User:Musiconeologist

Wikipedia:Babel

en-5

This user can contribute with a professional level of English.

nb-2

Denne brukeren har god kjennskap til norsk (bokmål).

da-1

Denne bruger har et grundlæggende kendskab til dansk.

sv-1

Den här användaren har grundläggande kunskaper i svenska.

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About me

Background

Reading this now, ^[when?] ^[1] it looks horribly CV-ish. I don't like that. I just want you to have some idea of who I am, and of the areas where I might talk the most sense and the least nonsense.

Anyway, here are some things I think are relevant to my Wikipedia editing. My background includes:^[2]

a father who was a mechanical engineer and believed, when I was eight, that the test of really understanding something was one's ability to explain it to an eight-year-old.
a degree in electronic engineering,^[3] though I didn't become an engineer and only occasionally venture near electronics articles.
a general interest in many areas of science.
an occasional interest in mathematics.
a good few years working mostly on document design, editing and typesetting. (That's probably why this page isn't besprinkled with userboxes; I don't like the visual effect if there are more than a handful.)
many years of amateur orchestral playing.
a strong interest in language; I often regret not studying linguistics.
an interest in the psychology of most of the things I get involved in. (Even mathematics.)

On Wikipedia

On Wikipedia I typically copy-edit articles on technical subjects which have attracted my interest. This lets me combine learning about the subject with improving the article. As of January 2025, I seem to be spending a lot of time trying to make overly technical lead sections more accessible to non-specialists. I strongly believe that for most subjects this is possible, but it requires the ability to put oneself in the position of someone who's never encountered the subject before. You can, for example, explain a concept in straightforward language before then saying "this is known as . . ." and giving its technical name.

Norwegian, Danish and Swedish

Occasionally I make small edits to Norwegian Wikipedia (Bokmål version),^[4] but only when I'm very sure of my ground linguistically or when language doesn't arise (e.g. inside LaTeX equations).

I read Wikipedia in English, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.

My user pages on the other Wikipedias are:

på norsk Wikipedia, finn meg her
på dansk Wikipedia, find meg her
på svenska Wikipedia, hitta mig här.

Opinions

I hate cryptic (and non-cryptic) abbreviations in edit summaries: I think the summaries should be readable by anyone viewing a page history for the first time, not just those who know the code and are used to editing Wikipedia. Also, very brief summaries like ce get buried visually among the other details, making it significantly harder to see at a glance what's been done.

Notes

^ February 2025, since you ask. In fact, it's often possible to answer this question if you don't mind digging through an article's edit history: the date of the edit when now was added is obviously the date that now refers to.
^ In case you're wondering, my logic for the format of this list is that it presents multiple sentences, each beginning with My background includes. Each entry gives an alternative way of completing the sentence, so starts in lowercase and has closing punctuation. (I find this marginally preferable to either capitalising the entries, or creating a colossal sentence divided by semicolons or line breaks.)
^ This is different from electrical engineering. The difference is typically a few hundred to a few thousand volts.
^ Bokmål is an odd word. Its correct spelling in Norwegian is bokmål, since Norwegian doesn't capitalise names of languages. But English does, so to use it in English we have to misspell it, resulting in either a Norwegian word that looks painfully wrong, or an English word that uses a letter we don't have.

[1] February 2025, since you ask. In fact, it's often possible to answer this question if you don't mind digging through an article's edit history: the date of the edit when now was added is obviously the date that now refers to.

[2] In case you're wondering, my logic for the format of this list is that it presents multiple sentences, each beginning with My background includes. Each entry gives an alternative way of completing the sentence, so starts in lowercase and has closing punctuation. (I find this marginally preferable to either capitalising the entries, or creating a colossal sentence divided by semicolons or line breaks.)

[3] This is different from electrical engineering. The difference is typically a few hundred to a few thousand volts.

[4] Bokmål is an odd word. Its correct spelling in Norwegian is bokmål, since Norwegian doesn't capitalise names of languages. But English does, so to use it in English we have to misspell it, resulting in either a Norwegian word that looks painfully wrong, or an English word that uses a letter we don't have.

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