User:Helicon

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[edit] K.E. Mitchell

Daily user and willing contributor

[edit] Personal

I am a college student at the University of Texas at Austin.

I am studying Plan II and Comparative Literature in English, Spanish, and Russian.

I am fluent in English (American variety, Southern dialect), and approaching fluency in Argentinian Spanish. I am a beginning Russian student as well.

I am fluent in numerous programming languages, a Linux user, an avid LaTeX typesetter, and supporter of standards-compliant web technologies like XHTML and CSS. I browse using Opera 9 and use jEdit, VIM and Eclipse for editing by preference.

Religiously, I am best (but not comfortably) described as Theopanistic, which is occasionally called Panentheism for reasons we Theopanistic-pseudo-panentheists are too easy to care about.

My musical interests extend to composition and percussion performance. As a listener, I prefer jazz (Charles_Mingus and Dave_Brubeck especially), the classical works of Rimsky-Korsakov and his students (e.g. Igor_Stravinsky and Sergei_Prokofiev), and experimental rock music (Talk Talk, Tortoise (band) Radiohead, Mogwai, Broken Social Scene, etc...).

I produce artwork digitally via a graphics tablet and western pen and ink when I get the time and the inkling.

I read modern literature voraciously, and love it.

[edit] Contributions

I intend to expand information in the Wikipedia pertaining to the University of Texas when i can, and to check and contribute to science articles in my fields of study and interest as I reach them. When i catch typo, grammar, and style issues, i fix them. I am currently paying a lot of attention to Kent Hovind, which has become rediculous, and Shi'a Islam, which is still limping along looking for direction.

[edit] On Wikipedia

The technical articles seem more or less on-target. Personality pages (especially living personalities) tend to be much less encyclopedic.

I'd like to see page-templates (or just general standardization) for repeated pages like the chemical elements and somesuch, just to get things looking more uniform. There have been some efforts by hand to standardize them, but the information in the sideboxes, etc. is not always the same.

My general philosophy concerning pages is: They should read like encyclopedia articles.

• Dry yet readable
• Well sectioned and broken down
• Easily searchable
• Dense
• Clear designation between fact, purported fact, and reaction
  • ("There is a dispute" can be a fact!!!)

I'm a firm believer that, just like in the writing process, it's often best to start again from scratch when collaborating. This isn't very popular around here... ;-)