User:Weeb Dingle

Put myself through college as a newspaper editor; took magazine assignments when they appeared. Spent years as a book editor (fiction and how-to).

From those decades of experience, I am prone to come across as short-tempered. Mostly, that's inaccurate: I am long-used to being surrounded by skilled professionals of much experience who take pride in their craft. We don't see any need to sugarcoat when we spot each other's errors and, when disagreements arise (which they regularly do), we can be both passionate and erudite in making the respective cases, after which a winner is declared and the house stylebook is updated, problem solved.

Totally dig the Wikipedia core concept, and am increasingly irked (nettled, even) by rampant editorializing, corporate marketeering, fanatic fanboys and (of course) lousy basic language skills. Now semi-retired, I intend to spend a few minutes a week playing Whack-A-Mole around here.

AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST (always expanding)

 * deviant subcultures (particularly United States, particularly 19th century onward, particularly occultish)
 * popular music (particularly mid-/late-20th English-language)
 * modern musical instruments (particularly guitar family, particularly electrified)
 * economics (particularly microecon, and neighborhood governance theory)
 * offbeat mathematics (information theory, chaos dynamics, catastrophe, analogue "fuzzy" maths, etc.)

A Note About Unsourced Text
I regularly rant against "essayism" and "fanboy arm-waving" — a peeve likely remaining from my newspaper days, when a reporter would attempt to slip some bias into an otherwise balanced article.

To clarify, for WP purposes: Personally, in an article body I do not mind if someone makes a calm and well-stated assessment, even if there are no indicated sources at all. This provides a framework (or at least skeleton) upon which any diligent editor may readily hang such notes as appear in a search engine, a task that can easily be accomplished by any reasonably diligent child.