User:Rob Kennedy



I’m Rob Kennedy. I hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science from  UW–Madison, and I’m working on a master’s degree in the same field at  UW–Milwaukee. I participate in numerous Delphi-related mailing lists and newsgroups, and I run a Web site called Delphi Q&amp;A. Most of that has little relevance to my activity on Wikipedia.

My Wikipedia interests lie primarily in copy editing and wikifying articles, as well as policies in the Manual of Style. In college, I was the copy chief and Web manager of The Daily Cardinal.

Links
These are links I want to keep handy.
 * My user space
 * My edit history
 * My user space
 * My edit history

[[Image:Stock post message.svg|25px]] To do

 * Ongoing items:
 * Remove excessive capitalization
 * White House Press Secretary
 * (Deputy) White House Chief of Staff
 * United States Cabinet
 * Catholic, if I feel like getting into a religious debate.
 * Fire Marshal
 * The Daily Cardinal
 * Clarify copyright information
 * Confirm some “firsts” trivia
 * John B. Chapple; See.
 * Anthony Shadid
 * Tailgating needs to be split.
 * Photos
 * General
 * Le Creuset, for Dutch oven
 * Expand Marcus Amphitheater
 * Signals
 * Update all the articles to match SIGINT (POSIX)
 * Revamp
 * Merge strongly related articles
 * Function pointer, Smart pointer, Handle (computer science)
 * ALGOL
 * Ars Electronica reads like a press release
 * Merge strongly related articles
 * Function pointer, Smart pointer, Handle (computer science)
 * ALGOL
 * Ars Electronica reads like a press release

Soapbox
I have some opinions about how things should be done around here. Not all of them are well formed, at least not here on this page.

Overview
I'm involved with the Manual of Style. As of April 2007, I've made more than twice as many edits to its talk page than I have to any other page in any other namespace. Style is a funny thing. The purpose of a style manual is to encourage consistency, both within single articles and across multiple articles. There are few hard-and-fast rules in a good style manual, though. Application of any rules needs to be accompanied by an inteligent editor. Good rules are ones that include rationale as well as instructions. That lets editors know what the goal was in establishing the rule and thus lets the editors judge whether the rule is appropriate before applying it.

The Manual of Style is frequently subject to instruction creep. That's something to be avoided. Not everything has to be spelled out. It's OK for a style rule to be a little vague. It leaves room for the rule to bend when appropriate.

AP style
Like I said above, I used to work for The Daily Cardinal, a student newspaper in Madison, Wis. There I learned to appreciate some of the Associated Press’s style rules, including those for abbreviations and spellings. Among Wikipedia’s style rules is that U.S. state abbreviations should be spelled out, but I prefer most of the AP abbreviations instead. It looks stilted to always spell out state names. The idea is that non-American readers won’t know what the abbreviations stand for, and while I appreciate the concern, I don’t think it’s quite the problem some make it out to be. For one thing, when a city-state combination appears in an article, it will probably be wikilinked, so readers can see the full name either by following the link or by pausing the cursor over the link and reading the tool tip or status-bar message that shows the link destination. Readers with Navigation popups installed will get an even better hint. At the same time, readers who are familiar with the abbreviations will get tighter writing that looks more like what they read in other venues, such as newspapers and magazines.

One style I think is inappropriate is U.S. Postal Service state abbreviations. Those abbreviations are for postal workers. The AP abbreviations are usually more indicative of what the state’s name is. The exception that comes to mind is Pennsylvania, which the AP abbreviates to Pa. I would have expected Penn.

Singular they
It’s well established that the “singular they” is not a new phenomenon. That doesn’t mean it should be embraced as perfectly acceptable in the formal style of Wikipedia articles. It does not take much effort to recast a sentence to avoid using they to refer to just one person. It usually consists of making other single references plural, in which case they no longer sounds awkward. In limited quantities, the phrase “he or she” will do as well.

Serial comma
My preference on the use of the serial comma is one place where I disagree with AP style. I think the comma is a better reflection of the cadence used when reading lists, silently or aloud.

Typographer’s quotes
I like curly quotation marks and apostrophes. I also like to see other characters that don’t generally appear on keyboards, such as the ellipsis, the long (em) dash. Web browsers today are sufficiently advanced that they are capable of understanding those characters, so even if there is not a font available for some of them, the browser can still display an approximation.

American English
I have something to say here, but I’m not sure what, yet.

Capitalization style
I have stuff to say regarding Manual of Style (capital letters), but I haven’t quite figured out how I want to organize it.