My name is Adam. I'm a mathematics student in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
I think Wikipedia is the best thing to ever happen to the information world by a long shot. It kind of puts a proud view of humanity in your heart. I can't believe there are so few Tasmanians who know about it, so you should tell all your friends.
I mostly clean up, fix spelling and grammar, fill out articles on Australia, and when I get the time I occasionally write my own articles on something (when I find something someone else hasn't already done).
Interests: mathematics, physics, engineering, film and television, the English language.
My philosophies on Wikipedia
editI'm really quite impressed with most of Wikipedia, but then I read some articles, and I remember, "Oh yeah, this is really just a bunch of amateurs who have no real training or experience writing encyclopedia articles."
I think an article should be a complete, coherent discussion of a topic assuming no real understanding of the subject beforehand. I'm sick and tired of reading articles to find out what something is, and they don't even start with a simple, concise context in which the page title fits into society. Also, I'm tired of reading articles written by people trying to explain something in ways they shouldn't.
Example: I love The Simpsons. I feel I really understand what the writers are trying to do. The jokes are crazy, and it's not meant to be taken seriously. Now go to ANY Simpsons character page. It is bullshit...all completely ridiculous. You may as well take the Simpsons category and chuck the thing in the bin. Start again. Why? Somewhere along the line, somebody started taking the jokes literally, and they try to work out "WHERE IS SPRINGFIELD?" and they seriously can't work out why the hints in the shows contradict each other. You see, they missed the point.
An encyclopedia that is a compendium of human knowledge needs to base its explanation on the point of view of where things fit into society. In other words, start in an article by saying what the thing literally is in the context of the world, and then feed through information about how that thing has had an effect on society, that is, what does it mean to us. The Simpsons is not a bunch of facts about the characters and setting--it is a comedy! At its core The Simpsons is not the stuff that is written about the things in it, but rather, The Simpsons is a STYLE OF HUMOUR THAT IS COMMUNICATED THROUGH THE CHARACTERISATIONS OF THE PERSONALITIES IN IT. So in other words, those articles should be about what makes up the personalities of the characters, the setting, and the style of events that happen in the episodes. Because in The Simpsons, with the facts that have been presented previously, you can't predict what might happen at a subsequent time--they don't work that way. However, knowing the types of people and things that are portrayed in the show, you can usually guess what might be expected in the humour or the plot.
So they got off the track of where they should be. And that's a disappointment.
Criticisms of people who probably shouldn't be writing for an encyclopedia
editAs a mathematician and scientist, a keen logician and contributor to the world, my mind pretty much runs on pattern and organisation. I've said that Wikipedia is great, but only if it maintains a certain level of perfectionism in those who use it. There are many, many criticisms I have of those who think they're doing something nice, but really they're just making things worse. I just want Wikipedia to have the same standard right across the board, but what annoys me is:
- Bad spelling, grammar and getting lost in tense
- Punctuation errors, especially forgetting where you should italicise
- Bad photographs on pages
- Pictures just scanned from books
- Pages that have lots of photos but they're all from the same source (and thus all of the same thing)
- Any page that's called "List of BLANK" where BLANK is not the members of a finite set (and hence that list can never be complete)
- People making articles over trivial things