Martin Richard Gardner
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
19/09/1983
A bit about me
Learning/speaking French more than half of my life. Put myself as fr-4 but am definitely getting rusty. Have studied Spanish at the University of Leeds, and have studied German in the past; Old French, Middle French, archaic Modern French and Anglo-Norman are my current passions. I'm currently reading The Qur’ān (Saheeh International Translation) whence possibly some of the English words I'm entering. Also got a copy of "Inglaterra Escócia e País de Gales" from a charity shop whence the Portuguese words I'm entering (but I don't plan on reading it cover-to-cover).
I also used to play Scrabble at competition level and am learning some Latin and Ancient Greek. My current passion is juggling (YouTube video now actually exists!). November 10 2010, 7 balls for 7 catches. May 23 2012, 8 balls for 8 catches.
Now using Chrome instead of Firefox for technical reasons.
I'm an administrator of the English Wiktionary, for about a billion years now.
On the Wiktionary
- Trying to spend less time on here and do 'proper' grown up things instead.
- Current task: getting a job, User:Mglovesfun/to do/Old French (2nd run), formatting the entries in
Wiktionary:Todo/context outside of definitions, then Wiktionary:Todo/needed trans templates. Not urgent, no real deadline, help very much welcome!
- First started using Wiktionary to look up obscure Scrabble words. For the ones that didn't exist, I started creating them myself.
- Overly obsessed with neatness and regularity. This is mostly good for Wiktionary, as dictionaries should be neat and regular.
- I make a lot of minor edits, lots of them using the auto-formatting functions of User:Mglovesfun/vector.js. I tend not to write edit summaries for these, as I would literally spend twice as long writing edit summaries as I would doing actual formatting. So by just clicking the minor button and hitting enter, I can format more entries per hour.
- Stuff I've taken an interest in and therefore can contribute a bit to includes baseball, basketball, juggling, poker and Scrabble.
- You can edit my user page and subpages like any other Wiktionary page. I too may edit your pages for broken links, typos, broken English and whatnot. Do feel free to revert without any explanation, and I will do the same.
- I spend more time correcting stuff and updating stuff than making new articles. A dictionary is about quality and quantity, so correcting the entries we already have is very important.
- Per above, I nominate a lot of things for deletion, on the grounds that a quality dictionary does not contain "anything and everything".
- I do edit languages I don't speak, but only in terms of formatting (spacing, punctuation, correct use of templates).
- I sometimes edit Portuguese, Italian, Occitan and Catalan which I don't really 'speak' but they're very similar to French and Spanish.
- I like a joke. Life is short, this is a website, but if I make a joke I will revert myself.
- Learnt some Old French at the University of Leeds doing a one year course entitled Love, Laughter and Chivalry. Beyond that am self-taught, have taught myself by reading as many texts as possible, many of them more than once. Anyone with more experience is very much welcome to check my edits.
- Note: I only create accelerated Middle French forms when I can find an attestation. Dead languages can be a bit unpredictable, and there's nothing worse than creating a batch of accelerated entries to discover they're not used anywhere.
- I operate MglovesfunBot (talk • contribs), which mainly bypasses redirects, removes categories and templates that fail our deletion process, corrects spacing, etc.
- Similarly, I monitor Special:Contributions/KassadBot.
- Believe it or not, I don't really give two hoots about Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Serbo-Croatian. I just think where a norm exists it should be used as widely as possible, even if I disagree with that norm.
- IRC, Internet Relay Chat, Wiktionary channel.
- Trivia: great grandson of John Maconnachie.
Areas of interest
- Suffixes and prefixes.
- Etymologies, especially Latin ones.
- Deleting pages that shouldn't be here.
- I do a lot of boring stuff like managing categories, uncategorized pages, fixing broken links, etc.
- I don't usually block users unless the vandalism is severe (such as spam or attack pages) or repeated.
- If I make typos or stupid errors, correct them without asking me, or even revert me.
Working CFI
Stuff that I think are common practices but aren't in any Wiktionary policies
- Single words (with no spaces) aren't nominated for deletion as 'sum of parts'
- Sum of parts entries that meet WT:CFI#Idiomaticity are usually deleted, or at least nominated for deletion.
Subpages
External links
Last modified on 15 May 2013, at 08:51