User: Jeeves
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WARNING: You have entered the user page of a Pedant.
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Greetings.
I'm a university student studying linguistics and chemistry. I'm employed as a sysadmin/programmer in an engineering design lab and as a research technician in an oncology lab.
Other interests include musicianship, composing music with trackers and sequencers, software synthesizers, creative writing and poetry, electronomics, and learning other languages. I speak fluent Swedish and have a good academic knowledge of French (I can read it easily, and can write it with reasonable competence, but have no spoken fluency).
Editorial Missions
Most of what I do on the Wiki is copyediting. If you're interested in my editing process, see my advice to authors and editors.
I have created very few articles, although I have added substance to a few. I recognize that my primary talent here is rewriting rather than original discourse.
I like to delete
I'll readily admit it; I'm a destructive editor. I strike things out, trim down, delete words, remove phrases. Quality, not quantity. "Omit needless words!" I won't say that I'm always right. Although I take a critical approach to the prose of others, it goes both ways. I expect articles I edit to be further edited, and even for some of my edits to be undone in the name of clearer writing and better information. You will not offend me by doing this. I enjoy it when an article I've edited is further edited by another user, because that's the spirit of collaboration, and n heads are always better than one when it comes to revision.
My basic theory on delete versus keep is that it is harder to remove entrenched nonsense than it is to re-insert good information. That is, an article that needs to be here will be re-added if it was deleted, and in a better form. I do not worry about deletion.
I used to be active on VfD, but nowadays I don't bother with it. The current process is too subjective and leads to heated debates which are often in the wrong spirit and don't actually go anywhere. I fervently hope that real standards for inclusion/deletion get established someday, but that seems far in the future.
If something basically worth keeping gets deleted, it was flawed. If such an article was needed, someone will eventually write an equivalent which will be kept. Hence, I think deletion should not be regarded as a rejection of ideas, merely a rejection of a particular form of an idea. Sometimes it's easier to delete an badly-realized article and start over again. I repeat, my vote to delete is not always an indication that I don't think the concept should be treated in the Wikipedia; rather, that particular way of treating it was not acceptable.
US-centrism
I am an American. That said, I really, really dislike the tendency of other Americans to think that what happens in the US is of foremost concern to everyone. In my experience, a lot of American Wiki editors lack international perspective and tend to be gregariously nationalistic without thinking about it. The fact that the Wikipedia is written in English does not mean that United States perspectives take center stage.
Suffix Abuse
Now we come to my personal linguistic pet peeve. As a linguistics student, I disdain prescriptive "grammar rules" and have great tolerance, even awe and respect, for the dynamic nature of the English language. But this really bothers me:
The excessive and silly elongification of English words must be preventiated at all costs! Death to the derivational suffixationalizers!!
Think before you coin, plz.
Words liberated so far
-
interminglemingle -
transcribaltranscription -
disputationdispute -
syncretisticsyncretic -
agriculturalistsfarmers -
prehistoricalprehistoric -
ritualisticritual -
traditionalistictraditional -
ceremonious eventsceremonies
And on the phrase level...
Weird phrases
-
make reading more readily availablemake reading easier
Don't use OFTEN so often!
Often I find articles which often use the word often too often. I will often edit these articles to use the word often less often, especially since the authors of such articles often lack the authority to say whether something really happens often or happens not so often. People often think that using the word often sounds more encyclopedic and will lead people to believe that they are often smarter than they are. However, I think this is often transparent.
Suggested Alternatives
- frequently
- generally
- usually
- in general
- for the most part
- typically
- sometimes
- on occasion
- (this space intentionally left blank)
In one article (beef) I removed 7 occurrences of "often"! Why do people like this word so much? Does it sound good, or have some kind of encyclopedic mystique? Perhaps we'll never know. But this brings me to another point...
Sexist language
I like Spivak Pronouns. I use them in my academic and personal writing. Unfortunately, the English-speaking world doesn't seem to be ready for them yet. Oh dear. It's a pity that our language doesn't supply us with a gender-ambiguous third-person pronoun. Maybe in a few more decades we can have a multinational referendum.
Anyway, it will probably take us linguists at least that long to develop a wikibot that could automatically identify and alter sexist pronouns.
Bureaucracy and Wikipedia
I'm against it.
