- "What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become."
David Malouf (born 1934)
- "You reach a point where you have had everything, and everything amounts to nothing."
Patrick White (1912–90)
- "There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness."
Alain de Botton (born 1969)
My self-help writing tutorials
Self-help writing tutorials:
About me
I'm a professional editor and research consultant. My doctoral dissertation was in the psychology of music reading, including the roles of working memory and eye movement. I work with researchers and academics in their preparation of grant applications for competitive research funding. Most of my clients are staff at Australian universities who are applying for funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. This typically involves the negotiation of text in the areas of engineering, chemistry, physics, biology and information technology, although some of my work brings me into contact with a much broader spectrum of research.
My first career was in the European art music of the 18th and 19th centuries, specialising in the compositional techniques that underlie style—how acoustics, culture and psychology intersect in harmony and voice leading—and the psychological and musculoskeletal patterns that support excellent performance, particularly on the keyboard. That career crashed and burned 13 years ago, but music is still a big part of my private identity.
I’m a keen advocate of systemic functional grammar (see Michael Halliday’s and Christian Matthiessen’s Introduction to functional grammar, 3rd ed., Hodder Arnold, London, 2004 ... but the second edition, 1995, is easier to understand). Traditional grammar sucks, in my view; while it might be helpful in the early stages of learning a foreign language, the parsing of written words into inflexible categories doesn’t help people to write better. What does help is a knowledge of the functional relationships between speakers/writers and their listeners/readers as embodied in the grammar. But it’s damned complicated: theme and rheme; the given and the new; hypotactic and paratactic clauses; mood; texture; cohesion; tone groups; and much more—it’s a whole science of how the language fits together on many levels. Although I’ve started writing short articles on aspects of functional grammar, such as thematic equative and nominal group, I can claim no more than amateur status.
I enjoy the teamwork aspect of working on Wikipedian text, and I’m interested that the NPOV thing works so well. I like the way in which the project brings anglophones into a relatively homogeneous international community to share their wonderful language. But more recently I've become more involved in covering the multilinguistic, multicultural Wikimedia movement. Its complexity and potential for bringing the world together are astonishing.
Reform
I’m a reformer; it’s what I do. Thus far, I’ve achieved a degree of success in eight areas:
- Featured article candidates. I promoted the technique of reviewing the prose of nominations by analysing the weaknesses in a sample of the text as representative of the whole, and providing globally applicable advice. This may have been one of several factors contributing to higher standards of prose in some featured articles over the past two years. It has certainly made nominators take Criterion 1a more seriously (“[A featured article is] well-written: its prose is engaging, even brilliant, and of a professional standard”).
- Featured list candidates. I prompted a major overhaul of the process in late 2007, in which a directorate was appointed along the lines of the featured article process, and the FL criteria were recast. Further improvements have since been made by the FL team.
- Date autoformatting. I spearheaded the move towards dispensing with the misconceived date-autoformatting function, and played a major role in making this a reality on the ground.
- Overlinking. I introduced the term “smart linking” as part of moves over the past few years to persuade editors to use skill and moderation in linking. The main goals have been to strengthen the wikilinking system by avoiding the dilution of high-value links, and improving the readability of our article text. The English Wikipedia now has a much better functioning wikilinking system than the other 285 Wikipedias, which seem to have chaotic, undisciplined wikisystems by comparison.
- Gender-neutral language. In 2007, I succeeded in introducing WP's guideline for gender-neutral language against vicious opposition. The guideline is now supported by Wikipedia:GNL, written by other editors.
- Default width of thumbnail images. It was a tiny 180 pixels for as long as anyone can remember. I led a push in late 2009 to generate consensus on en.WP to raise this, and then to persuade the Wikimedia developers to implement the change. The thumbnail default size was boosted to 220 pixels—an increase of almost 50%—on en.WP in February 2010 and on Commons in April 2010; a gradual roll-out through Wikimedia's sites was completed by November 2010.
- Manual of Style (MOS). I've made a considerable contribution to improving the standard of expression and, in my view, the quality of advice in the Manual of Style, main page, along with users Noetica (who has taught me much about language), and others. In late 2006, I rewrote most of the critical Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (MOSNUM), setting it up to approach the characteristics of a professional style guide.
- Non-free content policy. In 2007, against considerable resistance, I forced through the issue of rewriting the policy text so that it is clearly and logically expressed rather than something that resembled the dog’s half-eaten breakfast. The structure, format and tone I designed survive in the current policy text, although the details have evolved since the revamp.
Overlinking
This user believes date-autoformatting is like lipstick on a pig. |
Wikis suffer from the chronic overlinking of common terms; these dilute the appearance and significance of high-value links in the vicinity. The benefits of reducing overlinking will be obvious if you consult most articles on the French Wikipedia, in which dates are still linked (without even being autoformatted), common terms are typically linked (“France” on every appearance, if you please) and repeat links are typical. It's a blue-spattered mess. I continue to promote smart linking practices in which linking is allocated to relatively high-value targets, and the clarity of piping is improved.
The Special Barnstar | ||
To thank you for sticking with the date-linking issue and for your Herculean efforts to resolve it. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 03:37, 3 April 2009 (UTC) |
Influences
These are the people whose work continues to have the deepest impact on me.
- JS Bach, the 18th-century German composer, particularly the choral movements of his cantatas. Why would you listen to anything else?
- Michael Tippett, the 20th-century English composer, particularly his Symphony No. 2 (1957), Symphony No. 3 (1972), the Triple Concerto (1979), and Concerto for double string orchestra (1939). He was not the greatest 20th-century composer—that honour goes to Stravinsky—but Tippett is the recent composer with whose music I feel the greatest personal affinity.
- Patrick White, the Nobel laureate novelist who showed that Australian culture doesn't have to be entirely superficial.
- Geoffrey Miller, the American evolutionary psychologist who has explained back to first principles so much about gender and what it is to be human.
- Michael Halliday, the great linguist who finally produced a map for understanding English grammar, and more broadly for understanding the grammar of all natural languages.
- Christopher Hitchens, who has flown the flag against that medievalist con-job we are all better off without: organised religion.
My pet hates
- Religion, the greatest con-job ever perpetrated on humanity, which deserves to be called what it is: "the supernatural industry", complete with brand names such as Catholicism, Anglicanism, and the palm reader at the circus.
- Nationalism, which leads to tears ... always, sooner or later.
- Sexism and racism.
- Celebrity, which makes me vomit.
- Display consumption, which I personally don't need or want, and which I disapprove of in others.
- Unregulated television and radio advertising, a primary agent for cheapening society, for promoting the superficial, unhappy life. Along with the acceptance of campaign-fund bribery to purchase influence, it has become the destroyer of representative democracy.
- Any music with a drum kit; call me a snob, then.
This editor is not an administrator and does not wish to be one. |
Tone down the bright blue of wikilinking
Linking, which is often overused on Wikipedia, looks seriously messy in densely linked text and makes reading more difficult. You can very easily change the display colour of links on your monitor from the current gaudy blue to a more subtle shade. Try it and see. It will take two minutes; here's how.
- (1) First, choose how subtle you want your links to look: here's a comparison over whole paragraphs of the current default colour with four other, decreasingly bright colours.
- (2) Create your own user stylesheet, if you haven’t done so already, at your monobook.css / vector.css page.
- (3) At the top of that page, paste in the following, starting with "a" and ending with the curly bracket:
a { color: #003366 }
(this one is for midnight blue, the second darkest—simply replace that code with the one that suits you on the comparison page). - (4) Then go to your user preferences. Make sure that you've selected "Never underline links" under Miscellaneous.
Clear your cache, and you're done. To use another colour, simply replace "midnightblue" with the name of your choice; remove the pasted text to return to the default. Feedback on this is welcome on my talk page. I'd like to see WikiMedia adopt this as the default colour, and decouple the date-autoformatting and linking functions: it's ridiculous that dates have to be blue links to activate the formatting mechanism.