User:Astrochemist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This Wikipedia name was created so that I can edit material of interest, mostly as relates to science, mathematics, and their history. Working on articles is a type of educational service activity for me, and a fun one at that.
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[edit] My foci on Wikipedia
- Content - One of my focal points is content because Wikipedia and similar efforts will fail without quality, authoritative articles. I've contributed to established articles and written new ones.
- References - Articles need authoritative references for verifiability. Since the English-language Wikipedia is based in the United States, most of the references I've added are to books and periodicals that are reasonably well available in the US and the UK, the two nations I know best.
- Pictures - Reading long pieces of unbroken text is boring, so I've added images to many articles through both Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Some images are pictures I've taken or ones I've scanned, while others are public-domain materials or older items for which fair-use can be claimed.
[edit] Why I will leave Wikipedia in the future
- Probably a third of my 1700 contributions have been removals of vandal-added material, and that has eaten up precious time. I have a very active non-Wikipedia life and it involves, among other things, writing professional papers. Once written, they're done and don't need to be constantly policed. Wikipedia writing, with its necessary time spent in policing, is unlike what professionals do, and unattractive to many. In brief, I don't have time to both write for articles and to delete vandalism.
- I enjoy writing and educating, but the "everyone is equally qualified" attitude will kill Wikipedia and similar efforts. Individuals with a one-topic agenda, or folks who are simply malicious, will revert and tinker forever while the rest of us drop out. Otherwise fine articles will contain material that is irrelevant, tangential, misleading, or incorrect. I have neither the time nor the authority to argue about edits with ill-informed contributors, and so I avoid them all and their articles. My editorial collaborations have been confined largely to friendly individuals who have taken the time to study their subjects carefully, as I believe I have. I've learned from those people and I thank them.
[edit] Some articles I've created
- Lauder Brunton, Catherine Cate Coblentz, William Coblentz, Josiah Parsons Cooke, Frederick G. Donnan, Augustus George Vernon Harcourt, Claude Hudson, Arthur Michael, Helen Abbott Michael, Edgar Fahs Smith, Adolph Strecker, James Alfred Wanklyn, Karl Weltzien, Ludwig Wilhelmy, Hyperfine coupling, Karlsruhe Congress, Pneumatic chemistry
[edit] Some articles to which I've made reasonably-significant contributions
- Ernst Otto Beckmann, Jacob Bronowski, Stanislao Cannizzaro, Henry Cavendish, James Dewar, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, Robert Were Fox the Younger, Eugen Goldstein, Robert Hooke, Eben Norton Horsford, Pierre Janssen, Richard Kirwan, Joseph Norman Lockyer, Eilhard Mitscherlich, John Pitkin Norton, Reginald Punnett, François-Marie Raoult, Theodore William Richards, Wilhelm Schlenk, Alexis St. Martin, Silvanus P. Thompson, Cavendish experiment, Electron paramagnetic resonance, List of molecules in interstellar space, Nernst heat theorem
[edit] Some articles to which I've contributed pictures, and often some text
- Follow this link to reach a gallery of images I've added to Wikimedia. Many of them are in the following articles:
- George Biddell Airy, André-Marie Ampère, Henry Edward Armstrong, Charles Babbage, Frank C. Baxter¸ Simone de Beauvoir¸ Friedrich Konrad Beilstein, Robert Bentley, Emile Berliner, Joseph Black, Nathaniel Bliss, Mathew Brady, Aleksandr Butlerov, William Wallace Campbell, Jean-François Champollion, William Christie (astronomer), Agnes Mary Clerke, William Kingdon Clifford, Ralph Copeland, William Crookes, John Dalton¸ William Rutter Dawes, Arthur Conan Doyle, Pierre Louis Dulong, Jean Baptiste André Dumas, Frank Watson Dyson, Émile Egger, Edward Frankland, George Gamow, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Thomas Graham, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Cato Maximilian Guldberg, Stephen Hales, Edmond Halley, Dashiell Hammett, Joseph Henry, Germain Henri Hess, Johann Wilhelm Hittorf, Herman Hollerith, J. Edgar Hoover, William Henry Hudson, William Huggins, Thomas Henry Huxley, James Prescott Joule, Gustav Kirchhoff, Leopold Kronecker, Urbain Le Verrier, Oliver Joseph Lodge, Alexander Macfarlane (mathematician), Jane Marcet, James Marsh (chemist), Edward Walter Maunder, Viktor Meyer, William Allen Miller, Maria Mitchell, Simon Newcomb, Lars Onsager, Wilhelm Ostwald, John Pond, Pushmataha, Johann Philipp Reis, Ellen Swallow Richards, Henry Enfield Roscoe, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julius Scheiner, Upton Sinclair, John Philip Sousa, George Gabriel Stokes, Leopold Stokowski, Pietro Tacchini, Benjamin Thompson, Thomas Edward Thorpe, Bernhard Tollens, John Tyndall, Hermann Carl Vogel, Wernher von Braun, Hugo von Seeliger, Isaac Todhunter, Alexander William Williamson, Johannes Wislicenus, William Hyde Wollaston, Charles-Adolphe Wurtz, Marsh test, The Sceptical Chymist
