User:Alarob





Hi, I am Rob C, a historian, computer guy, and cat wrangler in Birmingham, Alabama. I do a podcast called Deep South History about "the most southern part of the American South."

To reach me, drop a note on my talk page or (if you're not in a hurry) send email.

About this user
At the moment I'm mostly copyediting or doing gnomish tasks.

My contributions
I recently revised: New Orleans English, Talk Radio Network, Moesia, Soldiers of Heaven, Fitna (word), Taqlid, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Richard Throssel, Narwhal, Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, Romano-Germanic, Castilian War

Articles I've started: American Farmland Trust, August Wenzinger, Avinash Sachdev, Bartram's Travels, Bernard Gregory, Buckdancer's Choice, Burnt Corn, Alabama, City of Basel Music Academy, Contraguitar, Cusseta, Alabama, Elko, Georgia, Farid Esack, Flintridge Building, Folkwang Academy, Frederica (given name), Georg Schäfer (industrialist), Gesellschaft für das Gute und Gemeinnützige, Heutelia, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Huntley Project, J. Gordon Coogler, James R. Osgood, John Harvard Library, John Pope (travel writer), Lauren Newton, Lukas Vischer (theologian), Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, Mathias Rüegg, Montgomery Symphony Orchestra, Museum Georg Schäfer, Museum of Cultures Basel, Poarch Creek Indian Reservation, Ring shout, Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology, Schloss Ebenrain, Schrammelmusik, Spanish West Florida, Suum cuique, Vienna Art Orchestra, Vischer Ferry, New York, William and Mary Quarterly

Disambiguation pages ("dab pages" for short): Arts and letters (disambiguation), Available Jones, Ballantine, Benjamin Porter, Frederika, Fredrika, James Douglass, Luke Field, Northridge High School, Lukas Vischer, Romano-Germanic, Standard Oil (disambiguation), VAO

These are still stub-class: Al-Mu'tasim, Iraq, Benjamin F. Porter, Big Warrior, Cappella Coloniensis, Cherokee War of 1776, Cusseta tribal town, Hadron collider, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Johann Spies, John Harvard Library (series), Lucerne School of Music, Lukas Vischer (collector), Pompey's Pillar, Montana, Tukabatchee, Wheeling, Louisiana, William H. Miles, WVSU-FM

Templates: Unicode support notices for Canadian Aboriginal syllabics and Cherokee syllabics (now handled differently) : : Some ISO 639 support templates for Native American languages: (akz), (alq), (cic), (ciw), (ctm), (cho), (dak), (kio), (cku), (mik), (mus), (ojc), (ojg), (ojb), (ojs), (ojw), (opt), (otw), (unm), and (yuc).

Did you know? … that the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in Timbuktu in Mali houses a collection of manuscripts begun more than 500 years ago? (30 May 2013)

Babel boxes: Appalachian English : : Middle English (basic, intermediate, fluent, advanced)

Other pages in my userspace: Userboxen : : Languages : : Travels : : 10 Random Pages : : References : : Workspace

Personal stats
(Updated infrequently.) As of August 2017 I had made over 11,390 edits to more than 3,630 pages.
 * 2.6 average edits per day
 * 3.1 average edits per page
 * I've started 71 of Wikipedia's articles.
 * My latest contributions

Watchlist oddities
Some of the more unusual articles I keep an eye on:

Chang and Eng Bunker : : Dictionary of Received Ideas : : Frick and Frack : : Guadalcanal Diary (band) : : List of fatal alligator attacks in the United States : : Mike the Headless Chicken : : Muslimgauze : : Pylon (band) : : St. Marx Cemetery : : The real McCoy : : Why did the chicken cross the road?

About Wikipedia
Wikipedia does not contain the truth. Articles in Wikipedia, at their best, reflect the general state of human knowledge, or (to put it even less precisely) what most qualified people these days believe to be true. I reserve the right to believe that most people are wrong about some things. But I do not have the right to make my opinion prevail in Wikipedia. (See: Wikipedia: Verifiability.)

On writing for Wikipedia
From "observations on Wikipedia behavior" by Antandrus:
 * Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The primary job of Wikipedians is to write it. Everything else is secondary.
 * The very existence of Wikipedia is a massive proof that there are more people in the world wanting to build than to tear down. Were that not true, vandals would have overwhelmed and destroyed us years ago.
 * The best way to continue as a writing Wikipedian for many years is to be, as the Buddha recommends, "indifferent to both praise and blame." Indifference to praise is a hard task for mere humans, but millions of potential anonymous readers demand it of you…. And remember this: you are allowed to take your work seriously here, and think highly of your own efforts; but be advised, don't talk about it.
 * A common insult hurled at dedicated Wikipedia editors is that they "have no life." If you write extensively in an out-of-the-way area, you may well become the most widely read writer in the world on your topic. There are worse ways of "having no life", such as abusing the few actually useful people on the internet, but those who deliver such insults are invariably tone-deaf to irony.

From some advice by William Pietri:

‘’Wikipedia's articles are no place for strong views. Or rather, we feel about strong views the way that a natural history museum feels about tigers. We admire them and want our visitors to see how fierce and clever they are, so we stuff them and mount them for close inspection. We put up all sorts of carefully worded signs to get people to appreciate them as much as we do. But however much we adore tigers, a live tiger loose in the museum is seen as an urgent problem.’’

Systemic bias
The typical Wikipedian is a relatively privileged white male "knowledge worker," student, or professional from the so-called First World who has easy access to the Internet and a high comfort level with geekery. This imposes an unintended but inherent bias on the encyclopedia's coverage of topics — a bias that militates against the ideal of Wikipedia as a universal repository of human knowledge. Overcoming that bias is an interesting challenge.

To date, most of my articles have been located in the American South (especially the Deep South, where I'm from) or in Europe, and most of my editing of biographies has been about men. I'm trying to branch out more.

Some articles that need help

 * Third opinion disputes [ update],

Bonnie Blue flag (takes sides rather than reporting the debate) : : Benjamin Hawkins (mere storytelling) : : Cherokee-American wars (mistitled, but no clear alternative) : : History of Alabama (needs rewrite, begun here) : : Islam in the United States (a bias magnet) : : William McIntosh (needs rewrite, begun here) : : Zheng He (sprawling, confused)

Redlinks to turn blue

 * Abeka (the Creek town, not the publisher)
 * Alden T. Vaughan
 * Eastern Muskogean languages
 * Eleanora O'Donnell Iselin (who should not be subsumed under her husband)
 * Fairfield Works
 * Fort Crawford (Alabama)
 * Ibrahima Abd al Rahman


 * John Parrish (1729-1807), abolitionist (see here)
 * Klondike, Georgia
 * Lamine Kebe (or Kaba?)
 * Mohammad Ali ben Said
 * Montroville Dickeson, archaeologist
 * Negro Universities Press
 * Nkiru Nzegwu (needs expansion)
 * Reichensteiner Hof
 * State Archives of Basel (Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt)


 * Town Meeting Day should not be a redirect to Town meeting.
 * Titus Müller (translation request)
 * Tommy Jemmy (Seneca Indian named in historic lawsuit)
 * Woodward's Reminiscences (by Thomas S. Woodward)
 * Yarrow Mahmout

Common misspellings
Adopt-a-typo is a Wikipedia project for quickly identifying and correcting a spelling or typing error that recurs constantly in English.

I have adopted the relatively obscure typo of "Alabaman" for "." It occurs frequently in direct quotations that must be left untouched. "Alabaman" is acceptable when referring to the language of the Alabama people, but the more common name for the language is "Alabama."

Other wiki projects
Besides the other Wikimedia projects shown above, I'm a contributor to: ArchivesWiki (the moribund AHA resource) : : BhamWiki (excellent) : : Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 (very buggy) : : Wikivoyage

I've made minor contributions to the German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Bengali Wikipedias.