User:Boynamedsue

Wikipedia is one of the great monuments of the human race. Its value is infinitely greater than the pyramids of Egypt or the Mona Lisa. If you want to find an individual contribution more important to the good of humanity, you really have to look to people like Fleming, Jenner and Pasteur. It was created voluntarily, largely anonymously and more or less without any desire for personal enrichment.

I don't feel we talk about this enough.

I do very dull work that nobody else can be bothered to do, but which serves to improve wikipedia. I sometimes indulge myself with a silly edit summary while doing so, largely to amuse myself and alleviate the boredom. I endeavour to keep things on the right side of the rules of courtesy, but if you think I'm not doing so, drop me a line and I will look at the comment and use it as a learning point to strike a more acceptable tone.

Using terms like "battle with cancer" or "battle with dementia" is unencyclopaedic.

• It is a often euphemism, as people cannot meaningfully be said to battle against an inevitably terminal degenerative illness like Motor Neurone Disease or Dementia.

• It is unquantifiable, how can we tell who battled and who didn't? Even if there were a way to do this, the people writing the obituary stating "long battle against cancer" have no oncological or psychological experience.

• It is also pernicious and offensive, as it suggests that a cancer patient's chance of survival depends on their own tenacity, rather than medical intervention or simply blind luck. This may leave patients confused and suffering from stress as they believe they need to "fight" but do not know how to do so (as it isn't really a thing). As result, sensations of guilt and culpability may arise as the illness progresses, with negative psychological and physiological consequences.

Less can be used with any noun. Fewer can be used with only countable nouns. I know your style manual says different. It's wrong.

Every decent writer in English up to 1900 used less with countable nouns, and a lot did it afterwards. 90% of native English speakers use "less" with countable nouns on occasion. In 1960 it was 99%.

"She has less friends than she used to" is perfectly good English, and I will deck anybody that^* says it isn't.

^* Don't get me started on that, either.

In British English, "which" can be used in restrictive relative clauses, thus:

The house which burned down had been built in the 17th century.

Many American dictionaries also state this is acceptable. It is a stylistic choice that usually depends on the formality and tone that a writer is trying to achieve. The more formal, the more "which".

If you are going through wikipedia changing "which" for "that" in restrictive clauses as if it were a rule, you are imposing your own stylistic choices on the people who have actually done the work of writing the text. You should therefore give your head a wobble.

1. Sort Children of the plantation into a proper article about child slavery in pre-civil war USA.

2. Expand and source articles on Bolivian indigenous languages/cultures.

3. Expand article on Roma in Romania to include Muslim Roma.

4. Improve the sourcing of the English section of Linguistic prescriptivism.

5. Create Italian Telephonic Alphabet.

This user believes that making daft little boxes for anything other than project membership or informing of administrator status is a waste of every bugger's time.

This user is a member of WikiProject Romani people.

This user is a member of WikiProject Languages.

This user participates in WikiProject Argentina.