S Marshall
uses his real name on Wikipedia.
S Marshall
Born(1971-02-28)28 February 1971
PR | New pages | My sandbox
AfT | DRV | LFH
UCP | ReFill

 

Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one's prejudgment simply need not be believed... Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.Dietrich Bonhoeffer


S Marshall is a British Wikipedian.[prove it] Palaeontologists estimate that he may have stood up to four metres tall at the shoulder.


I sometimes don't receive emails from Wikipedia because I use Yahoo and, well, this. I do want to talk to editors, but it's safest to use my talk page.


Hi, I'm Stuart Marshall. I live in Cambridgeshire in England (but am originally from Hertfordshire). I have varied interests on Wikipedia; look for me in unlikely places!

I edited occasionally as an IP in 2004 and 2005, and I registered this account in 2006, but was only sporadically active until 2008 or so. In 2009 I nominated two people for adminship: User:Fences and windows and User:LinguistAtLarge. Although they both seem to have worked out rather well, I've never nominated anyone since.


It's 00:55 on 21 July 2026.


We're here to write an online compendium of knowledge (United Kingdom Traditional English: encyclopaedia; United States Simplified English: encyclopedia), and to share it with everyone in the world in freely-reusable format without cost. That's a profound thing to do.

Historically, what people who had knowledge did was to monetize it. In the past couple of decades, Wikipedia, together with other more reliable, but less broad, knowledge-sharing initiatives driven by universities and libraries, have started to subvert that monetization. We're slowly but I think importantly disrupting the knowledge economy.

Editors get various benefits from contributing, the most important of which is learning the right kind of scepticism. We learn to analyse sources. When I started contributing to Wikipedia, early during the rise of social media, I didn't know how important the right kind of scepticism would become. Editing Wikipedia over the years has made me brighter, which is an outcome that the person I barely remember any more, S Marshall in his thirties, wouldn't have expected for a moment. But it's true. Now that I can find the right information in the right source more quickly and surely, I make better decisions, faster, than I did in the past.

Wikipedia is of course deeply flawed and heavily distorted in many, many respects. But, whether you measure it in terms of the labour that went into it, or its importance to our culture, it's reasonable to call it the first Information Age Wonder of the World.


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