Wikipedia editor
| This is a Wikipedia
user 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 Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia.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:Dclayh. |
Userbox:
5-Humor | This user has no problem with
laughing at everything, regardless of what others think. |
whom | This user insists upon using
whom wherever it is called for, and fixes the errors of whomever they see. |
Latin Plurals: "Data is are..."
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This user uses "data", "media", "memoranda", "criteria", and "agenda" as the plurals of "datum", "medium", "memorandum", "criterion", and "agendum".
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Majority ≠ right
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This user recognizes that even if 300,000,000 people make the same mistake, it's still
a mistake.
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“...”!
US vs. UK | This user uses
logical quotation marks. Internal punctuation leads to factual errors. It's not a style issue! |
naïve coördinate Naziïsm | This user thinks English would be benefitted by a reasonable use of
diacriticals |
LaTeX | This user can typeset using
LaTeX. |
| This user listens to
NPR. |
tng-2 | This user has an intermediate understanding of
Tengwar. |
| This user knows how to prove that the
square root of two is irrational. |
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This user understands the
summation convention.
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| This user drinks
tea. |
| This user drinks
wine. |
T | This user will eat anything that's
tasty |
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This user likes their
steak
.
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Hello Wikipedia, I'm Clay, a grad student in
astrophysics at
Princeton. I did my undergrad in physics at
Harvey Mudd. In addition to science, I'm also quite interested in philosophy and art.
Generally I only edit Wikipedia when I comes across something in the course of my browsing which I know is wrong (many times this is grammatical), think is unclear, or believe is a gap in need of filling. That is to say I prefer not to create articles, but amend or emend existing ones (generally in small ways), and I don't restrict myself to particular areas.
Anyway, if you'd like to contact me, I have this username over most of the internet.
My
/Userboxes
A Thought on Style
Look at [
this version of the 2008 Presidential Debates] article. In the "Vice Presidential debate" section, we read, "On the morning of the day that the debate was to take place, McCain said..." Now this sentence could only have been written on the day the debate took place, but before it, because of its slightly convoluted avoidance of presenting the debate as a fact. After the debate in fact took place, it was duly modified to "On the morning of the day of the debate..."
Now I certainly don't want Wikipedia to be forecasting the future, but my question is this: why not just say "this morning", or even "today"? Naturally that doesn't at first glance sound encyclopedic, since no other encyclopedia would ever dream of making so specific a time reference. But Wikipedia is not any other encyclopedia; it's better, infinitely faster to update, and there's no reason why its style shouldn't include relative dates when appropriate.
A better criticism would be, what if the "today" doesn't get updated, thus making the sentence factually wrong? But look at the example above: the circumlocution was clearly going to be updated anyway, and in fact would have been, if not strictly wrong, at least highly misleading had it not been updated. So, in particular, if the person who introduces a relative date takes responsibility to update it, there shouldn't be a problem; current events in progress require many updates anyway.