User:Dclayh

Hello Wikipedia, I'm Clay, a grad student in astrophysics at Princeton. I did my undergrad in physics at Harvey Mudd. In addition to science, I'm also quite interested in philosophy and art.

Generally I only edit Wikipedia when I comes across something in the course of my browsing which I know is wrong (many times this is grammatical), think is unclear, or believe is a gap in need of filling. That is to say I prefer not to create articles, but amend or emend existing ones (generally in small ways), and I don't restrict myself to particular areas.

Anyway, if you'd like to contact me, I have this username over most of the internet.

My /Userboxes

A Thought on Style
Look at [this version of the 2008 Presidential Debates] article. In the "Vice Presidential debate" section, we read, "On the morning of the day that the debate was to take place, McCain said..." Now this sentence could only have been written on the day the debate took place, but before it, because of its slightly convoluted avoidance of presenting the debate as a fact. After the debate in fact took place, it was duly modified to "On the morning of the day of the debate..."

Now I certainly don't want Wikipedia to be forecasting the future, but my question is this: why not just say "this morning", or even "today"? Naturally that doesn't at first glance sound encyclopedic, since no other encyclopedia would ever dream of making so specific a time reference. But Wikipedia is not any other encyclopedia; it's better, infinitely faster to update, and there's no reason why its style shouldn't include relative dates when appropriate.

A better criticism would be, what if the "today" doesn't get updated, thus making the sentence factually wrong? But look at the example above: the circumlocution was clearly going to be updated anyway, and in fact would have been, if not strictly wrong, at least highly misleading had it not been updated. So, in particular, if the person who introduces a relative date takes responsibility to update it, there shouldn't be a problem; current events in progress require many updates anyway.