Hallo, I'm Chiswick Chap, or CC for short: for what it's worth, Chiswick is a place and chap means a man. I have specialised in natural history articles, including naturalists and their books, but to my surprise I seem to have a soft spot for Victorians, while working on camouflage led me all over the place including into the mysteries of military history. I suppose it is natural for an encyclopedia to look into the history of everything: after all, it cannot look forward or even at the present. A liking for Sweden led to Carl Michael Bellman's wonderful 18th century songs, especially Fredman's Epistles. Similarly, interest in patterns in nature led to tessellation, a meeting-place of mathematics and art, which led in turn to the splendour of Islamic geometric patterns. Another track is English cuisine, where I found a void in coverage of even the most important historic cookery books, and a remarkable amount of recentism. I'm working on the whole area of Insects in culture, another dark corner with a rich history. I seem to enjoy creating order out of chaos, which is fortunate as there is a considerable supply of suitable articles.
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Contents
Featured articles
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Starfish (collab)
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Sea (collab, top scorer (720 pts) in Wikicup)
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Crocodilia (collab)
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Rodent (collab)
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Cucurbita (collab)
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Mayfly (collab)
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Mantis (collab)
Good articles
Natural history
Vertebrates
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Salamander (collab, 108 Wikicup pts)
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Procellarii-formes (orphaned GA)
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Tiger (collab, 162 Wikicup pts; 2.5m/year)
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Little owl
(minor) -
Grey Heron (collab)
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Greylag (collab)
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Bittern
(collab) -
Olive baboon
(minor) -
Teleost (collab)
Insects
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Bumblebee
(collab) -
Dragonfly
(collab) -
Damselfly
(collab) -
Grasshopper
(collab) -
Cricket
(collab) -
Locust
(collab) -
Bee
(collab) -
Wasp
(collab) -
Horse-fly
(collab) -
Bug
(collab) -
Mole cricket
(collab) -
Cicada
(collab) -
Butterfly
(collab) -
Stick Insect
(collab) -
Louse
(collab) -
Cockroach
(collab) -
Antlion
(collab)
Camouflage and coloration
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Bioluminesc-ence (collab)
Mathematics and aesthetics
Natural history books
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Wallace's Malay Archipelago
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Bewick's History of British Birds
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Yarrell's History of British Birds
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Poulton's Colours of Animals
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Beddard's Animal Coloration
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White's Natural History of Selborne
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Pliny the Elder's Natural History
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Dioscorides' De Materia Medica
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Theophrastus' Historia Plantarum
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W.G. Hoskins's Making of the English Landscape
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Paley's Natural Theology
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D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form
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Georges Cuvier's Le Règne Animal
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The Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle
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Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae
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George Montagu's Ornithological Dictionary
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Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique
Iron and steel
Cookery
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Eliza Smith's
The Compleat Housewife (1727) -
Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747)
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Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769)
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Mrs Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806)
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Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (1847)
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Elizabeth David's
A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) -
Francatelli's The Modern Cook (1846)
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Thomas Dawson's The Good Huswifes Jewell (1585)
Culture
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Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
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Steven Pinker (orphaned GA)
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Tolkien's On Translating Beowulf
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Tolkien's Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
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The sea in culture
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Stuckism (rescue)
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Agriculture in Wales (contrib)
Heroes
- Mary McCarthy's description of WP:OR: "every word [Lillian Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'".
- Thomas Bewick's marvellously unclouded observation of people and nature.
- Robinson Thwaites's honest rags-to-riches.
- John Stewart Collis's descriptions of ordinary rural life, as it then was, as something special.
- Sumana Harihareswara on how WP "privileges liberty way over hospitality".
- David Runciman on Wikipedia's real merits.
- Clay Shirky on Wikipedia's real authority.
- Rich Farmbrough's WP:Wikipedia has more..., an essay that trashes some of the lies told about Wikipedia.
- Dr. Blofeld's vision of what Wikipedia could become.
- Santiago Ortiz's display of Wikipedian gender for different articles
- A visual reminder of what bias means.
- John Julius Norwich said in The Times that "As a writer of history I resort to [Wikipedia] at least a dozen times a day. I could never have written my last two books without it, and I have never caught it out yet, which is more than I can say of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its range is astonishing: it is almost impossible to find a person, place or subject that it has left uncovered." Nice of him (not sure if it's heroism, exactly, but never mind), but we editors do occasionally find one or two small gaps here and there.
- Jimmy Wales celebrated Wikipedia's 15th birthday with the request "rather than succumb to fear, hatred, exclusion, and isolation, I believe we have reason to celebrate. Make an edit on Wikipedia."
- How to edit Wikipedia. Yeah, it takes a YouTube video to say what we should be saying, as Serendipodous remarks.
- Trusted more than the BBC, says the Telegraph.
- Stuart C. Ray's WikiConference talk "Are the Obstacles Academic?" on the challenge of getting experts to edit Wikipedia. The talk starts at 4 hours and 36 minutes.
- The Daily Dot: "Wikipedia is great", at least if you don't mind that in 2012 Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing after 244 years.
Wikihumour
- A 2000-year-old Roman joke (lightly retold): A Wikipedian sees an edit from a friend who hasn't been around for a while, and pings him with the words "I heard you died!" The friend replies at once "Well, you can see I'm still alive." The Wikipedian replies "Yes, but the place that told me you were dead was a more Reliable Source than you." (From the Philogelos or 'Laughter Lover', 4th Century AD)
- WikiWeird: Listen to Wikipedia (really)
- Venus dione, the sexually-charged seashell, according to Linnaeus himself
- I say, Sherlock, Wikipedia really is a reliable source. Says Watson (computer).
- The Washington Post celebrates Wikipedia's 5,000,000
- We help the Internet not suck. Jimmy Wales
- Wikipedians are comprised of super-pedants. Who aren't even right. Says David Shariatmadari in The Guardian.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted Louisa May Alcott as saying that Henry David Thoreau's neckbeard preserved his virginity, somewhere in his 16-volume Journals and Notebooks. Honest.
- How XKCD sees Wikipedia, from the sublimely encyclopedic to 'In popular culture'
- "The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate": yes, an ordinary day with Huggle or Twinkle
Resources
- /Citation Templates doi, jstor, Infobox person etc
- Googlebooks citation generator
- GA
- Today's AfD
- My own response to a foolish AfD, rebutting a common (no, the usual) misconception about what notability is
- "Impenetrable science" (some articles that need work, then)
- Article traffic statistics
- Article count
- Commons
- /sandpit
- {{User:MiszaBot/config|maxarchivesize = 75K|counter = 1|minthreadsleft = 3|algo = old(90d)|archive =Talk:ARTICLE'S NAME/Archive %(counter)d }}{{Archive box|auto=yes|search=yes}}
- Birds in culture:<ref name=BB>{{cite book |last1=Cocker |first1=Mark |last2=Mabey |first2=Richard |author2link=Richard Mabey |title=Birds Britannica |titlelink=Birds Britannica |date=2005 |publisher=Chatto & Windus |isbn=0-7011-6907-9 |pages= – }}</ref>
- Fly etymology:<ref>{{cite web |last1=Agassiz |first1=Louis |last2=Corti |first2=Elio |title=Nomenclator Zoologicus |url=http://www.summagallicana.it/Agassiz_nomenclator_zoologicus/Diptera.htm |accessdate=24 July 2015}}</ref>
- cite in bibliog: |ref=CITEREFBloggs_and_Smith1998; refs in text [1]
- Good practice on CoI for academics
- WP:Elsevier ScienceDirect
- ^ Bloggs and Smith 1998, 123.