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User:DutchmanInDisguise

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Welcome to my world! I am the Dutchman In Disguise. Even though many of my ancestors were Dutch, I don't use that language, but contribute to Wikipedia in English, in Spanish and in several other languages. Unlike some Wikipedists, I have a life beyond Wikipedia, and only make occasional contributions about random things which interest, or annoy, me.

My contributions in English

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Articles

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I either created, or was responsible for much of the text, of the following articles:

Dutch-American history

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  • Charles Winans Chipp, American naval officer and Arctic explorer
  • Cornelis Melyn, early Dutch-American settler and leader – my first attempt at an article
  • Winans, just an index of various persons with this Dutch surname who have Wikipedia articles; this is known as a disambiguation page in Wikispeak.

Some other disambiguation pages

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Music, especially jazz

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Baseball

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California politics and history

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Miscellaneous

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Editing

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I also do a lot of trivial edits and corrections (wrong links, missing links, typos and grammar errors really bug me):

Carlsbad

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Not long ago, I was vacationing in the beautiful town of Carlsbad, California. I happened to see a plaque along a street there commemorating the beach city's sister city relationship with some Czech town. It took a lot of reading and research before I figured out that the strangely-named (to my Anglo ears) town is the place that I used to hear of as Carlsbad or Karlsbad.

My curiosity aroused, I did some wiki-browsing and discovered that a lot of articles contained links to plain old Karlsbad, but failed to distinguish between the Karlovy Vary version of that name and a small town in Germany with the same name. There were also a bunch of links to plain old Carlsbad which were put in wiki articles by incompetent or careless editors. The links took you to a "disambiguation page" which left it up to your imagination which town the editor really meant. I've tried to remedy this situation whenever I've had a few minutes to kill and could figure out which town an article was talking about — the one in Bohemia? in California? in Baden? in New Mexico? I hope I've guessed correctly while making these corrections.

Chelyabinsk

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15 Feb 2013, I scooped the world, sort of, in Wikipedia's coverage of the 2013 Russian meteor event. At 0633 GMT, after hearing the early news reports, I added a paragraph entitled Meteor shower to the Chelyabinsk article. Well, to be completely truthful, Edward Vielmetti had already wondered about it on the Chelyabinsk talk page 49 minutes earlier. Y para decir la verdad, un usuario anónimo agregó un párrafo al artículo en español unos siete minutos antes de mi cambio al artículo en inglés. Y es posible que habían contribuciones en otros idiomas aún más temprano que éstas.

Categories

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Duke Ellington once said something like "you can't put cats in categories", and I find Wikipedia categories to be a huge nuisance. Far too much time is spent creating them and putting people in them and debating about who should, or should not, be in this or that category. I very seldom click on a link to a "category" and have little or no interest in what category a person might fall into.

Surnames and dates

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Something which is of much more interest to me than a "category" is a page which lists persons having the same surname. When I have trouble remembering the first name of somebody who interests me it's quite helpful to be able to see all the people who happen to share the same last name. I've helped create, or add to, such surname disambiguation pages (see above), and have also expanded their contents by filling in the birth and death dates on pages which lack them. I believe the inclusion of a person's dates in a surname page is very helpful in determining whether Joe Blow or José Fulano is a contemporary, or somebody from out of the distant past. The most recent of these pages where I supplied names and/or dates is:

"Intitle"

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While adding and correcting information on people with certain surnames, I discovered a capability for seeing, in an instant, all articles whose titles included the name, or word, I was interested in. This is done via the "intitle" template. For instance, to see all wiki-articles whose title line contains "Dutchman", click here:

   All pages with titles containing Dutchman

So, having discovered this handy feature, I added the "intitle" template to a number of pages I was working on. What do you think? Is this a worthwhile change, or would you rather not see that unobtrusive link at the bottom of certain pages?

Stuff

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some stuff I'm working on

My Wikipedia edit history

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Here are the numbers of edits I've made each month to the English Wikipedia:

YEARJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecTOTAL
202144
202071538386002346
201911169171791721136107153
201878671611161819121115146
2017913182191221161352024181
2016303131542620432212252321338
2015442224181621182019205419295
2014503457196039302619423964479
201369333860665397413714513447820
2012696481476266172723342837555
2011502053818042438048869044717
2010493466234913302543334835448
2009122117728342329285652289
2008Began editing Wikipedia in December88
GRAND TOTAL OF EDITS: 4,479

Mis contribuciones en español

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Minhas contribuições em português

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Mes contributions dans d'autres langues

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