About me
I am a graduate student in geology, specializing in planetary geology. I am also interested in a wide range of subjects, including history, linguistics, physics, and politics.
I am generally thrilled with how impartial, honest, readable, and accurate Wikipedia is, but I feel there are a couple areas for improvement:
- There appears to be a general "dictator bias." The admirable idea of treating all viewpoints equally has lead to numerous cases where authoritarian leaders and governments are described in laudatory POV language. Criticism sections are scant, and the general tone of these articles tends to be highly praiseworthy and factually selective. I have attempted to battle a few of these (i.e. Wen Jiabao), but I've found it generally very difficult. I suspect that these pages tend to be edited by these oppressive regimes.
- The Wikipedia practice of using single spaces instead of double spaces after ending sentences is an unnecessary affront to readability and general practice.
- Commas must be used after conjunctions if and only if the following clause can stand alone as its own sentence. Editors violate this rule with alarming regularity.
- In science articles, moderately fringe theories have an overabundance of coverage, and they tend to be portrayed as more mainstream than they actually are. Making coverage of these theories more objective is one of my main focuses, (e.g. Wilkes Land Crater).
- Often mainstream theories are portrayed as fact when they are still controversial. (Proto-Sinaitic script is a page where I've worked to address this problem.)
- Coverage of ancient history and prehistory tends to focus on individual sites, finds, and pieces of evidence, and coverage of the overall historical narrative is seriously neglected. I started a page on the Preclassic Maya to help address some of this.
I would also like to declare here that I created an earlier Wikipedia account at some point in the past. Unfortunately, I do not remember the name I used, except that it was a pseudonym (as this name is, in fact).
Pages I've started
User:Rppeabody/Preclassic Maya
User:Rppeabody/Mini-RF
Other pages I'm working on
Tholeiitic magma series
Calc-alkaline magma series
Proto-Sinaitic script
Impact crater
