User:Troels Nybo~enwiki

My name is Troels Nybo Nielsen. As far as I know I am the only person with this particular combination of names.

What's in a name?
My first name means Thor's arrow or Thor's ray.

My middle name means new home. It's a place name, in my case the name of the farm where I was born. A couple of villages and many farms and houses bear the same name and some of those places have given names to other families. An alternative spelling is Nyboe.

My last name is a patronymic and the second most common surname in Denmark. About 300,000 or 6% of the Danish population are named Nielsen.

Danish, Scandinavian, European ....
I am Danish and very much aware of being a Scandinavian. This does not mean that I am a Chauvinist, though. Actually I am very open to other cultures than my own and I hear music and read books from a broad range of foreign cultures. I am a member of Wikipedians Old Europe and in other contexts I have been accused of being anti-American because my attitude to the USA is completely devoid of the submissiveness and inferiority feeling that some Americans want from others.

Actually I follow the advice of Walt Whitman:

Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved

Also, when I watch the Americans I very much understand that Egyptian priest a couple of thousand years ago who reportedly said to a Greek:

You Greeks are such a young people.

I hope that I combine pride and humility and I certainly appreciate this combination in others.

Music and literature
Most of my Wikipedia work has been done at the Danish Wikipedia where I have mainly dealt with music and literature.

A few of my musical favourites (in no particular order):
 * Ludwig van Beethoven
 * Sabicas
 * Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
 * Orlando di Lasso

And some of my literary favourites:
 * Selma Lagerlöf
 * Gabriel García Márquez
 * Honoré de Balzac
 * Sigurd Hoel

Doing interwiki
I joined the English Wikipedia - and other foreign Wikipedias - mostly to do some interwiki, but I am also one of those people who spend time correcting the spellings of Scandinavian names.

Dealing with Scandinavian names
This is mainly a question of changing o or oe to ø or ö.

A good rule of thumb is that half of the times you see an o in a Scandinavian name in an English text it should really have been an ö or ø. Yes: Every second time, approximately. And some of the misspellings are definitely insulting.

And then there are the problems with æ, ä and å which are not quite as serious.