Wikipedia editor
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This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_P._Coleman. |
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| my photo: "The Peace Bridge over the Niagara River between Buffalo, NY, and Fort Erie, ON, in winter"
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Welcome to my Wikipedia user page. It has a little information about my background and the projects I'm working on or might be available to help with. Then there's a whole bunch of useless userboxes.
Some explanation about using my real name. Many Wikipedians prefer anonymity and making their contributions with no recognition by name. That would be my preference too, but I've chosen to obey a different imperative: namely transparency in order to avoid conflict of interest. So, I'm here under my own name. I respect those who've made the other choice and in many ways agree; I hope they'll respect my choice and my reasons.
Please do not edit my user page.
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| | This Wikipedian is LGBT. | Q |
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Wikipedia Accomplishments
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 | A fact from the article Nausea (novel), which this user created or significantly contributed to, has been featured in the Did you know... section on the Main Page. |
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In my day job, I'm a professional biostatistician -- interested in in applications of statistics, mathematics, and artificial intelligence to clinical trials, outcomes, and medical decision making, as well as to healthy communities and sustainability. For some years, I have not been university-affiliated, but have a small consulting business that is independent, one-man and intended to stay that way. I have taught philosophy, mathematics, and statistics at the university and postgraduate level, been an investigator or coinvestigator on several academic research projects, and a consultant to numerous industrial firms. I've held a peer-reviewed grant from NASA to develop telemetric medical decision support for the space station. I was a designer of the largest multi-center clinical trial ever held in spinal cord injury, and am a member of an NIH clinical study section. My CV can be downloaded as a pdf.
Otherwise, I've written several screenplays, a stage play, some short stories and a novella. I have a novel about half finished. I also like to write essays about the visual arts. I take photographs.
Philosophy, Ancient Greece
[edit]Before turning to getting a PhD in computers and statistics as a way of making a living, I studied classics in high school and philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate in college. I'm deeply interested in ancient Greek philosophy and literature.
I study Tai Chi (both Yang Style and Chen Style), and I work on translating the Tao Te Ching and classical Chinese poetry. Lately, I'm especially fond of the poems of Su Tung P'o.
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 | This user plays the piano. |
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Almost all of the above-mentioned, varied topics are also represented in my blog, which is intended as a non-profit source, reusable under a Creative Commons "by-nc-nd" license. My basic plan is to contribute factual reporting to Wikipedia -- and original research and opinion to the blog.
wpc at wpcmath dot com
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Yes, I realize I've joined a lot of projects. But, that reflects the reality. I'm actually interested in all these things, and active in them in various ways. I hope to make at least some contribution to each project and to be available to other users who might want my advice or help in these areas. If you need me, please leave a message on my talk page.
In all these projects, of course, my basic plan is to keep checking with the project talk page and finding grunt work to do. In some, though, I have specific ideas about contributions I'd like to work on.
I'm currently very active on Nausea (novel), which was the Novels WikiProject Collaboration of the Month in January.
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| In the Portal:Arts/Things you can do, it's mentioned as an open task to expand Modernist poetry. I would like to work on this. The existing article is a 1-paragraph stub that has remained unedited and undiscussed since first written by User:Stirling Newberry 00:32, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC).
Modernist poetry has a See also, several of whose references to national schools are themselves are not yet even stubs but would need to be created.
It also cites two perhaps unnecessarily competing lists: List of modernist poets and List of English-language first and second generation modernist writers. Both of these lists are exclusively English-language, and both indiscriminately mix precursors, high modernists, late modernists, and post-modernists. They should be reorganized into list(s) that are international and that give the reader some idea of chronology and of specific movements.
I think the main article should be international and make general comparisons and contrasts, while the national articles should describe chronology and movements within each country.
I'd start by researching names of poets suggested by Marjorie Perloff in the course of an article on anthologies that mentions which modernist poets she feels belong where:
there was little doubt as to the position of the Great Modernist Precursors. True, one could quarrel as to the relative merits of Robert Frost or of e. e. cummings, true such forgotten women poets as Mina Loy and Laura Riding Jackson had not yet been rediscovered. But whose list did not include Eliot and Pound, Stevens and Williams, Moore and H.D., Gertrude Stein and Hart Crane? Add to these the English poet Auden, the French Valéry and Reverdy, Apollinaire and Cendrars, the German Rilke, Trakl, and Brecht, the Spanish Lorca, and Argentinian Neruda, and you have a pretty fixed notion of what Modernism-in-Poetry would look like. . . . such 'forerunners' of Modernism as Blake, Hölderlin, Dickinson and Rimbaud through the Futurisms, Dada, Surrealism, and Objectivism . . .
Others:
- Russians: Marina Tsvetaeva, Russian Symbolism, Valery Bryusov, Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Acmeist poetry, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova
- Americans: Fugitives (poets)
- English: Yvor Winters, Cecil Day-Lewis, Cecil Day-Lewis#A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940 (1941), Cecil Day-Lewis#The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1955 (1956), Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender
- French: Rimbaud and modern culture, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire
- Spanish and Latin American:
- Italian:
- Polish:
- German: Hermann Hesse, Paul Celan, Expressionism
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Clinical Trials and Medical Decisions
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to-do: LGBT youth in trouble
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Wikipedia should be more helpful to LGBT youth in trouble, who are likely to come here for solace and information, even though it's "supposed to be" a cold-hearted encyclopedia. We aren't social workers, but we could pass troubled kids along to people who are. These articles don't have to be preachy or comforting -- but they could describe and make available sources that help -- and they could allow teens to see (in fair perspective) that a world exists in which their problems are real, widespread, and can be coped or dealt with. Such articles should be easy to find and invitingly worded.
- Gay teen suicide. There's currently an article teenage suicide that has problems, IMHO.
- It's far too cold and impersonal, even for an encyclopedia article. No teenager thinking of suicide would be even slightly deterred.
- Its mention of LBGT teens is too buried to be very noticeable.
- I don't know how good the chances are that any suicidal teenager, LGBT or not, would happen to stumble on it.
- Homeless LGBT youth. My search doesn't reveal anything about thise topic, although there are reputable studies in the past year showing an "epidemic."
- The Task Force study shows "LGBT youth: epidemic of homelessness — Of 1.6 million homeless American youth, 20-40% are LGBT. Why do they become homeless? 26% of gay teens who come out to parents/guardians are told to leave home. More suffer physical, sexual, or emotional abuse."
- A newer study by Empire State Coalition says 3,800 people under 25 live on streets of NY, and 30% are LGBT. This is 3 times the % of NY’s LGBT community. 42% sleep on streets, in subways or empty buildings. Some turn to prostitution to spend the night.
- I don't know if we have findable articles that give information about and access to the many services helping gay teens or empowering them to help themselves against abuse or discrimination at home, in school, or in later life.
- A more subtle problem is that -- even without overt abuse or discrimination -- it's emotionally hard growing up LGBT: figuring yourself out, coming to have a sense that you can build an emotionally fulfilling life in this world. We could have articles that are not recruitment and not counseling -- but that (within the boundaries of factual reporting) let teens know that they're not alone, that others feel these things and that there is a variety of possibilities and opportunities for a variety of people.
- I'd be glad to help out with these social service issues (I do know links to a number of resources) but I would need collaborative help, due to the following deficiencies:
- I'm not exactly super-proficient as a Wikipedia editor.
- I'm not experienced in fending off the local variety of homophobes.
- I don't know zip about social work or counseling in any formal way.
- Although I was once a teenager, it was back around the year 1810 and I'm a little out of touch.
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to-do: Edgar Z. Friedenberg and Paul Goodman
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| Back in the '60s, there was a group of theorists about freeing people and radically transforming education. One of the leaders was Paul Goodman, a bisexual, represented now on Wikipedia only by a very incomplete stub. Another eloquent voice was Edgar Z. Friedenberg, a gay who happened to teach at the university where I was a student: SUNY at Buffalo. Friedenberg does not appear to be represented on Wikipedia at all. ---Are we talking about the same guy quoted in Wars on Campus as having said: "failure to establish adherence to conventional forms of patriotic observance, or uncritical acceptance of authority (in childhood education)...is not tolerable" ?? -- lisaf106@gmail.com
In some ways, their message now seems out-of-date, with changing conditions and changes in the attitude of youth. However, there's also something timeless in their call for respecting the freedom of the individual and the dignity of young people.
Although I'm not a sociologist or educator, I would like to work on expanding coverage of the publications of both these men, and I'd be grateful for any help.
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Consider joining
- Philosophy
- Logic
- Philosophy of Language
- Theoretical Linguistics
- Mathematics
- Statistics
- Biostatistics
Consider joining New York State routes
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| 78
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This user listens to 78 RPM records.
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| SI-0 | This user thinks the metric system is bureaucratic and inhuman. |
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This user is of Irish ancestry.
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| 1, 2, 3... | This userbox is a test. Please tell this user if you don't see it. |
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| snk | This user says either sneaked or snuck. |
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| …in. | Ending a sentence with a preposition is something that this user is okay with. |
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| who(m) | This user uses either who or whom in the object case. |
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you're | This user thinks that if your grammar is incorrect, then you're in need of help. |
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This user prefers that the subjunctive mood be used. Were this user you, he would use it.
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| Majority ≠ right
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This user recognizes that even if 300,000,000 people make the same mistake, it's still a mistake.
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A, B, and
A and B | This user uses the serial comma unless its inclusion is confusing. |
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| its & it's | This user understands the difference between its and it's. So should you. |
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| ’s | Thi's user know's that not every word that end's with s need's an apostrophe and will remove misused apostrophe's from Wikipedia with extreme prejudice. |
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| "…" | This user favours typewriter style quotation marks over typographic ones. |
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| ; | This user is addicted to semicolons; they use them frequently. |
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| ANAL 4 | This user advocates good grammar usage. |
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| no ads | This user is against commercials in Wikipedia. |
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| <sum>:1 | This user believes that every edit should have a summary. |
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| Flexible | This user deals with edits, deletion, and creation of pages individually instead of unilaterally and encourages others to do so. |
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