User:Zedmelon

&#60;nutshell&#62;zedmelon&#60;/nutshell&#62;
Hello; zedmelon here. I'm a dad, a musician, a geek, and a gamer. This page is exceptionally boring and will remain that way for some time--sorry.However, the above may prove helpful.

learning nerd and giving back
I enjoy learning, read a fair amount of Wikipedia and also edit from time to time--generally simple phrasing or spelling. After a year or two and a couple dozen anonymous edits I finally created an account in late 2006.

Changing little in the way of substance yet striving to improve general quality, I'm a stickler for English grammar and spelling--and though my writing skills aren't quite as sharp as they once were, I still gawts some purdy good grammaticals.

why don't you just speak AMERICAN!
Allow me to reassure my fellow Wikians across the pond I'll not stubbornly--ignorantly?--remove the s from analyse, change tyres to tires, or transpose letters in theatre and centre, labo(u)ring under the naïve and arrogant belief that I'm fixing something. Jingoism--albeit rampant--is not ubiquitous.



captious? fastidious? perspective.
Both online and in meatspace I've been called nit-picky, hypercritical, and worse. I prefer exacting or discriminating.

As language would not exist without the desire to communicate, I view it as requiring consistency--one can't express an idea without an agreement upon how the words used to express it will be interpreted. I disdain incorrect use of a given word despite that in many cases unrelenting erroneous application affords itself a perceived credibility. Like George Carlin, I cringe upon seeing the word "ironic" used when the intended meaning is "coincidence" or "humorous." I take exeption to hearing "proverbial" applied to something that's not in the Book of Proverbs, although this is from a linguistic perspective far more than from a theological one. I've seen varied sources on whether the term predates its literary namesake and would appreciate reading something definitive. Upon hearing someone say "biweekly" when they mean "semiweekly," I wonder if they've considered how they might describe something which occurs every other week. I understand that language must evolve or die but am a firm believer that a word's meaning should not be seen dismissively, that the process of changing it must be taken more seriously and involve consideration beyond simply an incessant and unapologetic barrage of "well, you know what I meant anyway."

Nearly all of my edits are simple spelling and grammar corrections. Many of the remainder stem from stances like these, and hopefully I've always been amicable in my approach.

elsewhere online
Myriad online communities include comments, articles, and posts from and intended for a global audience; consequently I am given daily opportunities to exercise patience with regards to the above. Successful for the most part in discerning cultural differences and ignorance from (a perceived lack of) intelligence, I've been largely congenial. I certainly wouldn't want to see any of these communities restricted based on any arbitrary criterion such as using "your" instead of "you're" in a comment.

That said, I cannot "unsee" what glare at me as mistakes, almost as if they were printed in red. Some are innocent typographical errors, others are honest mistakes, and still others were made in haste. Those which bother me the most include the view that digital communication is somehow less deserving of our attention, that proper spelling doesn't matter when the medium is so fleeting that a power outage could erase its existence. I disagree--and not merely because digital information so rarely disappears entirely. I feel a strong urge to fix all of the anomalies I find, but of course I cannot. Being an I.T. Geek and frequenting online communities where language is perhaps not the strong suit--or at least is not the current focus--of the populace further exacerbates my dilemma.

Wikipedia &#61; my safe haven
Wikipedia has probably the highest concentration of good spellers that I've seen, which is unsurprising when you consider its collective goal. Most contributors here genuinely want a good project to continue evolving. This coupled with my ability to edit nearly every article offers me a tantalizing environment. I like it here.

objection. overruled.
To my knowledge I've only had one edit. After re-reading my work, my sloppy grammar displeases me. I also should not have marked the edit as a minor one, though that may have been an oversight, as my preferences once allowed me to keep the minor box checked by default.

As far as its reversion, I still feel the point is valid and a special case worthy of reconsideration, as the Google link illustrated well my claim of common misattribution--it took me awhile to find a page that didn't credit the song to Alanis instead of Miss Brooks. However, I now recognize the need to address the ever-evolving Google Search's unpredictability, and though the Answers.com page is static, it's not so authoritative. One day I might actually bring it up again.

did I break it? lemmeno.
While I tend to neglect email more than I'd prefer, messages on my talk page will eventually be read. Trumpet the good news if I helped you. I apologize if I caused you stress or extra work; please let me know, and I'll apologize in more specific terms.

zedmelon turns 100!
2009 11 29 - I made today. :)

The description of a now-decommissioned ocean topography research satellite lacked a capital letter, and I swooped in for the rescue. I'm confident that Commissioner Gordon is at this moment dismantling the Bat Signal to make way for the zed signal.

-- zedmelon (¿) - 17:39, 2009 11 29 (UTC)

zedmelon turns 200
2012 08 26 - I've now made, and while it may have been nice to make more than a couple superficial changes, the entry documents a guitarist I've admired for quite awhile, so I'm pleased it was there.

UPDATE: I'm now amused that I even bothered to note the triviality of my 200th edit, because after creating its link, I decided to update the above note regarding my 100th and searched the archive to determine what it was. I capitalized one letter; whee.

2012 09 14 - update #271: I'm a.

300
Apologies to Gerard Butler fans; I'm merely chirping the creation of my help page.

lookimee!
Okay, with a mere 230 edits after six years (2012-09-04), I'm a slow learner--or I'm a confirmed Wikisloth. It's a little silly to bother with these self-appointed accolades after seeing the sheer volume of work some folks have devoted to Wikipedia. As of this writing, the most prolific editor on Wikipedia has nearly 1.2 million edits to his name. Even the user in 5000th place has made 11,013 contributions. The number nerd in me will tell you these are 4,676 and 44 times mine respectively.

However, I have always tried to consolidate my edits into one sweeping database entry, somehow having put the idea into my head that this is more beneficial for high-level editors who will only need to review one entry rather than three or four dispersed throughout the entire article. This at times is quite cumbersome, and for longer articles I've used a separate window for the edit as I track my location in the editing process, ensuring that if I'm going to correct "this data" to "these data" that I'll also adjust "your welcome" in the same efficient edit.

However--again--I see that this is not necessarily the practice of others; as of 2012-09-04 one article I've modified has been edited 710 times (SEVEN HUNDRED TEN TIMES) by one individual since I last touched it. Granted, this person is a major contributor to that article, but still... that's a boatload of edits.

After considering my method--which I'd been considering as helpfully taking a less convenient route for the sake of saving someone else some time--I realize that mine wasn't as great as I was thinking it was. For starters, I'm making sincere effort from a reasonably intelligent perspective, so I won't require as much policing as the teenage girl who adds "Simon Cowell sucks" in triplicate to several celebrity pages. Secondly, I was overlooking the technical tools afforded our editors anyway. The recent changes tool is a very quick and visual way to see what was updated, and my taking an extra five minutes to save someone else an extra edit will probably save them thirty seconds, and that's assuming they need to revert what I've done.

I'm not going to blast the top off the other end of the spectrum, but I will henceforth not worry so much about consolidated edits. That might help improve my perceived contribution rate slightly--see below 230e/6y figure--and I'll reach 400 by 2020 after all. Heck, if I dig around for my old IP address leases list and take credit for some of my pre-registration edits, I might even get there by 2019. The traditional location for a section like this is on an /awards page, so I may move it.

Next echelon:

400 edits: novice l1 to l2

1,000 edits: novice to apprentice

six years/42,000 edits master editor


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