User: David Gerard
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David Gerard is an utter wikipediholic. He is apparently an administrator [1] [2] and helps clear the incoming spam on wikien-l. He is from Australia and lives in London.
My wife foolishly directed me here and I became an instant addict. Like Barney Gumble having that first beer.
My life has been spent filling my head with unbelievable quantities of trivia and rubbish. Here's a chance to get some of it out.
As a recovering editor, I can't see a grammatical or spelling error without my red-pencil hand twitching. Wikipedia provides tremendous opportunity in this field.
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Contacting me
Put it on the article talk page in the first instance, my talk page in the second. If you email me stuff that would normally go on a talk page, I'll likely ignore it. I've also erroneously deleted such mail as spam before ...
If you're inadvertently affected by a block I've made, do of course email. Collateral damage is bad.
I must write more articles
And not copyedit so much. And so must you. My scratchpad (for the terminally bored or work-avoidant). The Problem With Music.
Wikipedia 1.0 is my current obsession. Go to m:List of articles all languages should have and Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have and help fill the gaps.
My personal style guide
- "It's about viral payload density." — John Hawkes-Reed
We're writing articles for someone who knows nothing about a topic but needs to get up to speed really quickly. You have ten seconds.
- Who, what, where, when, why?
- Summary lead, then inverted pyramid).
- Omit needless words.
- The Economist Style Guide: clarity with precision. ("I love The Economist. It's like a really rational guy on crack." — Erithromycin)
- HOWTO: write bad documentation that looks good. "Why" is almost more important than "what."
- Notes on brevity.
I sometimes picture my reader as a very bright ten- to twelve-year-old. Someone with a good reading age, but who knows nothing yet. Did you used to devour encyclopaedias as a kid?
Trivia
Your humble editor has been inducted into the Western Australian Music Industry Association's Hall of Fame. I got in and Bon Scott didn't. User:Redcountess will never forgive me.
See also
I have logins on Meta, OpenFacts (which I mostly use to write articles during Wikipedia downtimes) and Disinfopedia (which can be fun to write for, not having our NPOV rules ;-).
External links
- My home page at Thingy (the original and best)
- My home page at Velvet (smaller but faster)
- Rocknerd (the first web hosting I have ever paid for)
- My LiveJournal (a reliable source of TMI and unutterably tedious for anyone who doesn't know me)
