User:Teratornis
I spend a big chunk of my Wikipedia time answering questions on the Help desk, trying to help other people with their problems. As of 04:06, 15 June 2008 (UTC), I seem to have had the most edits on the Help desk with: 3006.
As of 08:45, 6 November 2008 (UTC), most of my recent article edits are on the topic of Energy, especially topics relating to Renewable energy, Wind power, Peak oil, and Electricity generation.
Useful links
Some pages I refer to often enough to make them worth writing down here:
- WP:HELPDESK
- WP:VPT
- Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia (shortcut: WP:EIW) - Wow!
- Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup (shortcut: WP:TC)
- Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant
- More citation tools at: User:Teratornis/Notes#Citation tools
Useful searches
Subpages
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg/350px-Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg.png)
These are my user subpages. They are in various stages of "completion" at a given time. Pages that will eventually end up somewhere else (such as essays) will be incomplete while they are here.
- Special:PrefixIndex/User:Teratornis - all my user subpages
- Special:PrefixIndex/User talk:Teratornis - and all their talk pages
Essays in fairly good shape
- User:Teratornis/Tips for teachers - oh yes, you absolutely do want to teach your students to edit on wikis. Wikipedia is one obvious choice, but not always the most appropriate.
Essays in appallingly rough shape
Peruse these at your own risk. You may find some ideas, but probably not presented nicely yet. These are scratchpad pages where I get my POV on.
- User:Teratornis/Avoid jargon creep - this will be a futile plea against synonym disease, i.e., the overwhelming spontaneous human tendency to invent additional synonyms for canonical jargon terms we already have. (E.g., "mop and bucket" for "administratorship".) Synonym disease generates accidental complexity. (Of course by referring to the same phenomenon as "jargon creep" and "synonym disease" I'm guilty of it. However, "synonym disease" is more precise because there is a constant need to introduce new jargon terms to describe actually new things that the Wikipedia community invents.)
- User:Teratornis/Do not fear complexity - a counterpoint essay to Wikipedia:Avoid instruction creep. Very not done yet.
- User:Teratornis/How Wikipedia defeats Brooks' law - according to Brooks' law, Wikipedia should be getting less efficient as more people join the project, yet this does not seem to happen. Here's what I think about why.
- User:Teratornis/On "scientific bias" in articles about science - I received a request to write an essay about this, so I should at least see whether such an essay already exists.
- User:Teratornis/Outplacement - why we should organize an effort to find suitable wikis for Wikipedia's deleted articles, rather than just deleting them.
- User:Teratornis/Should editors be logged-in users? - my take on this endless debate.