].