Welcome to my user page. I'm an amateur linguist, botanist, and pianist. People sometimes ask linguists how many languages they've studied; my list would be Attic and Homeric Greek, Latin, Old Norse, Old English, German, and Arabic. Regrettably, I'm not fluent in any language besides English, though I can pronounce some of them pretty well.

I love growing European cyclamens, taking pictures of flowers and insects, drinking Chinese teas, and playing music by Sebastian and Emanuel Bach on piano. Only the first two loves have influenced my Wikipedia editing; maybe I'll get to the rest one of these days.

If you have the Gentium font installed, you will see that this page uses that font. I'm rather fond of its Greek characters.

Thoughts on Wikipedia

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My philosophy is to write understandably. If an article, even on a specialized subject, is impossible to understand, that's a problem. Language is communication, and if it fails to communicate, it needs to be rewritten. Brevity and simplicity are stylistic virtues. I'm also obsessive about explaining every edit with an edit summary.

I've worked on improving the articles on Latin and Ancient Greek pronunciation, and recorded a few soundfiles as illustrations. While many phonetic details are unknown, enough is known to create an approximation that gives us some understanding of the music of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Athenian tragic playwrights, and the Aeneid.

Wikipedia needs a general article on Ancient Greek and Latin poetry and its meter. At the moment, information on the topic is fragmented between articles such as Prosody (Latin), Metre (poetry) § Greek and Latin, Dactylic hexameter, Greek lyric, and Iambic trimeter. Since Greek and Latin poetry share characteristics, they should be described together in an overview article. The current situation is a nightmare for someone wanting to learn more about Latin and Greek poetry.

Gnome work

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  • converting cm and mm to fractions of inches in articles on plants using {{convert|number|cm|in|frac=power of two}}:
    sample diff

Tools

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Works

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Greek and Latin grammar:

Poetics:

Other linguistic stuff:

Ancient Greek and Latin templates:

Plant-related templates:

Other templates:

Modules:

Cyclamen:

Climate:

Editing scripts:

Ideas

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Awards

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The Template Barnstar
For all the templates you've created, especially the magnificent LSJ template that I have so many times used!!! Thanatos|talk|contributions 09:46, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
The Million Award
For your contributions to bring English language (estimated annual readership: 3,200,000) to Good Article status, I hereby present you the Million Award. Congratulations on this rare accomplishment, and thanks for all you do for Wikipedia's readers! WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 17:44, 14 April 2015 (UTC)