User:Peter Isotalo

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Wikipedia:Babel
sv Den här användaren talar svenska som modersmål.
en-4 This user speaks English at a near-native level.
no-3 Denne brukeren behersker norsk.
da-2 Denne brugers kendskab til dansk er på mellemniveau.
de-2 Dieser Benutzer hat fortgeschrittene Deutschkenntnisse.
ru-1 Этот участник владеет русским языком на начальном уровне.
nl-1 Deze gebruiker bezit elementaire kennis van het Nederlands.
Cyrl-N
я		 This user has a native-like understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Swedish
⇔
english		 I translate from Swedish to English on Wikipedia:Translation


My name is Peter Isotalo. I was born in Moscow in 1980 and I grew up in both Sweden and the Soviet Union. My family settled in Sweden in 1990 and I consider myself to be culturally and linguistically a Swede. I used to speak Russian as a second language, but it fell into disuse after moving from Moscow, so it's rather rusty now.

I live in Jakobsberg, a suburb of Stockholm in the municipality of Järfälla. I'm currently a student of linguistics at Stockholm University, now in the second term of their linguistics program. I have also completed two semesters of Mandarin at SU and taken a minor course in Dutch. Before my university studies I took courses in Japanese, German, Spanish, Latin and Russian. I have done some work as a freelance translator and I am planning to do sporadic jobs as a subtitler.

I previously went under the handle user:karmosin, so any edit history prior to October 17 2005 can be found here. You can also find me at Wikimedia Commons and English Wiktionary.

I'm not an ideal Wikipedian; I'm impatient, emotional, extremely critical of others as well as myself and sometimes I have very real problems with keeping my cool in heated debates. I am perfectly aware of this and do what I can to deal with it, but if you're of the foul disposition of trying to use this against me in a discussion, I'll try my best to ignore you or provide you with reminders of why personal attacks are stupid. You're welcome to point out if I engage problematic behavior, but certainly not by quoting my own user page. I mean, really, would you appreciate those kind of comments?

My WikiPolitics

I believe that a good argument should always outweigh one, or even several, poorly or just unmotivated votes or posts. I believe that all polling is extremely evil except when electing wikiofficials. I have a very strict view on what content should be allowed and I have even more stringent demands on the work I and others produce. I'm a firm opponent of all types of cruft and I generally believe that the tolerance for pop culture and very obvious fancruft (most of the tens of thousands of articles related to minor info blurbs in Harry Potter, Pokémon, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc) is too widespread and has lead to a lamentable and often publically embarassing systemic bias, i.e. that young, male, white, middle class, computer-savvy, North American and Western Euoprean nerds dictate far too much of the focus of Wikipedia without taking into consideration that they are a minority even in their own countries. Demographically I belong to this group myself, but I try my best to broaden my horizons and take on new topics of interest when possible. And I do not try to hold any kind of fancruft to be the equal of real life-relevant topics and I find those who do so to be mildly narrow-minded at best and downright arrogant at worst.

WikiProblems

  • Writing for readers, not yourself: Editors often forget that they are (mostly) writing articles that are intended to be read by the widest possible readership, not by their peers, friends, colleagues or indeed even experts in the field.
  • Your area of interest is most likely not unique: No really, it isn't. Yes, all knowledge is to one degree or another unique from other knowledge, but it isn't isolated and without comparison. Nothing is. If you find yourself taking up this position then you're most likely already deeply entrenched in a POV stance and should be thinking of how to get yourself out of it, rather than sniping at those trying to point it out.
  • Fancy words: Wikipedia is very often written by people without experience with writing popular literature or teaching. Commercial encyclopedias hire editors who have written articles not just for their peers, but for general audiences as well. Wikipedia still appears to be in its infancy when it comes to readability, as simplification and the usage of slightly more general terms is often confused with "getting it wrong" just because academic discussion tend to get bogged down over extremely specific definitions of terms that are fairly intuitive in other contexts. This, however, should not be confused with stilted or overly simplified prose. An article doesn't have to be devoid of flowery language, but I'll be the first to admit that it's a lot more difficult.
  • Mine! Mine! Letting someone else reword parts of all of what you have written doesn't mean your contribution has been thwarted. By all means, take a stand for good prose, but not just because it's yours'.

sub-pages


Interests

I am participating in the following WikiProjects:

Bias

Contents

Awards and wikiwork

A Rosetta Barnstar for stepping up to the plate and translating a Swedish article on Ben oil so that the material could be added to the English WP article. Waitak 13:35, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I, MacGyverMagic, hereby award you with an Epic Barnstar for your work on Medieval cuisine - a truly marvellous article which will no doubt be featured on Did You Know pretty soon. - Mgm|(talk) 12:24, 18 September 2006 (UTC)


Major contributions

Minor contributions

Articles started

Useful links

References

medieval topics

  • Adamson, Melitta Weiss (2004) Food in Medieval Times ISBN 0-313-32147-7
  • Albala, Ken, (2003) Food in early modern Europe, 1500-1800 ISBN 0-313-31962-6
  • The Cambridge world history of food (2000), editors Kenneth F. Kiple, Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas ISBN 0-521-40216-6
  • Coe, Sophie D. (1994) America's first cuisines ISBN 0-292-71159-X (paperback)
  • Dembinska, Maria (1999) Food and drink in medieval Poland : rediscovering a cuisine of the past, translated by Magdalena Thomas, revised and adapted by William Woys Weaver ISBN 0-8122-3224-0
  • The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages (1972) ISBN 0-00-632841-5
  • Henisch, Bridget Ann (1976) Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society ISBN 0-271-01230-7
  • Medieval science, technology, and medicine : an encyclopedia (2005) Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, Faith Wallis, editors ISBN 0-415-96930-1
  • Nordberg, Michael (1984) Den dynamiska medeltiden ISBN 91-550-2786-5
  • Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: A Book of Essays, edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson (2002) ISBN 0-415-92994-6
  • Scully, Terence (1995) The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages ISBN 0-85115-611-8
  • Strong, Roy (2003) Feast: A History of Grand Eating ISBN 0-7126-6759-8

linguistics

misc.

To read

Gallery

A sneaky (and thirsty) friar; medieval cuisine.

A lovely Danish baked by the excellent pastry chefs of Vete-katten in Stockholm.

Pölsa is an integral part of northern Swedish cuisine, the Scandinavian equivalent of haggis. Quite simply a type of meat porridge.

My own homemade vegetarian borscht.

From my trip to Vancouver (with friends living in Seattle); lovely, scenic Deception Pass.

Look at those mustaches... One of the founders of modern Swedish, August Strindberg.

A groovy and very photogenic tunnel at Frankfurt Airport.

The oldest document in Old Swedish written with a Latin script, known in Swedish as äldre västgötalagen, "the Old Västergötland Law".

Reading of Alexander Pushkin's "Winter evening" (Зимний вечер ) in Russian.

No, this is not a Miriam Makeba-remix. It's an example of the difference between the three variants of voiceless bilabial plosives, [p] that is, in Quechua.

Harbin pronounced in (non-native) Standard Chinese.

This is how you got to dine if you were a late medieval duke. No one sitting but yourself and your cardinal, surrounded by musicians, servants, guards, carvers, fancy plates, small dogs, chaperons and a truly grand nef (a salt cellar), topped off with a fancy red baldaquin over your noble head. And all of this in a room decorated with the most exquisite tapestry.
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