User:Edonovan
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I joined Wikipedia on October 10, 2005 after reading an article on Wikipedia and trust which used the anomie article as an example of why Wikipedia is inferior to other sources of information. The irony I saw was that the author could've, by getting involved, just corrected the perceived deficiency himself, since in his post he stated what was wrong. So I did it for him. Then I decided I needed to join the community in order to be able to take part in discussions relating to that article, which I know had a little bit of ownership in, and to contribute to other articles.
My blog is at donovan.covblogs.com. My del.icio.us username is outofegypt. I'm also on Facebook, a source of some embarassment to me, though the site has some legitimate uses.
When I was at Covenant College, studying English, I occasionally edited without logging in because of the firewall that I was behind. My IP for those edits would have been logged as 66.255.16.50. Of course, that's for all public computers at the college, so not all the changes logged to that IP are mine. If you have any questions about particular edits, just ask.
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[edit] History
I was born June 15, 1984 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Lancaster County among the large Amish and Mennonite communities of the area. I, however, am a Reformed Presbyterian and not a true Lancaster Countian according to some, since neither of my parents were born there (my father grew up near Washington, D.C. and my mother near New York City).
In 2002, I graduated from Solanco High School. While there, besides taking some AP courses and otherwise preparing for college (though I didn't end up going to a tremendously selective one after all), I ran on the cross-country team and wrote poetry for the school's literary magazine, Reflections.
Both of those interests I've kept up in college. Also, for a while I wrote for the Bagpipe, Covenant's college newspaper. During my sophomore and junior years, I worked on layout, exercising my perhaps-mediocre graphic design skills.
Last semester, I wrote an undergraduate thesis (known at Covenant as a SIP) about Marshall McLuhan's media theories and the rhetoric of hypertext - that is, how hypertext documents, and, more broadly, web communities, offer media experiences that transcend McLuhan's dialectical oppositions between hot and cool communication, between word and image. The finished paper (at least insofar as such a paper can be finished) is accessible at my writing wiki.
Currently, I'm studying abroad at Oxford, focusing on British literature from 1740-1832 and the development of Christian doctrine to AD 450. After that, my current plan is to move to Philadelphia and find work either in journalism or the publishing industry. Maybe I'll eventually go to seminary to study theology (Gordon-Conwell would be my top choice right now) or to graduate school to study something at the interface between writing, literary theory, and the theory of electronic media, media ecology perhaps. But I have to make money somehow.
[edit] Interests
- poetry and other forms of creative writing
- running
- going to pubs (well, over here, anyway)
[edit] Intellectual and Spiritual Influences
- my father (and his Westminster Theological Seminary education)
- Athanasius of Alexandria
- St. Augustine
- St. Bernard of Clairvaux
- John Donne
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Denise Levertov
- Francis Schaeffer
- John Piper
- Walker Percy
- (more to come)
[edit] Probable Areas of Wikipedia Activity
As I am most knowledgeable in humanities-related fields, such as literature, philosophy, and theology, you'll see me working on articles in those fields most often, which is good, since they seem to need the most work. I've already slightly revised the articles on a few literary works that I've read. I also might work on some of the articles about popular music and Internet-related topics.
You can expect me to do occasional proofreading and adding of wikilinks, as well. I might set up a list on here of certain faux pas, stylistic and otherwise, that irritate me.
Update (28.2.06): After a long hiatus, I'm returning to editing, though, with my busy essay-writing schedule, my edits will be sporadic at best. So far I've largely been fixing proofreading mistakes that I find while browsing. I find that many of the articles that I could actually revise extensively would take serious reworking that I can't afford to do at the present time. Perhaps I might start making a list for the future. I edited the Eucharist and Gregory Dix articles today, for a start.
[edit] Internal Links (within my user namespace)
Bible link discussion from the Village Pump.
Proposals for the future.
[edit] Pages on Wikipedia that are horrendously biased (and probably will always be)
(With a note of the current slant.)
- New World Translation - pro-JW
- I think this puts the NWT on an even plane with translations such as the KJV, RSV, etc., which it does not deserve
[edit] Gregory Dix
I have tried to fix it but without unduly prolixity and undue POV slant. There is fairly heavy but inconsistent criticism from Colin Buchanon; much more muted comment by such as Kenneth Stevenson and Michael Perham. If you still think it needs clarifying without the theological article I wil come back to it. Roger Arguile\Roger Arguile 17.15 5 March (UTC)
