The best of humanity is in our exercise of empathy and compassion. It's when we challenge ourselves to walk in the shoes of someone whose pain or plight might seem so different than yours that it's almost incomprehensible.
We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
There is unlikely any additional information about me of interest to the general public. I am a relatively normal,
inconsequential, but spirited and unique individual, with strong opinions, feeling, and morals, living as one among the
rest of you. Feel free to email me for any pressing correspondence; otherwise, post on
my talk page to communicate about Wikipedia-related discussions.
I am a relatively infrequent contributor to Wikipedia (list of contributions),
but aside from Google and GitHub, Wikipedia is my most-often referenced source for knowledge; I regularly find
myself obtaining an initial, cursory understanding of subjects by reading their respective Wikipedia articles. I believe
Wikipedia is one of the most important creations in the last century and that it represents a beacon of knowledge and
exemplification of a community-driven project unlike any before. When my time allows, and my knowledge intersects, I make
edits to articles, but I am most active in discussions on talk pages about when changes should and should not occur. My
goal is always to better this amazing resource and leave it in a finer state for those who follow.
The most important principals I try to uphold when contributing are truth and objectivity, but like most individuals
with the cursegift of opinion and independent though, the latter principal is often the most difficult
to attain. I do my best, and generally find others in the Wikipedia community do so as well. Infrequently I find individuals
whom obviously have a personal or professional bias, or those whom argue for the sake of confrontation, but they are the
minority, and can be easily silenced by simply ignoring them.
Grammatic Preferences
My English preferences are generally modern. I strive to apply proper
American grammar when editing articles and participating in
discussions. If you notice inconsistencies in my English usage please inform me so I can work to correct it in the
immediate and better my usage moving forward.
As listed in my userboxes, I am opinionated about certain grammatical choices authors may make.
For example, despite the long history of double-spaced sentence concatenation, I find no readability
benefit, and therefore prefer single-spacing between sentences. I
strongly support singular they and gender neutral pronouns, as I believe their use serves to
promote inclusion and further our collective commonalities as a single race of
humans, instead of alienating those whom identify differently and classifying subjects based on precedent established
during historically biased, bigoted, and segregated times.
When it comes to dates and time, my computer science and programming backgrounds caused me
to naturally express them from their largest to their smallest period of time. The common American date
representation of MM-DD-YY is illogical to me, so I instead format dates as
YYYY-MM-DD. Further, every single clock I own is set to use 24-hour time, and as
such I format times as HH:MM[:SS.MS]. I support the International Organization for Standardization,
regularly using their specifications throughout my professional and personal work, and write dates and times using the
ISO 8601 standard.
Experience, Focuses, & Weaknesses
Having worked as the Systems Architect for a successful publishing company specializing in well-formed, XML-based
publishing, I am proficient in copy-editing, document structuring, and many times of formatting and markup. I am proficient
in a number of styling, document, and general markup languages, including LaTeX, CSS3, HTML5, and others.
Likewise, I have experience with many different lightweight markup languages, including
Markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown, MediaWiki, ReStructuredText, and others.
I believe my weakest area is remaining truly objective and unbiased as it applies to politics and politically-leaning or
controversial living persons. As such, I have consciously decided to only work within talk pages in such contexts to
avoid immediate reversal of direct edits, as well as debates and critique after the fact.
Released into public domain
I agree to release my text and image contributions, unless otherwise stated, into the public domain. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under public domain terms, please check the multi-licensing guide.
All contributions by this user are hereby released into the public domain
I, the author, hereby agree to waive all claim of copyright (economic and moral) in all content contributed by me, the user, and immediately place any and all contributions by me into the public domain, unless otherwise noted. I grant anyone the right to use my work for any purpose, without any conditions, to be changed or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without any attribution or notification.