From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
My userboxes exist primarily to provide transparency about my affiliations and my most prominent and strongly-held values and beliefs. I am unlikely to respond to invitations to work on projects related to them and I will not respond to invitations to discuss them outside of Wikipedia.
That said, if you have an interesting work about Roger Williams you'd care to share, drop it on my talk page.
Here are some convenient Manual of Style (MOS) shortcuts which you may find illuminating if you see one of my edits tagged with one of them specifically or just with "MOS" (or "MOS compliance"):
- MOS:HYPHEN and MOS:DASH (hyphen and dash guidelines)
- MOS:GNL (gender-neutral language)
- MOS:FOREIGN (when, how and when not to use foreign terms)
- MOS:COMMA (I hope the name is self-explanatory—though read beyond the comma and try to get down to the semicolon section)
- MOS:PERSON (Avoid the use of second-person and first-person language [i.e., "you", "yourself", "mine", "I"])
- MOS:PLURALS (Pluralize loanwords in natural English ways [e.g., though it derives from Greek ὀκτώπους oktṓpous, "octopus" is fully integrated into English and, written that way, it is as English as the word "bicycle". As such, the English plural form should be "octopuses"]. Pluralize explicitly foreign terms [that is, the ones that require the use of italics to delineate] using the conventions of that language. Greek ὀκτώπους becomes ὀκτώποδες, oktṓpodes. The English plural of Octopus should not be "octopodes" [and "octopi" is right out, as it's a made-up word which respects neither English nor Greek nor even Latin conventions, as the Latin plural, again, as a loanword from Greek, is octōpodēs]. In general, you shouldn't need to use foreign words extensively unless there is no agreed-upon English equivalent [articles about foreign history or culture may be filled with foreign terms that have not penetrated into the English vocabulary, and they're notable exceptions], so just use the English loanwords whenever possible. One useful tip: if you happen to be writing about Japan, it's rarely necessary to make words explicitly singular or plural, and even in the English loanwords [such as ninja and samurai], they are frequently treated as if already both singular and plural, with context, such as pronouns and verb forms, resolving ambiguity. Note that this user doesn't speak Japanese [or Greek, for that matter]; he just prefers consistency and accuracy—a transliteration is not a translation.)
- MOS:QUOTEMARKS (Use straight double quotation marks [" "] when they're called for. Alternate these with straight single quotation marks/apostrophes [' '] for nested quotations. There's no reason to use single quotation marks outside of a nested quotation, with a couple of exceptions—namely, plant cultivars and simple glosses. I will usually change such single quotation marks to double marks, especially if there are already examples of double quotation marks in the article. I will always change "curly" marks or otherwise non-quotation marks being used as such to the appropriate straight variants, as the MOS explicitly directs.)
