User:WillowW

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

No rest for the wicked -- and hopelessly addicted editors

A friend introduced me to Wikipedia in early April, and it was like waking up from a nap, with warm sun on my face.

I love sharing about nifty subjects, so Wikipedia is like crack for me. There's something — magical in passing on what you've learned to a friend, and in learning from them in return.

I like crafty things, and making gifts for other people, although it sometimes gets me in trouble. I also like beautiful, symmetrical things, which means that I end up studying too much fashion design and science. So that's what I write about.

Writing is fun, although words aren't tame; they never seem to say what I want them to. My favorite book is Middlemarch by George Eliot, which I can read over and over. I also love vivid, poetic language, ranging from Homer and Sappho to silly, fun stories like those of P. G. Wodehouse.

I also enjoy music, especially musicians like Natalie Merchant, Indigo Girls and (early) Tori Amos. My own playing is lame, though, so I only play when no one's around; I'm better at riffing on this keyboard. I also love Norah Jones, especially her song Seven Years.

Although I've written some articles here, I still feel like a wiki-newbie, since I'm usually a clueless Chloe about what's customary or how to do things. If you have any suggestions or helpful hints for me, please write; I enjoy hearing from people, even if just to chat. Thanks for stopping by!

1 Fun articles
2 Biographical articles
3 Biochemistry articles
4 Physics articles
5 Mathematical articles
6 Chemistry articles
7 Encyclopedic articles
8 Missing encyclopedic articles
9 Taxonomic articles
10 Random articles
11 Categories and user boxes
12 Inter-Wiki stuff
13 Other trivia about me

[edit] Fun articles

I contributed to an article about No Rest for the Wicked, a wonderful webcomic that I read.

I like this comic as well, although sometimes it's uncannily accurate. ;) Did I mention that I like smileys?

Together with old and new friends, we've started new WikiProjects on Textile Arts and Fashion. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread — wait, did I get that backwards? ;)

Did I also mention that I like to knit?

Before the WikiProject, I created a few craft-related pages:

and helped out with another

Gauge (knitting)

I'd also like to add some articles about clothing design. I've begun with

I really need to add some pictures/figures to these articles. :( I also added some polishing touches to

A few other random crafty contributions...

I sometimes do calligraphy with a broad-nib pen, which is the only kind of art I can do. (My drawings are awful!) It's really useful for writing thank-you notes. I like very rounded scripts like Uncial, Carolingian minuscule and some forms of bastarda Gothic. Recently, I added a wiki-related pangram for calligraphy practice.

[edit] Biographical articles

A Fayum portrait, sometimes said to be Hypatia

I've created mini-biographies of people and places that I admire...

...and contributed to a few others

[edit] Biochemistry articles

Biochemistry students have it rough - so much to learn! And so few good textbooks - it's a recipe for Confusion Stew. Here's my dash of paprika ;)

One of the most common proteins in your body; immanent beauty, no?

I helped to spiff up a few articles as well

Theoretically, I'm a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, although I'm just beginning to contribute to the project. I set up our article worklist and make some linked navigational templates on protein structure

and on biochemicals (under construction — don't look, please!...unless you want to help out, mwahaha)

They were fun, I've learned a lot making them! :)

There's also this, now improved by my favorite pentomphaloid:

Template:Genetics glossary

[edit] Physics articles

Physics is beautiful; I always wish I understood more. I started a few articles about nifty topics...

The whole universe could be discerned from a single scene, if we could only see it in sufficient detail — Leibniz

...and helped out with a few others

Sedimentation
Multipole moments
Multipole expansion
Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector ← I also worked hard on this one
Centripetal force
Mean free path
Radius of gyration
Moment of inertia
Euler's equations
Lennard-Jones potential
Adiabatic invariant
Normal mode
Two-body problem
Hamilton-Jacobi equation
Fictitious force
Inertial frame of reference
Rotating reference frame
Non-inertial reference frame
Action (physics)
Luminiferous aether
Speed of light
Entropy
Photon ← I worked really hard on this one!
Light
Bohr model
Kinematics
Redshift
Equipartition theorem

I try to write articles about topics that puzzled me when I was a student, so as to help the next generation. Theoretically, I'm a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics, although I haven't contributed much there.

[edit] Mathematical articles

Beautiful and serene Selene is described by mathematics

Making new mathematics articles is fun, especially if geometry is involved

I love that feeling when you choose just the right coordinates and a big, terrifying problem dissolves into something trivial. It's like throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West. ;)

I've contributed to existing articles as well

Someday, I'll add some stuff about my first love, map projections. Wikipedia's already pretty good, though! Theoretically, I'm a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics, although I haven't contributed much there, either.

[edit] Chemistry articles

I've never been good at chemistry - bleh :p So I've only fixed up a few articles

[edit] Encyclopedic articles

I'd really like to work on more music articles, especially counterpoint- and dance-related ones. But, somehow or other, I seem to be drifting towards library science, specifically encyclopedias. I've worked on improving these articles

and created a few others

The articles help me appreciate the larger picture of what we're doing here at Wikipedia and what the traditional goals of encyclopedias have been.

With the EB articles in particular, I'm trying to give a balanced presentation, and one hopefully helpful to many: praising its virtues and aiding novice readers in making the most of it, while not covering up its shortcomings and biases. It's a difficult path, however, and I encourage everyone who feels that I've been discourteous or unfair (in either direction) to write to me with constructive criticism. Thanks for your help! :)

[edit] Missing encyclopedic articles

As part of a wiki-game, I started creating some missing encyclopedic articles

Dactylella, predators of nematodes
Daedala, an ancient Greek festival to Hera and marriage
Daima, a modern artist from Tashkent
Daonella, genus of Middle Triassic clams, excellent for dating
Darwin-Radau equation, describes the shape of the Earth from its rotational speed and mass
Dasycladales, giant unicellular green algae
David Mermin, a reasonably well-known solid-state physicist; wasn't he a 4 on the Landau scale?
Decadentism, an Italian art movement inspired by the Decadent movement
Delay equalization, useful all-pass filter for correcting phase imbalances across different frequencies
Demetrius (Bible), two separate people mentioned in the New Testament
Demetrius Cydones, a 14th century Byzantine theologian of surpassing eloquence
Demetrius Lacon, a third-generation Epicurean philosopher of the late 2nd century BC
Demetrius Triclinius, an uneven ;) Byzantine critic, obsessed with meter
Dendroceratida, a spiffy taxonomic order of sponges
de Sitter effect, two relativistic effects in astrophysics
de Vaucouleur's law, the logarithm of the surface intensity of elliptical galaxies declines as the fourth root of the radius

[edit] Taxonomic articles

My musical friend Daisy

Since working on the missing encyclopedic articles above, I've become good friends with a headstrong and very vocal nightingale, Daisy, who is determined to produce stubs for the roughly 270,000 taxa missing from Wikipedia. We've begun by making two new stubs, {{Archaea-stub}} and {{Taxonomy-stub}}, as well as an article-assessment banner {{Tree of Life}} for the Tree of Life WikiProject, along with the associated categories. The only help I give to Daisy is that I upload her pages; she's a very smart passerine! :)

Daisy has made several new articles, beginning with the Archaea

...and new categories...

...and some new lists (good for eliminating important redlinks!)

Daisy has also helped to fix up existing pages

I've also joined Wikipedia:WikiProject Microbiology and Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life, although I can't claim to be an expert. Hopefully, people will be patient with me!

[edit] Random articles

Pangrams — great for calligraphy
Apodictic — A really useful word, and so wonderfully Greek
Quiffin
/Nature
Courtly love
De amore
List of fugal works by Johann Sebastian Bach

I don't often read newspapers but these came up thanks to Alfred Harmsworth:

[edit] Categories and user boxes

I was really timid when I made my first few categories...

...but then I went a little wild...

Hopefully, more Wikipedians who love the same crafts will find each other by following these links. Unfortunately, I don't really know what I'm doing, so I really hope that someone knowledgeable about Userboxes will fix mine up.

As part of a proto-WikiProject(s?) on clothing/textiles/fashion, several of us have been organizing categories into a coherent framework. Here are a few of the new categories

Category:History of clothing (ancient Greece)
Category:History of clothing (ancient Rome)
Category:History of clothing (Byzantine)

I recently started making templates again for fun...

[edit] Inter-Wiki stuff

Original sources are great for encyclopedia articles since they are the ultimate references and, strangely, they're often written more understandably than secondary works. Unfortunately, many original sources (or translations thereof) aren't in the public domain or simply have never been rendered electronically. I've begun adding some original texts (along with my translations) to the Wikisources

Physics (English translation, but just beginning to type in) by Aristotle

De partibus animalium (English translation of short blurb; needs work) by Aristotle

I'm really fond of Aristotle.

Confessio philosophi (English translation) by Gottfried Leibniz

Confessio philosophi (original Latin text) by Gottfried Leibniz

Fun dialog written by Leibniz at the age of 27 that gives a good sampling of the themes running throughout his philosophy.

Invention of the principle of least action for light (English translation) by Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis

Invention of the principle of least action for light (original French text) by Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis

Assertion of the principle of least action by Maupertuis in April 1744, but only for light, not matter. Maupertuis shows the equivalence of minimizing time (Fermat's principle) and action, and asserts without justification that action is more fundamental.

Invention of the principle of least action for mechanics (English translation) by Leonhard Euler

Invention of the principle of least action for mechanics (original Latin text) by Leonhard Euler

In the fall of 1744, Euler proposed the principle of least action for mechanics, not light, independently of Maupertuis. Euler also notes that the principle holds only when speed was a function of position (in modern langage, when the total energy of the particle is constant).

Re-invention of the principle of least action for mechanics (English translation) by Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis

Re-invention of the principle of least action for mechanics (original French text) by Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis

Assertion by Maupertuis in 1746 that he invented the principle of least action as a general principle, and that Euler merely applied it to determining the motion of planets. Maupertuis does not seem to understand the principle, since he mis-applies it to perfectly elastic/inelastic two-body collisions and mechanical equilibrium.

Euler's defence of Maupertuis' priority (English translation) by Leonhard Euler

Euler's defence of Maupertuis' priority (original French text) by Leonhard Euler

Remarkably, Euler gives all the credit for the principle to Maupertuis a few years later, in 1752. Ironically, Leibniz may have been the original inventor of the principle, in 1707, at least for mechanics.

A Heuristic Model of the Creation and Transformation of Light (English translation of the 1905 "photoelectric effect" paper) by Albert Einstein

Article for which Einstein was awarded the Nobel prize, where he first introduces a "photon"-like concept.

The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation (English translation of a 1909 talk) by Albert Einstein

Amazingly prescient talk in which Einstein introduces wave-particle duality (decades ahead of everyone else) and argues forcefully for particles (photons) that carry the energy and momentum of light. Unfortunately, European copyright restrictions prevent the original 1909 Einstein article from being added to the German Wikisource; check back in 2026 (it'll go by quickly! ;)

Spanische Tänzerin (original German poem) by Rainer Maria Rilke

A breathtakingly beautiful poem from my favorite German poet. Lame translation soon to follow.

I've also entered other nifty works in the public domain, such as

Lysistrata (English translation; anonymous translator rumored to be Oscar Wilde) by Aristophanes (a very cool play!)

and some brief essays by Kurt Tucholsky, modern, bitter-sweet and beautiful:

Bread with tears (original German)
Procreation (original German)
Enjoying life (original German)
Worry (original German)
Hello to the future (original German)
On the hotel terrace (original German - hilarious)
There is no virgin snow (original German)
Spots (original German; horribly prophetic, powerful)
The flea (original German; clever and cute)
One sentence (original German; portrait of a Nazi)
How to give a bad (good) speech (original German; excellent advice)
Clairvoyance (original German)
The Border (original German)
A vision of the distant future (original German)
Fairy tale (original German)
The pious fisherman (original German)
How to have a bad (good) vacation (original German)
The face (original German)
Mr. Smith makes a phone call (original German)
Tenant and Landlord (original German)
Unpacking a suitcase (original German)

Tucholsky's works entered the public domain this year (2006).

[edit] Other trivia about me

I share Catherine's optimism that Wikipedia deserves our devotion, despite its vandals and scandals and sometimes silly personality clashes. (She's an INFP, too!) Wikipedia feels like a medieval cathedral of knowledge being built over a century, one that brings together a community of wonderful, well-meaning people of gentle strength.

When I was about seven, my grandmother gave me a Children's Book of Knowledge, a fat, yellow book that I read over and over even after the binding had cracked in three places. I loved all the chapters, especially those about different lands and languages. Somehow, my articles now feel like gifts to my younger self.

Every so often, something especially nice happens to me on Wikipedia, which gets remembered in my scrapbook.

Fun Stuff