User:Harpyionycteris

About Me
15, female, nerdy, vaguely geeky. I spend most of my life with my computer, and we often stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning to watch anime together or play with websites. I consider myself to be crepuscular, because, while staying up all night is a traditional weekend pastime, I also enjoy getting up extremely early. My afternoons are best spent asleep.

I can program in Python to a degree, but markup and stylesheet languages appeal to me more than programming. I have a website at http://blessedpancake.com/ which is almost, but not quite, devoid of content. Nevertheless, it is my pride and joy and I love working on it.

I'm also interested in graphics, and have toyed with the GIMP and Inkscape.

Free software (both freedom and price) is important to me. I don't have the resources to pay for commercial software, and I feel it is wrong to prevent people from improving your creations.

Username
Harpyionycteris was selected because my usual nickname was already taken. I like Harpy Eagles, and I like bats. The Harpy fruit bat genus made sense, in a weird way. It is a pity I cannot spell it.

Wikipedia
I recently joined Wikipedia, as you can probably tell. Whenever I am confronted with a topic about which I know nothing, I google it or search for it on Wikipedia; it makes sense to help the latter in any way I can.

As I am still getting used to the way things are done, please be patient and forgive me if I do anything wrong. Everything I'd edited is added to my watchlist; if I see that my work has been changed, I always try to understand why it was changed, so that I don't make a mistake more than necessary. I don't want people to have to clean up the articles I've left in my wake.

Writing
I'm moderately fanatic about grammar and spelling; however, my own spelling is often less than perfect. I must often resort to googling words to look up their spellings. Despite growing up around American spelling, I favour British spelling and use it as much as possible. I also prefer the metric system.

I believe in lots of punctuation, except at the ends of sentences. I am fond of semicolons and commas in particular; they help shape sentences and give them structure. It's easier to read a sentence with phrasing.

Editing
I enjoy fleshing out stubs; I hate arguing, and they are generally less likely to be the site of an edit war. I usually find articles to edit by looking at stub categories and picking articles with intriguing names. I seldom know anything about a topic before I write about it; Google, as has been mentioned, is my friend.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and once I've started editing an article, I like to go through the entire thing, adding punctuation or changing wording to try to make the sentences flow. I tend to favour having lots of headings and paragraphs in articles; I haven't yet seen anything criticizing the practice, and I like categorizing things until each piece relates to one topic, and one topic only.