User:Equinox

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Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
— 1832, Galileo Galilei

Notwithstanding their influence, we apprehend, however, that dictionary-makers are on the whole an oppressed race, doomed to more than their due share of obscure drudgery. […] They may have had their romance at home — may have been crossed in love, and thence driven to dictionarying; may have been involved in domestic tragedies — who can say?
— 1864, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (volume 96), uncredited author

[T]he maximum number of revisions an author made is 237,600 for the English Wiktionary (user "Equinox") […] As an anonymous reviewer points out, this "sounds as [sic] an incredibly high number of revisions for one single user".
— 2016, Wolfer & Müller-Spitzer, How Many People Constitute a Crowd and What Do They Do?

Words, words, words, words! You may as well listen to the birds.
— 2000, Coil

About me

Hi. I've been on Wiktionary since mid-2008. My main interest is adding (legitimate) English words that we are missing. I seem to have done rather a lot of this.[1] In particular, I have added the missing material from Webster's 1913 dictionary (which has about 80,000 entries); created thousands of entries from lists of scientific terms, such as minerals, soil types, organic compounds, and pharmaceutical drugs; originated Appendix:Unicode (I fear I have birthed a terrible emoji monster); and added various words that I encounter in books, newspapers, and everyday life.

I'm on Wikipedia too, where I mostly make a fuck of a fuss about commas.

I have an HND in Applied Computing and a BA in English Language. I'm a software developer for a charity that I like a lot. I've done some other sucky jobs too like telesales :)

  • Things I like: super-specialised senses of otherwise ordinary words (e.g. tick in birdwatching, policeman in chemistry); proper tagging of slang and rare senses; and words beginning with x.
  • Things I don't like: blind prescriptivism; made-up phobias; folk etymologies; any editing "agenda" (Islam, Anglo-Saxonism, gender studies, etc., to the exclusion of actual real-world usage); and especially spam and commercial bullshit.

Subpages

Things to do, apart from adding words

  • Why doesn't my headset work? I could record a zillion words. Try it on another PC. If it's super-quiet and broken even there, buy a new one.
  • Download all pages and write a thing so I can fill in missing etys easily, e.g. obvious compounds and prefixes.
  • Ditto: deal with the initialisms and abbreviations that need a proper part of speech.
  • Go through Special:WhatLinksHere/&c. and replace those prissy, attention-seeking "&c." links with "etc."
  • Things not to do: finish my excellent desktop Wiktionary with loads of power-user shortcut keys, since templates change too fast and I would end up vandalising without knowing it. *cry*

Individual words to consider

Other places to get words

Features I would like to have

  • Some kind of high-level platform-agnostic API that exposes the dictionary as objects (if only a collection of subheadings), not raw text.
  • "Blame", as in software source control, to discover which user wrote a particular line of an entry. See Wikipedia:WikiBlame.
  • Standardisation of how templates work. Also, general accountability for templates, including pre-rollout consultation, testing, and backward-compatibility.
  • Fix the dumb issue where various plug-ins load sequentially and stuff keeps jumping around so you can't click it.

Unpopular opinions

  • We should get rid of (or drastically cut down) the misspelling entries. They are way out of control.
  • Having separate alt-form pages for variants that differ only by case (Bloggs' disease, Bloggs' Disease) is somehow aesthetically displeasing. Furthermore, we should not have separate pages for titles like Admiral and Dame; just explain the usage at the normal form.

Wiktionarians I have met

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