User:Muriel Gottrop~enwiki/Muriel Gottrop

Muriel Gottrop is a Portuguese geologist and amateur historian.

Gottrop's formal career is in geology, but on the internet she is better known as a historian, having contributed to several thousand articles on Wikipedia, mostly related to Roman history. She was a sysop on the English Wikipedia from November 2003 to April 2004, when she resigned.

In the Wikipedia community, Gottrop is known for her strong personal dislike for confrontation, preferring to work for consensus and mutual respect. She has strong strong opinions, but respects those who differ - and has often expressed frustration with those who do not share her respect for others and their views. She announced on July 17 2004 that she was leaving the English Wikipedia, but would continue contributing to the Portuguese one, which she described as a much more amicable environment. She hinted on August 4 that her departure might not be irrevocable, however. Many Wikipedians hope that she will decide to return at some point.

Born in Lisbon on 24 August 1976, Gottrop has lived in Portugal, England, and currently in Mainz, Germany. She loves travelling, and has visited many interesting places not usually frequented by tourists, such as Namibia. She is an avid reader, a prodigious writer (on anything she can find), a lover of nature, a cigar smoker, a cat lover, and a self-declared semi-wikiholic. Mostly of Portuguese descent, she also has some German and Chinese ancestry, from Macao, Portugal's formal colonial possession on the coast of China. The daughter of a Latin and Greek professor, Gottrop has a twin brother, Sebastian, whose interests lie elsewhere than on Wikipedia.

Likes: silence; cats; tea (sugar and milk); fish to eat; the sea and its sound; geology; writing in wikipedia, in Boeings, in note books, napkins, laptops, wherever and whatever; books; rainy days (when not too often); sleep; rolling tobacco and cigars; absurd sense of humour

Dislikes: noisy small dogs; peas; arguing (even when i am right); arguing in wikipedia ; politics; sports; violence; fanatic femininists; literary critics who confuse complicated with good; cigarettes; absence of absurd sense of humour

Motto: Less is more