User:The Literate Engineer

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[edit] Intro

I am not licensed to practice engineering in any nation, state, province, territory, or other legal jurisdiction. I am not a licensed Professional Engineer or its equivalent in another jurisdiction. I am a certified Engineer Intern in the State of Tennessee; that certification is transferrable and valid in any other U.S. state. Here in Minnesota, where I currently live, it's Engineer-in-Training. My field is civil engineering, specifically transportation engineering, and I got my bachelor's degree from that raging hotbed of liberalism, Vanderbilt University. I am 22 years old, I was born in Anderson, South Carolina and grew up in the Atlanta metropolitan area. I did, in fact, live in the Atlanta city limits for... I think it's 7 years. Then I went to college. I was accepted to North Avenue Trade School, but my parents live less than 10 minutes away, so obviously, I wasn't going to stay there when an out-of-state school gave me a scholarship.

I am not an admin, I just try to act like one.

I don't speak as many languages as I'd like to.

I don't contribute to Wikipedia as often as I used to. I have reasons for that.

# Of Times This Page Vandalized Since I Joined Wikipedia on May 29, 2005: 4±1 <---Hah! Think you can outsmart me on my own vandalism counter, do you? -TLE

My favorite page in the Wikipedia namespace? WP:DEP. Pages listed there always need improvement, and a few minutes work building the web improves the entire encyclopedia, not to mention the article in question.

My second-favorite? WP:CSBOT It's more important than the Dead-End Pages list, actually, but the improvements are harder to make.

I'm #157!.


[edit] Articles I've Started

Freeway service patrol * D. A. Clarke * Martha McCaughey * Rape culture * USS Charrette (DD-581) * Cangas del Narcea * Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Lists of songs * DeShaney v. Winnebago County * lost time

[edit] Articles I've Made A Substantial Rewrite To Or Otherwise Heavily Influenced (saved from deletion, added a subsection, etc.)

Highway Emergency Response Operators * shephali (got to clear a wikify tag!) * Architect Registration Exam * Gu Long (got WP:CSB credit for this one!)* Richard Haas * Epidemic Intelligence Service * Gordon Gee * Alberto Gonzales * Intersectionality * Manganism * Don McPherson * Castle Rock v. Gonzales


[edit] Redlinks I Made That I Promise To Make Into Actual Articles Very Very Soon

Roth v. Board of Regents of State Colleges * Highway Capacity Manual

[edit] Requested Articles I Intend To Start If Nobody Beats Me To It

None, at the moment.


[edit] My Approach to AFD

  1. I am vehemently opposed to lists as articles. My belief is that there is no place on Wikipedia for any "List of..." articles. Any worthwhile list can and must be folded into a pre-existing legitimate article. Otherwise all lists are to be deleted, although a few are worthy of reincarnation as categories. I've yet to encounter the exception to this rule.
  2. Everything has its place. For some information, that's in an encyclopedia. For other things, it's in a thesaurus or in a dictionary. Never should these be mixed.
  3. Being "useful" is insufficient to justify an entry's existence.
  4. I believe Sturgeon's Revelation is inaccurate because it leaves out a key phrase: "at least". At least 90% of everything is crap, thus at least 90% of everything is unworthy of inclusion in any encyclopedia, Wikipedia included.
  5. Regarding original research, I have access to a university library, including a couple thousand scholarly journals in electronic (and searchable) form. I have neither the time nor inclination to search all of them (even all the relevant ones) for something I suspect is original research. Generally, I'll search 3-5 topical journals. If I don't get a result, I vote delete. Obviously, this only applies to fields of knowledge for which there exist relevant journals. There's also a bunch of databases I can search, like Lexis-Nexis for instance.
  6. All lists are listcruft. All lists must be deleted. Repetition that's worth making.
  7. WP:NOT. At some point, I'm going to have it memorized, I fear.

I believe in Wiki-Hell.

I believe that we who write and contribute to articles as editors are not writers of articles, but ranchers (or farmers, or gardners, or your preference of agricultural professional). And as with any agricultural endeavor, a great deal of weeding and culling is necessary.

In short, I'm a deletionist.

[edit] Talking About Other Wikipedians

I think it's good to praise people. So, here's a few of the people around here whose input I most respect, and who I am liable to go to and ask for advice about a conflict with another Wikipedian. Func * Splash * Essjay * Dmcdevit * BD2412

All of them are admins, though I think 3 weren't when they went on the list. Which means I need to find some new non-admins to stick there.

[edit] Some Thoughts About Grammar

While I loathe prescriptive grammar, I'm a big stickler for getting people to distinguish between it's and its and I get livid with people who use quotation marks for emphasis (see Scare quotes). See, with prescriptive grammar, the problem's that word order determines sentence meaning, and so saying that the mission of the Starship Enterprise was "boldly to go" is entirely different from saying it was "to boldly go". The problem with screwing up it's and its is that they're two totally different words.

[edit] About Infinitives And The Splitting Thereof

Let me delve into further detail about the infinitives. Keeping the famed Star Trek example, we have three possible sentences:

  1. The mission of the Starship Enterprise was boldly to go.
  2. The mission of the Starship Enterprise was to boldly go.
  3. The mission of the Starship Enterprise was to go boldly.

Now, why are these three distinct sentences?

  • The first applies boldly to the entirety of "to go", meaning that the decision to go is what's bold. It's approximately synonymous with, "The bold mission of the Starship Enterprise was to go."
  • The second applies boldly only to the word "go", meaning that the going is to be done in a bold way. It's exactly synonymous with, "The mission of the Starship Enterprise was to go in a bold manner."
  • The third applies boldly not to the infinitive at all, but to the Starship Enterprise, meaning that the going is to be done with a bold attitude. It's almost exactly synonymous with, "The mission of the Starship Enterprise was to be bold while going."

[edit] About "people" who use quotation marks to emphasize things

As for the quotation marks for emphasis, I'm going to quote what I once read on a livejournal:

There are two acceptable times to use quotation marks.

  • ONE. When you are directly quoting someone, as in:

Shiny turned to Sunny and said, "Dude, our names SUCK."

  • TWO. Using them in an absurdly wrong place as a means of making a mockery of someone/thing. As in:

"Jennifer" had AWFUL tapered leg jeans on yesterday. (As if to say, "Yes, allegedly, her name is Jennifer, but those jeans render her completely useless and unworthy of officially having a name.) COROLLARY: The above rules also apply to those stupid hand quotation marks. In fact, I amend the above rules in the case of SHQs to state that one can ONLY use SHQs in joking/mocking situations.

[edit] Other Community-Type Websites At Which I Am Or Have Been Active

I keep personal blogs at LiveJournal and at Xanga. I'm a researcher and moderator at BuyBlue.org. And about two years ago I participated in the Harry Potter fandom by posting some stories at fictionalley.org, something I'm kinda embarassed about these days. Even though they were some damn good stories.


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Wikimedia Foundation

About that whole "licensing" thing & the GFDL: I don't understand it. At all. But I don't particularly like mirror sites and I don't approve of them.