User:Patrick Welsh

I am an academic by training, but not profession. My expertise is in Hegel and German Idealism. I am also competent in other select areas of so-called Continental philosophy.

Building upon the work of other editors – and with welcome collaboration and reviewer-input – I brought the article on G. W. F. Hegel up to GA status in September 2022. I am pleased to have since contributed as co-nominator to do the same for the Philosophy article in August 2023.

I started an overhaul of the Kant article, but got worn out before completing my projected edits. If you're reading this, there is a fair chance that you are qualified to help! You can find some notes here. I do intend to return to this, and I would love to have a collaborator. The same goes for Phenomenology and Martin Heidegger.

My current project is a sorely needed overhaul of the article on Irony. It gets an average of about 700 hits per day. Yet, since 2013, it has been virtually abandoned to the disorganized contributions of drive-by editors.

A few underappreciated Wikipedia guidelines about which I feel strongly:


 * Lead follows body: Don't add stuff to the lead unless it is already sourced in the body. If you don't care enough about the article to follow this practice, you probably should not be editing the article at all.
 * Lists: If you cannot contextualize information in prose, there is a strong chance it does not belong in the article. (See also this essay on the importance of explicitly stating the inclusion-criteria in cases where it is appropriate to use a list.)
 * Oh yes, and everyone should read What Wikipedia is not, which is a policy too often ignored in many ways.

For those sensitive to such issues (thanks, you're awesome!), I use traditionally masculine pronouns. On Wikipedia, however, I am entirely indifferent between these and the gender-neutral they/them, which is my own default for other editors. Please, also, feel free to address me as Patrick or PJW.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk)

''P.S.: I'm chronically prone to typos in my edit summaries. Sorry about this. I'm a native English-speaker and have no excuse or explanation. It just seems to happen all the time.''