A couple of years ago I wrote a biographical article on a guy, and his descendants wanted to contact me. It dawned on me the other day that readers may not necessarily know a good way to contact an editor. So here is what you do: go to my talk page linked above (but for convenience here is a link) and then just edit the talk page. I get alerted about the message to my email, so I will see it fairly promptly. You need to decide if you want to leave a callback address or not, but if you do leave your email address I will hide it from public view as soon as possible but note that Wikipedia never completely deletes everything so in principle it can still be obtained. Many email providers have the capability of creating a temporary pseudo-email, so you might want to try that.
Note that anybody can edit any Wikipedia page, you don't need an account. Just hit "edit" and type away. If you are doing it for the purpose of contacting me, the format makes no difference so just blunder forward any way you want, I'll still see it. Don't forget to save the page though.
I will treat all correspondence professionally and sensitively. I am not fishing for social contacts, or interested in drawn out debates, etc. All I am interested in is improving Wikipedia.
Formerly I was editing as User:Jonwurl. I have never really quite understood the issue of using pseudonyms, and in fact I even wonder if that may evolve as time goes on. After all, in non-electronic writing (notably early American pamphleteering) this has been a fad that has come and gone. However, I do not want to buck the system and everyone seems to use pseudonyms so I guess I will also.
The only reason I did not change the account name earlier was that I feared that somehow I would not get "credit" for work previously performed. I realize now that issue is for the most part completely meaningless. For the record, as of right now account Jonwurl has 300+ edits, but as the Editcountitis essay explains, almost nothing should get read into the edit count. There is some minor significance to the count, but it is more in the realm of "be careful what you ask for" because it is used when requesting admin privileges, and I do not have time for that! And respect all you wonderful admins who do it!!
There is something to the fact that there is a certain "immortality" to a user's contributions, and also I shamelessly try to impress my friends. So the edit count is important to my ego, no doubt about that! That's why I mention it! (Repeat: it is 300+.)
As Jonwurl I have been signing my talk articles for a while as Laurentian Shield (with a space) so that's a good name to re-use. It is also the name of my my erstwhile blog.
That is all for now, because now I do need to re-establish a reputation as a non-abuser, etc, etc, to make future articles easier, etc, etc.
BTW on line breaks after section headings: "Include one blank line above the heading, and optionally one blank line below it, for readability in the edit window (but not two or more consecutive blank lines, which will add unnecessary visible white space in the rendered page)." (emphasis added)
I found by trial and error that for {{Infobox State Senator ...}}, {{Birth date|1825|03|21}} results in March 21, 1825, while {{Birth-date|March 21, 1825}} 1825-03-21. I have not investigated as to whether this is generally true for all other person infoboxes, or whether this is a glitch for the state senator. In any case, this is counter-intuitive, is it not??
Notable article contributions
Actually, right now I only have one article to discuss: Foo Lake. How it got started was I was watching the List of lakes in Wisconsin article, and someone added a jillion lakes, probably via the DNR web site. It was getting a bit cluttered, and so I re-organized it a little -- made it three columns for most counties (left it as one column it the list were smaller). In the course of that I noticed there is a Foo Lake in Sawyer County.
In the computer world, the word foo is ubiquitously used to represent a generic name of something when demonstrating or explaining code. It is a placeholder name of convention. It is (sort of) intended to sound comical. My immediate suspicion was that a vandal injected into the article to see if it would get caught. Upon checking the standard references for lakes (GNIS and the DNR), I found out that it is indeed real, albeit probably one of the most nondescript lakes in the world that still has a name.
So I will admit that the only reason I wanted to move it up in my priority list is that I want to be able to make the following boast: while I may not have written the article on Foo, I did write the article on Foo Lake.
I was also curious, of course, if it would get noticed by someone watching new page creations and get some type of tag for immediate deletion due to lack of notoriety. I was prepared to defend it, and partly the defense was going to be that just out of the novelty of the name, and the (presumable inadvertent) association with common computer jargon, it was noteworthy.
I still haven't figured out this whole ego thing in Wikipedia, but I am not going to deny that for me it is a real factor in my motivation🙂
User:LaurentianShield/sandbox/LafayetteBunnellDraft This is intended to be a major rewrite. Eventually I will get to it, but I need some help from Anne S to get information at the Minnesota Historical Library (requested in Oct 2012, but it is almost a year later and I need to get back on top of it). Update 2015-10-24: copied from User:Jonwurl due to confusion about this as a draft.
User:Jonwurl/AndrewJacksonTurnerNote: subsequently an article was written, and I received a request to update it. So far all I did was add an infobox and an image, but more can be done.
