This is a Wikipediauser page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Drat8sub.
The Apennine Colossus is a stone statue, approximately 11 metres (36 feet) tall, in the estate of Villa Demidoff (originally Villa di Pratolino) in Vaglia in Tuscany, Italy. A personification of the Apennine Mountains, the colossal figure was created by Giambologna, a Flemish-born Italian sculptor, in the late 1580s. The statue has the appearance of an elderly man crouched at the shore of a lake, squeezing the head of a sea monster through whose open mouth water originally emanated into the pond in front of the statue. The colossus is depicted naked, with stalactites in the thick beard and long hair to show the metamorphosis of man and mountain, blending his body with the surrounding nature. It is made of stone and plaster and the interior houses a series of chambers and caves on three levels. Initially, the back of the statue was protected by a structure resembling a cave, which was demolished around 1690 by the sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini, who built a statue of a dragon to adorn the back of the colossus. The Italian sculptor Rinaldo Barbetti renovated the statue in 1876.Sculpture credit: Giambologna; photographed by Rhododendrites
I started editing at wikipedia simply out of frustration. Late in the year 2014, I got interested in Indian football history (national teams), and wanted to know about Indian football statistics and players and to my surprise there were inadequate and scattered information on google or wikipedia and were not organised well. So, I thought why not just create & improve articles in wikipedia and provide as much as information about national team players, statistics, leagues, all national teams. Today, I am one of the main author and contributor of various Indian football articles in wikipedia viz. men's team, women's team and all other age group u23 & u17 national teams, various statistical pages related to Indian football, Indian football leagues, and Indian players. My motive here is to improve as much as existing articles (lot of which created by fellow wikipedians ArsenalFan700 and Coderzombie from the project) related to Indian football and create informative articles. The significant contributions and improved articles are listed below.
The journey with Indian football history also made me a football statistician and became a member of RSSSF, a foundation dedicated to football statistics, the biggest football database/archive in the world. Often provide and publish statistics there on Asian football. Interestingly, AIFF updated its website on December 2019 where they maintained a football history timeline, majority seems to be taken from the wikipedia articles which I have worked in, some are exact lines and stats which I've provided. Again, prominent footballing and sports website are directly taking materials from wikipedia and RSSSF. Like this goal.com article of India national team hat-tricks. However, ironically was replicated from the wrong version of the wikipedia article and many more such articles exist online. Another example, History India team at Olympics by Olympic.com based on the article India national football team at the Olympics a GA article I created here. So, surely I'm happy as directly or indirectly the purpose is served, telling history of Indian football to people and so that more people may support Indian football. My dream related to football is to see India football teams qualify for the FIFA Men's and Women's World Cup and other age group W.Cups and winning those, & me writing articles like India at the FIFA World Cup and India at the FIFA Women's World Cup someday with pride.
Along with football, soon I took interests in athletics, cricket and other sports articles, improved many related articles. My interest is also to work with the articles under WikiProject India & WikiProject Asia, and created and improved several articles and hope will continue.
Feel free to drop a message on my talk page, and I will likely respond to your comments there as soon as possible. Concerns on a specific article may also take place on the article's respective talk page, and I may respond there as well; just be sure to {{ping}} me. Drat8sub(Talk/Edits) 21:32, 22 May 2020 (UTC)