User:Wrdaley

Wrdaley, or Walter Daley, as he is commonly known, is a 25 year old Los Angeles native. He attended Loyola High School before leaving for gray and snowy Rochester, New York, to attend the University of Rochester, where he majored in english, played baseball until injuring his shoulder and was awarded the Rush Rhees Scholarship for academic excellence.

Daley worked at an immigration law firm for 2 years after his college graduation, as he thought he wanted to become a lawyer. Those 2 years showed him that he was mistaken.

Daley is currently in the final semester of a master's program in journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. An avid music and sports fan, Daley hopes to one day land a job writing somewhere for someone in one of those 2 fields. Film is also an interest.

Being a former english major, Daley is most knowledgeable about old detective fiction. He recently perused the C. Auguste Dupin entry in Wikipedia and came upon the following observations:

-First, Daley was surprised to see an entry for Dupin, who is a fictional character created by Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin was the first real detective (according to the entry, the word "detective" did not even exist when Dupin was created) in literature, and all other detective fiction, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes especially, owes something to Poe's Dupin. The content of the entry was very thorough; it appears as if Dupin actually existed from the way the entry reads. It does a good job of telling of Dupin, his background and his methods. It mentions the three stories of Poe that feature him, though does not go into great detail about his work in those stories, the only way Daley saw the entry to be lacking. It does a fine job of mentioning other writers who exploited the Dupin character, and mentions references in film as well.

-Second, Daley was surprised to see the number of references to such a short article about a fictional character (there are 30 in total). The people who created and edited this page really did their research. The external links are lacking, however, as there are only 3 and they all link to entries in other Wiki sites. Some other links (other works that analyze the character and the stories about him, scholarly entries) would have been nice to see as well.

-Third, Daley noticed that there wasn't much discussion about the Dupin entry. This isn't surprising: how many people really know enough about the character to care about discussing its Wikipedia entry? There are 2 discussions about the character's name and his methods. The name discussion made sense, but a conclusion was drawn. The method discussion was pointless; everyone seems to think that the only method of detection in fiction is deduction (made famous by Holmes). Dupin used ratiocination, it's in the stories and in the entry.

-Fourth, the history of this entry was interesting. All the interested parties are more than likely english and literary junkies themselves, so a lot of the revisions dealt with grammar and flow, style and the sensibility of the text. This came as no surprise, though it was interesting to see that the first bit of history of this article came in 2004.