User:Editeur24

I am going to use my sandbox for examples of editing commands I commonly use, especially those involving equations, tables, and such.

I have other local pages such as /sandbox2 and /hyperbolic and /Isaiah and /shellintegration and /diskintegration and /covidpolicy and /ultimatumgame and /convergencetest choice and /convergence testexamples and /blpmethod and /standarddeviation and/oddsratio and /uppersemicontinuity and /jackson and /klein and /derivative and /katz for drafts.

I am an economics professor at a major university with many years of experience and many publications. I would like to help edit articles in economics, particularly on technical topics, and in other fields as I wander (e.g. math, statistics, physics). I am especially interested in trying to make technical articles accessible to unsophisticated readers, for example, college students looking up a term they've come across that they don't understand. Many Wikipedia articles go straight to PhD level discussion even if the topic is one less expert readers want to know at least a little about. I think Wikipedia editors should realize that many people come to an article on X because they have never heard of X before and want to get some idea of what it means. In trying to explain simply, I know I will make errors and I purposely make simplifications. I hope experts will correct the errors and realize that the simplifications (and examples) are useful to many readers, even if not to an expert.

If I edit something you've written to improve the writing style, please don't be offended. I believe that practically any piece of writing can be improved; it is only a question of how much time to put in. I do many drafts in my own work-- ten or twenty-- and even thenwhen I read the published version I can see ways to improve it. When I wrote a book I read the entire thing out loud to myself in draft. So don't take it personally. A very common stylistic improvement is to reduce the number of words and syllables while keeping the same meaning-- to "Strunk-and-White" a piece of writing. This improves clarity, and is a good way to look at improving expository writing (it is not so useful for fiction or oratory, though it applies even there).

A Wikipedia best practices question: If an editor is going to make 3 distinct changes to a page, each with its own reason (say, fixing 2 errors and a group of stylistic improvements), should he do it as one change or as three? The argument for doing three changes is that each has a different reason, so logically it is three different edits that happen to be done on the same day by the same editor. The argument for doing it as one is that then people who have it on their watchlist just get one message rather than three, and they might like that better, even though the Summary of Edits would have to be longer or less informative. If anybody has an opinion, let me know. I couldn't find a Help article on this question.