User:Edonovan
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I joined Wikipedia on October 10, 2005 after reading an article on Wikipedia and trust which used the anomie article as an example of why Wikipedia is inferior to other sources of information. The irony I saw was that the author could've, by getting involved, just corrected the perceived deficiency himself, since in his post he stated what was wrong. So I did it for him. Then I decided I needed to join the community in order to be able to take part in discussions relating to that article, which I know had a little bit of ownership in, and to contribute to other articles.
My blog is at donovan.covblogs.com. My del.icio.us username is outofegypt. I'm also on Facebook, a source of some embarassment to me, though the site has some legitimate uses.
When I was at Covenant College, studying English literature, I occasionally edited without logging in because of the firewall that I was behind. My IP for those edits would have been logged as 66.255.16.50. Of course, that's for all public computers at the college, so not all the changes logged to that IP are mine. If you have any questions about particular edits, just ask.
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[edit] History
I was born June 15, 1984 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Lancaster County among the large Amish and Mennonite communities of the area. I, however, am a Reformed Presbyterian (of the PCA) and not a true Lancaster Countian according to some, since neither of my parents were born there (my father grew up near Washington, D.C. and my mother near New York City).
In 2002, I graduated from Solanco High School. While there, besides taking some AP courses and otherwise preparing for college (though I didn't end up going to a tremendously selective one after all), I ran on the cross-country team and wrote poetry for the school's literary magazine, Reflections.
I kept up both those interests in college. Also, for a while I wrote for the Bagpipe, Covenant's college newspaper. During my sophomore and junior years, I worked on layout, exercising my graphic design skills.
In fall 2005, during my senior year of college, I wrote an undergraduate thesis (known at Covenant as a SIP) about Marshall McLuhan's media theories and the rhetoric of hypertext - that is, how hypertext documents, and, more broadly, web communities, offer media experiences that transcend McLuhan's dialectical oppositions between hot and cool communication, between word and image. The finished paper (at least insofar as such a paper can be finished) is accessible at my writing wiki.
In the spring of 2006, I studied at Oxford. My main tutorial were on British literature from 1740-1832 and the development of Christian doctrine to AD 450. While at Oxford, I planned on working in either the publishing or journalistic fields after graduation.
However, the Lord's plans for my life were different (and better, though I admit I doubted that for a while this fall). Now I'm up in Boston helping to develop an after-school program for underprivileged youth, an opportunity which I found through TechMission. My eventual role at the program will largely involve technology education. Thus, I find myself increasingly interested in further pursuing the line of research I already outlined in my senior year of college. Someday, Lord willing, I will go graduate school to study something at the interface between writing, literary theory, and the theory of electronic media, media ecology perhaps.
[edit] Intellectual and Spiritual Influences
- my father (and his Westminster Theological Seminary education)
- Athanasius of Alexandria
- St. Augustine
- St. Bernard of Clairvaux
- John Donne
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Denise Levertov
- Francis Schaeffer
- John Piper
- Walker Percy
- Marshall McLuhan
- George Lakoff
[edit] Probable Areas of Wikipedia Activity
As I am most knowledgeable in humanities-related fields, such as literature, philosophy, and theology, you'll see me working on articles in those fields most often, which is good, since they seem to need the most work. I've already slightly revised the articles on a few literary works that I've read. I also might work on some of the articles about popular music and Internet-related topics.
You can expect me to do occasional proofreading and adding of wikilinks, as well. I might set up a list on here of certain faux pas, stylistic and otherwise, that irritate me.
Update (2.28.06): After a long hiatus, I'm returning to editing, though, with my busy essay-writing schedule, my edits will be sporadic at best. So far I've largely been fixing proofreading mistakes that I find while browsing. I find that many of the articles that I could actually revise extensively would take serious reworking that I can't afford to do at the present time. Perhaps I might start making a list for the future. I edited the Eucharist and Gregory Dix articles today, for a start.
Update (12.13.06): Have hardly edited in the past 10 months. Only have edited when I looked something up and saw an error which was either egregious but outside my scope of knowledge (in which case I left a comment on the relevant discussion page) or easy to fix. Perhaps I'll get back into WP when my life slows down (like **that**'s ever going to happen).
[edit] Internal Links (within my user namespace)
Bible link discussion from the Village Pump.
Proposals for the future.
Covenant College article, as I revised it 12/16/06. Copied here in case some people go on an edit war with it, and try to bring back some non-encyclopedic content.
[edit] Pages on Wikipedia that are horrendously biased (and probably will always be)
(With a note of the current slant.)
- New World Translation - pro-JW
- I think this puts the NWT on an even plane with translations such as the KJV, RSV, etc., which it does not deserve
