User:Seaside rendezvous

Mostly, I do minor fixes, as I am reading articles that interest me---a missing comma here, an accidental misspelling there.

But I also have an interest in art and architecture. I think I'm like a lote of Wikipedians, in that I find that the best way to learn about something on Wikipedia is not merely to read the page about it, but also to try to make edits myself. As long as I adhere to the community standards for edits---always footnoting, never adding anything that's not germane, only changing existing text in order to make it more readable or more precise, etc.---I find that making edits to a Wikipedia page is the best way to really learn about a subject.

My interests
One day, somewhat less than halfway through life's journey (assuming that my life will be of an average length), I realized that the day-to-day distractions of life were going to keep me from ever focussing upon, and learning about, some of the appreciation of the best that human culture is able to offer: art, literature, architecture, and so on. I was only vaguely familiar with Socrates' famous dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living---and only as a slogan. But I had a sense that if I did not carve out tiny spaces in my life, here and there where the opportunities exist, to fill with appreciation of as much of the beauty and wisdom created by our ancestors for us to appreciate, I'd be missing out on much of what makes life worthwhile.

With this in mind, I made up my mind to give myself an informal education in what could, roughly speaking, be thought of as the canonical works of literature, and also to learn enough to have an intelligent appreciation of music, the visual arts, and of architecture. Initially, this meant finding and reading books found in the local bookstore or library, but I had the fantastic good fortune to have his impulse towards what the Victorians would have called "self-improvement" just at the moment that the internet was coming into existence. And so I have been able to make use of this wonderful resource---and particularly of Wikipedia---to learn more about culture in general, and to focus, a bit more intently, on the particular aspects (sometimes one painter or architect, sometimes something else) that seemed to resonate particularly strongly with me.

One wonderful aspect of the Wikipedia community is that it's possible to add to one's own knowledge by building the common knowledge-base of the entire community. It is the perfect home for amateurs who have no formal education in the field in which they are now dabbling, and no particular credentials, but who do have sufficient insight to make an incremental improvement to an existing article on some subject that has ignited their passion. That is what I have been doing, from time to time, with regard to the subjects that interest me the most. Usually, it is when I am furthest down some rabbit-hole that has taken me far from the general goal of expanding my broad knowledge-base---when I am most involved in trying to tease out the meaning of an individual painting, or to understand how it felt to a long-ago builder to imagine a theatrical set-design---that I am most able to make a worthwhile contribution. (Whether a contribution is worthwhile is determined by whether or not the community feels a need to revert it. If it stays on the page unreverted, it was worthwhile.)

I think that this paradoxical result, in which the amateurs are best able to make contributions in the areas which would traditionally have been the exclusive preserve of the credentialed experts, is the result of the lack of competition, once you get this far into the weeds. Everybody has an opinion on the top-of-mind issues, but only a small number of experts, and a few uncredentialed lovers of this or that particular treasure, are paying attention. So it is here that I find I am able to make the most useful contributions, precisely where doing so is the most personally rewarding.

Seaside rendezvous (talk) 14:56, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

List of surviving literary works from ancient Greece & Rome, with authors (where known)
For years, I've been interested in hunting down all the surviving works of Classical (ie Greek and Roman) literature. So few survive, compared with (for example) the vast reservoir of mediaeval texts, or the tsunami of Victorian literature of various sorts. A single human can, in principle, read every surviving literary work from ancient times, and I always wanted to give it a try.

To assist in this task, there are some helpful resources out there. The most significant of these is the colossal Loeb Classical Library, which has been expanding its collection since 1912. But there seem to be texts from the era that have not been compiled and translated by Loeb and its multi-generational army of editors.

For people with the objective of reading the sources that have fallen through the cracks (or which have not yet been caught up in Loeb's net), a sortable list of surviving works might be useful. But I think it would be arrogant to post something of this sort as a page in Wikipedia, when it is still so embryonic. So, with this in mind, I have decided to start building this list on my own page, with the intention never to launch it as a proper Wikipedia page, until it is actually a useful tool for other, similarly-inclined Wikipedians.

Building a sortable list of festivals in Ottawa
I live near Ottawa, and therefore would like to make the [|Wikipedia page on Ottawa's festivals] more user-friendly. A sortable list seems to me to be a good potential solution.

{| class="wikitable sortable" ! Festival ! Category ! Date each year ! 4 ! 5 ! 6
 * Canada Dance Festival
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * Canadian Stone Carving Festival
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * [xyz
 * xyz
 * Canadian Tulip Festival
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * Ottawa Comiccon
 * [| Pop Culture]
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * Ottawa Pop Expo
 * [| Pop Culture]
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * Ottawa Pop Expo
 * [| Pop Culture]
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz
 * xyz