User:JEBrown87544

Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico USA

Age: fortymumble

[edit] Areas of interest and expertise

The best things I can give to Wikipedia are those unwritten insights that helped me to grasp the material. This is how new teaching methods evolve and develop. It's been said that many great theories were poorly taught until really good visual examples and clearer wordings were discovered -- decades later, in some cases.

Quality: When I see an edit which possesses the evil trifecta of Poor Spelling, Poor Grammar, and Poor Fact-Checking, I will usually back away and not correct the spelling and grammar. Misspellings are a useful indicator of poor quality, a sign that the author didn't put much effort into checking his or her work. Misspellings and poor grammar are often indicators that the writer is generally careless about detail in all aspects of his or her work; cosmetic changes will not fix that. Rather, cosmetic problems should be left in, to more quickly alert other readers to the deeper overall problems with an article's quality. In other situations, when the prose is clear and the logic is sound and the points made are needful, I don't mind cleaning up the spelling/grammar/punctuation as a tribute to the quality of another writer's contribution. In any case, I never correct the spelling and grammar on a wiki if I'm not in a position to check the facts as well.

My Wikipedia editing skills arose out of:

version control skills, acquired in a software engineering environment
code review techniques, esp. side-by-side file comparison (e.g. using Unix's sdiff and Apple's CompareFiles tools)
my habit of documenting all design decisions, whether I'm writing C++, HTML or text
a heavily hyperlinked 8 MB reference book I'm writing
web design

If you have these skills, your transition to Wikipedia editing will be easy and natural.