User:CelticBrain

My Wikipedia journey
Hello, anyone who might for whatever reason land on this page, I'm CelticBrain.

I first joined Wikipedia in 2015, when I was but a teenager. I mainly edited pages on my favorite TV shows (Still Game, Burnistoun, etc--I like Scottish comedy shows a lot). These first edits were rather horrendous, as it seems that I thought of Wikipedia as being more like TVTropes than a fact-based site. For obvious reasons, many of them have now been changed.

Eventually I began to work on more scholarly articles. Most of my edits nowadays, at the old age of 21, are on pages that have to do with my main interests (linguistics and history). My particular focus is on Old and Middle English, as well as the early Anglo-Saxon period. Other interests include the folk music of the British isles, and the cultural and linguistic history of the Scottish Highlands. I'm also fascinated by the use of ancient DNA to track historically-attested invasions & migrations.

Advice for new editors
Arm yourself with scholarly sources. On a more contentious topic these are a great weapon. It's unlikely that somebody is going to try to change something that has six citations clearly backing it up.

Annoyances on Wikipedia
The drawback to the advice above is that sometimes if you dig into something you'll find out that the sources that were cited don't really have much to do with the claim being made. Occasionally they'll even refute it! This is, of course, academically dishonest and should be fixed at the earliest opportunity. One thing I do sometimes, to make sure that my citations are on topic (since even good faith citations can be only tangentially related at times), is quoting the relevant text in the reference itself.

Another pet peeve of mine is when articles hew too closely to a single source, treating that source as representative of a (nonexistent) consensus. If there's diversity in the scholarly opinion on an issue, that diversity should be apparent in the corresponding article.

Pages I have done extensive work on

 * Gaelic Psalm Singing (created)
 * Northern Subject Rule
 * Influence of French on English
 * Genetic history of the British Isles

I've also made several maps and info-graphics. These can be found at Andrew Yang 2020 presidential campaign, Gaels, History of English, Old English, and Middle English.