User:Magipavra~enwiki

Welcome to my Wikipedia-EN user page
The text below is outdated. It predates a multi-year Wikibreak.

Welcome to the user page belonging to my account on the English-language Wikipedia project.

You may find that I started making registered edits only rather recently and haven't made so many of them, even taking into account the date of registration, but I can assure you I've made quite a few anonymously for quite a long time (roughly estimated 200 edits --including grammar corr.-- since around october 2005) and still today, because I find my self regularly inexplicably logged out -- just like that (perhaps it has something to do with switching between computers but I suspect not).

English-language versus Dutch-language projects
I prefer the English-language Wikipedia over the Dutch, Wikipedia-NL, both actively, because the "pool of readers" and the active community are both bigger, and passively, because it is more extensive and plain better; and my English is certainly good enough, plus I have a quick offline English↔Dutch dictionary right at my finger tips – literally, that is. Also, yes, I plead guilty, the majority of my contributions (currently) go to Wikipedia-EN.

Why 'guilty'? Because, although WP-NL is mature (with well over 250 000 articles), it's still true the WP-NL could use more help right from me now than WP-EN; it has more room for improvement. And expansion — in the rather exceptional case I find an encyclopedia entry unjustifiedly missing. Very rarely I find an entry missing in WP-EN and quite often in WY-NL (the Dutch-language Wiktionary. On the other hand, I feel that the English is much more frequented relative to its state of perfection than the Dutch (partly because of the fuss in the English-language media). Or, clearer put, the grade of perfection (the product of quality and completeness) of WP-EN & WY-EN is indeed higher than WP-NL & WY-NL, but the needs of the English projects are even more so (higher than the Dutch), because they are much more frequented. It's a matter of finding and keeping balance.

The same argument of course applies when comparing mainstream articles with obscure ones; the spreading of devoted attention must be more or less attuned to the interest/attention given by readers. That partly comes about automatically (is naturally regulated), because interests of passive and active Wikipedians largely overlap, of course.

Given the grade of perfection most mainstream WP-EN articles have reached by now the sum of my effective and potential contributions to WP-EN consists mainly of grammar/ phrasing/ spelling/ typo corrections. The sum of my effective and potential contributions on the WP-NL project on the other hand is situated more on the content end of the content↔style spectrum, but I like to interfere with article & section naming and redirecting on all of them.

I wouldn't go as far as saying "the more redirect pages the better" but I am certain WP (all Wikipedia's) ánd WY (all Wiktionary's — or Wiktionaries if you prefer) could use much more of them.

I also spend time on the English-language (User & Talk page) and Dutch-language (User & Talk page) Wiktionary.

I know Firefox is much better than Internet Explorer, but I don't exclude the possibility of finding Opera even better when I try it for a longer period, on an average, at least. The worldwide Internet Explorer usage percentage is declining, the Mozilla Firefox usage percentage is increasing everywhere, but so is Opera's, albeit less fast.

Gmail, or Google Mail, if you're in the U.K., is by far the best webbased e-mail service I've seen, and, frankly, I can't imagine there being a better webmail service out there. Such an interface! That is, so well-thought out, so clean, clear and fast!