User:Ronja Addams-Moring
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[edit] Wikipedia related
I am a registered Wikipedia user since June 15, 2006. I am slowly developing into a Wikipedian, all the while trying to avoid becoming too much of a Wikipediholic.
[edit] My WikiWork mottoes
- Do the menial tasks and the inspiring tasks will find you.
- Practice random acts of praise and decisive acts of beauty.
[edit] Wikipedia tasks you can help me with
If you wish to collaborate on any of the tasks listed below, drop me a line on my talk page or go ahead and be bold. I am going to do these myself when I can take the time, if nobody else gets around to them first.
Article tasks
- Expand 84 Charing Cross Road to worthy of two pages, one for the book and one for the film. Make those pages better. Long term goal: featured article (FA), maybe some day even FA-of-the-day.
- Fix the introduction of Nero Wolfe (too long and rambling at this time / 13:47, 1 December 2006 (UTC))
Community related
- The Wikipedia:Welcoming_Committee page is poorly organized and the content is hard for a newcomer [1] to understand. Figure out a good reorganization+rewrite and do it. Remember to create the talk page and explain there why you made the changes.
- The Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee and Wikipedia:Welcoming_Committee page naming is profoundly confusing for newcomers and other fledgling Wikipedians. Figure out a fix and suggest it on Wikipedia_talk:Welcoming_Committee AND Wikipedia_talk:Welcoming_committee.
The most challenging ones (conceptual, not too clear where and how to look for answers)
- Figure out how to create "concept thesaurus" a.k.a. "concept synonym" pages. One example of such confusing synonymous concepts is the large group of concepts that mean emergency population warning. For example, "public warning", "emergency announcement", and "citizens alert" are all used, in the USA, Finland and the Netherlands, respectively, and the list sure does not end there.
- Once we/I have an idea what a "concept thesaurus" could look like, check if there is an already established place for pages of similar nature
- If no established place for such pages can be found, ask for a discussion on both Wikipedia and Wiktionary about where to place them
[edit] Edits
New pages: none thus far
Major edits: none thus far
Significant edits: Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner - shortening the introductory section to less than a screen's hight, globalizing and rearranging the content, wikilink cleanup, etc. Irène Joliot-Curie - structuring the article with headings, one more reference, some language and style tweaking.
Small content edits: École nationale d'administration, Influenza pandemic, List of Finns, A Simple Twist of Fate (film).
Minor content edits: Mary Ward (scientist), Racak incident, Rex Stout.
[edit] WikiProjects
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[edit] Community and sanity building
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I took the Wikipediholic test on 29 November 2006.
[edit] Wikipedia maintenance and development that I like doing
- Fighting link rot
- Looking for weak introductions (long, incoherent, self-contradicting or otherwise unappealing) and listing them above and also on the relevant talk page (so, hopefully, one day they will get fixed)
[edit] WikiThings I plan to do
- Learn to use proper Wikipedia:footnote style for citing sources (starting with this page)
- Learn to build, expand and maintain categories and article series (for the purpose of making finding related information easier)
- Learn to use the templates for lists.
- Get my head sufficiently around the existing material related to emergency management, so I can become of actual use for Wikipedia:WikiProject_Disaster_management
- Do some work on book articles and join WikiProject Books
- Do good WikiGnome and WikiFairy work
- Publicly thank others for good work, ideas, help, and other constructive activities, whenever I stumble upon those - at least once each day when I visit Wikipedia, even more often as long as the appreciation is genuine.
- Contribute some of photos I have taken to Wikimedia Commons, so they can be used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects (few of mine are good enough, but every contribution does help)
- Upload a photo of myself for the Wikipedia Facebook, good models for photo info and licensing could be these photos of Jimbo Wales [2] and Daniel Dennett [3]]
- Develop a small-scale WikiSmile fit for shyish, mostly introvert Wikipedians, who would rather be lurkers (can you say WikiGnome?), and use it whenever there is real reason (or I can think of a good excuse :-)
- After I have some 1-2 years of experience, become a Wikipedia bureaucrat, and a member of Esperanza and the Welcoming committee
- Have patience with my husband's slow conversion - let him genuinely freely choose when and if to become a Wikipedian
[edit] Me, myself and I
[edit] Language abilities deciphered
I am actively trilingual and passively multilingual. This is not that unusual for Europeans who come from a bilingual or multilingual country, and who have traveled or lived abroad during their youth.
You may, however, view my Wikipedia:Babel list (in the upper right corner of this page) with some incredulity: how can anyone be familiar with that many languages, even if it is only on a basic level?!? The simple and short answer: most of these languages are related. Thus, if one is fluent in a language that grew out of an older proto-language, the chances are that one can understand, at least rudimentarily, some of the other languages with the same roots.
In practice, if I list a language as knowledge level 1, I trust my ability to understand written information in that language for the purpose of checking that a cited source addresses the issue(s) claimed in connection with the citing. I do not trust my ability to understand written information in that language so far that I could correctly evaluate the tone of the cited document or decipher any idioms used in it. I am quite likely to misinterpret such aspects of the cited document as irony or sarcasm, or religious, cultural and historical references.
A slightly longer and more personal answer:
I have heard five languages in my childhood home: Finnish, English, Swedish, German, and French. Of these I spoke English and Finnish daily and could read and write them before the age of six, and used Swedish fluently enough by the age of twelve. All these first five I have also studied in school and/or at language courses. The strongest base of my German comes from a childhood stay with my aunt, who married to Germany. I learned Norwegian during my childhood, too, mostly from listening to a neighbor mum converse with her bilingual kids. After having a fluency in Swedish and some grip of Norwegian, reading Danish is not that hard - but do not expect me to understand spoken Danish! (I wonder if anyone who was not born in Denmark really does...) With my background in English, two-three Scandinavian languages, and German, I found that following our neighbor's son-in-law conversing in Dutch with his bilingual kids is surprisingly easy, and I also can understand written Dutch tolerably well. The rest of my language ability comes from studying dictionaries and travel guides. Having a good base in French makes reading Spanish rather straight-forward (but do not expect me to follow a conversation too well) and my lifelong affection with Latin combined with French and Spanish helps me to decipher written Italian well enough, even tough following spoken Italian is hard.
It is sad that my German and French have atrophied to a mere basic level due to lack of use during the last 20 years. Also, I have intentionally not included in my Babel box those languages in which I would not be comfortable checking even the general content of a reference: Turkish and Estonian, even though I have studied them a bit, a long time ago. I also learned some sign language (the Finnish version) as a kid, but I have unfortunately forgotten practically all of it.
Since 1984 I have used three languages actively every day: Swedish, English and Finnish.
[edit] Rather informal Curriculum Vitae
I am currently an academic free radical. With this I mean, among other things, that I am a university student and that I do research, and sometimes teach, too, but I do not hold a permanent faculty position. My main area of interest is multi-channel emergency announcements (MCEA) - emergency population warnings sent via several communication channels simultaneously. Together with fellow students and faculty, I have thus far (February 2007) published four conference articles that focused on security related requirements for MCEAs received through mobile phones and other mobile devices (mobile emergency announcements, MEA). MCEA systems are not widely adopted yet, even though MEAs are already working in several countries and regions. Despite of this, I find studying the concepts and theory interesting and motivating: maybe one day our work will help save lives.
I have also helped a little in research on how to thwart unisolicited bulk e-mail (UBE) - also called spam, junk mail or unisolicited commercial e-mail (UCE).
I have taught the fundamentals of scientific research and writing both in English and in Finnish since 2002, and continue to do so.
[edit] Limited rant on how to teach research
From the teaching experiences mentioned above grows my motto: "It takes a research community to train a researcher". I see myself less and less as a teacher (a giver of information to those who know less) and increasingly as a facilitator and a coach (an intellectual "ball plank" for those who certainly know more than I do about their own research topics, and about many other things, too). In my honest opinion, the best learning for fledgling researchers - high school and doctoral students alike - comes from three learning/teaching experiences, when they are combined:
- guided group discussions in groups that include older and more experienced researchers,
- individual or group research projects, the results of which someone actually needs, and
- being personally tutored by older and more experienced researchers while working on those projects.
I predict that those schools, universities, faculties and laboratories that have or can develop traditions that build and maintain such inter-generation research communities will be the ones to produce the best graduates and doctoral candidates, the most highly valued peer-reviewed research and the most innovative solutions to many of humankind's most pressing problems. rant over
[edit] Trivia
I was born in May 1964 in Helsinki (Finland, EU) as the eldest of three sisters, and originally named Päivi Hyvärinen. I lived from October 1967 to December 1969 in Baltimore, (Maryland, USA), where both my parents did postdoctoral research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. During our time in Baltimore I forgot everything about Finland except the language and came to view myself as an American. Not surprisingly, returning "home" was not easy. Today I have a Western - mainly cross-Atlantic - identity, with some roots here, some there, and most of my strongest roots in the international scientific-scholarly community.
In Baltimore I attended Cedarcroft Kindergarten (Montessori method), the best school I have ever had the honor to study at - though Helsingfors svenska sjukvårdsinstitut in 1983-1988 came close.
I changed my name in 1993 to Ronja Addams. This name comes firstly from the protagonist of Astrid Lindgren's book Ronja Rövardotter (translated into English as Ronia the Robber's Daughter), and secondly from the Addams Family cartoons and films (I love them, especially the 1991 movie). In 1997, when we married, I took also my husband's family name in use.
I am a Bright, and so is my husband. We have brought our children up in the spirit of intellectual and emotional honesty, creative curiosity, constructive argumentation, and religious tolerance, which they are now testing to the hilt by both proclaiming that they believe in God and angels. I find the irony of this simply delicious.
We currently live in Helsinki (Finland, EU). The time zone of Helsinki East-European Time (EET), the same as for Tallin, Cairo and Cape Town (UTC + 2 hours).
[edit] For more information
Please see my web page for more details, such as my publication list and a picture of me.
--Ronja Addams-Moring 23:33, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
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![[2]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jimbo_Wales_in_France_cropped.jpg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dan_Dennett_in_Tahiti.jpg){kind=link}
