User:Universitytruth

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[edit] Welcome to my newbie page

I became a wikipedian initially due to my interest in the University of Miami 2006 custodial workers' strike. I chose this userid for polemical reasons: it seemed at the time a good tool to use en la lucha.

This interest expanded into a concern for related pages on the University of Miami and Donna Shalala. Having been involved in two AfD discussions regarding the strike article, I became interested in other AfD discussions in general, and can understand how one can fritter one's life away being involved in these.

Currently, I'm contributing to pages related to German studies, including articles on German literature, a List of German-language authors, a List of German-language philosophers, and the like. I was very disturbed to see that from 2004-2006, the article on German literature opened with the claim that German literature was defined as literature written *in Germany proper* and in German. What??? Swiss and Austrian literature doesn't count? Kafka doesn't count? The novel Thomas Mann wrote in California doesn't count? This was an awful thing, but I've fixed it.

I have also developed a page on David E. Wellbery for the English and German wikipedia. Having reviewed some of the proposed wikipedia guidelines (and guidelines about guidelines...) concerning notability of academics, I feel that it will be hard to come to consensus on this topic, but that an article on Wellbery should be uncontroversial, given that he's truly in the first rank of Germanists.

Feel free to leave comments on my talk page and let me know how I'm doing. But please do sign your contribution. Thanks!

Meanwhile, I have logged in under my real name, Anthony Krupp. Substantive edits will generally be under that account name from now on. Unless labor issues arise again in South Florida, requiring my attention, in which case I will don this suit once more.

This username is an alternate account of Anthony Krupp.


[edit] Pages I'm working on now

List of German-language philosophers
add cat to pages starting with D
work on criteria with other editors (probably have to call for more in philosophy to drop by and discuss)
probably remove some names and blank others from the list and category
add some names from 19c, 20c, and contemporary lists.
List of German-language authors - have expanded it greatly and cleaned it up. It probably needs to be pruned now. (Perhaps separate lists for "writers" of sci fi, fantasy, and other such things?)
List of German-language poets - expand and add dates.
German literature

[edit] Category Errors: Sorting by Language vs. by Nationality

I proposed and created two categories: Category:German-language philosophers and Category:Philosophers by language. After a CfD, it was decided to keep them.

My concern was that Category:German philosophers, which sorts by nationality, creates several problems. First, Germany has existed in its present form since 1991, and in several other forms only since 1871. It is nonsensical, then, to claim that Immanuel Kant, for example, is a German philosopher according to a sorting by nationality. The situation gets worse when you consider the case of Salomon Maimon, a Lithuanian Jew who was not a German philosopher[1], but who wrote important philosophy in German. I think we can avoid excluding obviously important philosophers if we sort by the language in which their works were written. One could do this in addition to sorting by nationality. Thus Gottfried Leibniz, who was German but wrote in Latin and French, would be on the list and in the category of German philosophers, but Maimon, who was Lithuanian but wrote in German, would be on the list and in the category of German-language philosophers. The claim that this is confusing is a red herring. I'm glad that reasoned discussion prevailed. This makes me optimistic about wikipedia's development.

Current issue: developing criteria for inclusion in lists and categories of philosophers. How to reasonably distinguish between philosophers and intellectuals?

[edit] Helpful notes to self

  • If you need help, place {{helpme}} on your talk page.
  • Next time you want to delete anything mistakenly created by you place a {{db-author}} on it and an admin will soon come along and delete it.

[edit] My wikipediholic score

560.7836070115342