The Story of Me in a Dozen or so Wiki-Boxes
[edit]
| Things I've Been Doing |
... for How Long |
... and Where
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 | This user is an expert mathematician. |
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 | This user has been on Wikipedia for 15 years, 6 months and 12 days. |
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 | This user is a native of Wales. |
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| prog | This user has been programming for 83.6% of their life. | 84% |
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 | This user plays the piano. |
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... for 63 years |
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... professionally for 57 years |
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My name is Chris Benson. I was born between Swansea and Llanelli in Wales (ond nid wyf yn siarad Cymraeg), but now I live in Martinez, California, USA. My interests include:
- Football - the kind where you use your foot to kick the ball,
- Sailing - the kind done in sailing boats, which are boats with sails,
- Mathematics - the sum of my interests.
- Cosmology - (not to be confused with Cosmetology). It is the "timeline of space" that intrigues me, not the "eye-liner of space cadets". See Footnote [1] below.
- local history - history that
is was both local and in lower case on Wikipedia. See Footnotes [1] and [2].
- Local History - the topic of Local History that
is was capitalized on Wikipedia is a different interest of mine. See Footnote [2].
[1] All of my life, my two favourite academic subjects as pastime hobbies have been Cosmology and Local History. I only realized recently that in some senses, they are the exact opposite of each other.
[2] There really are were two "Local History" articles on Wikipedia, "back in the day". The article titles differed only in their capitalization. Their precise subject matter and content differed significantly though. Back then (cf. the day), the capitalized version was restricted to the historical development of local history in and about the various regions of England, whereas the uncapitalized version was on the topic in general, without geographical constraint.
Shortly after I mentioned these duelling dual titles, common sense prevailed in the form of editor Pharamond (thanks), and the capitalized article was renamed English local history (losing its capital L and H in the process). After a suitable mourning period, the uncapitalized version's title was half-capitalized when it was awarded the capital L from the other article. So it goes by the name Local history, these days, but I won't be too surprised if it takes ownership of the capital H from the other article at some point. Anyway, both of those forms of the topic are of particular interest to me. And neither should be confused with an as-yet-unwritten article entitled Local HISTORY, in which people from a nearby pub shout regional historical facts at each other.
Choosing English Language Variants
[edit]After watching one particular "brawl" amongst well-meaning editors, I am developing a flow-chart to determine when why what how which English language variant should be used in various contexts. Then I can watch the brawl continue. Seriously though, just about every one of the "contributors" in that "discussion" either misunderstood, misquoted, or misapplied Wikipedia policies and guidelines. In my opinion, the existing policy (which I do not intend to change) is not sufficiently "centralized" "cohesive" "unambiguous" or "understood". For me, a flow-chart would work better. Most comments are welcome on my Talk Page.
I feel qualified to comment on the matter of British and American variants of English, as I have spent almost half of my life as a resident of the UK (but significantly less than half of that time actually listening) and a little over half of my life as a resident of the USA (wondering what my American wife and children just said).
