Regarding my user name, I am not licensed to practice engineering in any nation, state, province, territory, or other legal jurisdiction. I am not a licensed Professional Engineer or its equivalent in another jurisdiction, I do not claim to be such, and I neither offer my services as an engineer nor practice engineering except under the supervision of a licensed Professional Engineer. I am a certified Engineer Intern in the State of Tennessee; that certification is transferable and valid in any other U.S. state.
I am literate, but only in English (and to a slight extent Spanish). I don't speak as many languages as I'd like to.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia very much anymore. I have reasons for that.
# Of Times This Page Vandalized Since I Joined Wikipedia on May 29, 2005: 4±1 <---Hah! Think you can outsmart me on my own vandalism counter, do you? -TLE
My favorite page in the Wikipedia namespace? WP:DEP. Pages listed there always need improvement, and a few minutes work building the web improves the entire encyclopedia, not to mention the article in question.
My second-favorite? WP:CSBOT It's more important than the Dead-End Pages list, actually, but the improvements are harder to make.
I'm #157!.
Freeway service patrol * D. A. Clarke * Martha McCaughey * Rape culture * USS Charrette (DD-581) * Cangas del Narcea * Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Lists of songs * DeShaney v. Winnebago County * lost time
Highway Emergency Response Operators * shephali (got to clear a wikify tag!) * Architect Registration Exam * Gu Long (got WP:CSB credit for this one!)* Richard Haas * Epidemic Intelligence Service * Gordon Gee * Alberto Gonzales * Intersectionality * Manganism * Don McPherson * Castle Rock v. Gonzales * War Risk Insurance Act
None, at the moment.
I believe in Wiki-Hell.
I believe that we who write and contribute to articles as editors are not writers of articles, but ranchers (or farmers, or gardners, or your preference of agricultural professional). And as with any agricultural endeavor, a great deal of weeding and culling is necessary.
In short, I'm a deletionist.
While I loathe prescriptive grammar, I'm a big stickler for getting people to distinguish between it's and its and I get livid with people who use quotation marks for emphasis (see Scare quotes). See, with prescriptive grammar, the problem's that word order determines sentence meaning, and so saying that the mission of the Starship Enterprise was "boldly to go" is entirely different from saying it was "to boldly go". The problem with screwing up it's and its is that they're two totally different words.
Let me delve into further detail about the infinitives. Keeping the famed Star Trek example, we have three possible sentences:
Now, why are these three distinct sentences?
As for the quotation marks for emphasis, I'm going to quote what I once read on a livejournal:
There are two acceptable times to use quotation marks.
Shiny turned to Sunny and said, "Dude, our names SUCK."
"Jennifer" had AWFUL tapered leg jeans on yesterday. (As if to say, "Yes, allegedly, her name is Jennifer, but those jeans render her completely useless and unworthy of officially having a name.) COROLLARY: The above rules also apply to those stupid hand quotation marks. In fact, I amend the above rules in the case of SHQs to state that one can ONLY use SHQs in joking/mocking situations.
This is a Wikipedia user page.
If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated, and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Literate_Engineer. |
About that whole "licensing" thing & the GFDL: I don't understand it. At all. But I don't particularly like mirror sites and I don't approve of them.