User:TheBetty1921

My wikipedia user ID honors my mother, "The Betty", who was my personal Yoda.

I have had a career that has run the gamut of 'technical' writing: medical writing, academic grant requests, hardware manuals, software manuals. I was one of the very first technical writers anywhere to create online help for a personal computer software product, and one of the first to ever teach technical writers how to write for the web.

This means I am older than dirt. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I'm still working and going to school (life-long learners unite!), so I am an infrequent contributor to Wikipedia, but I hope that my contributions are helpful.

My added value to Wikipedia

I'm a good editor, exceedingly respectful of the material I prune, and any new articles I author.

I have strong familiarity with twentieth century science fiction, graphic novels, satire (Chaucer, Cervantes, and 17th century through Mad Magazine).

I also have the wrath of Tina the Brittle Technical Writer.

Pet peeves

• Sentence fragments. (Yeah, I know.)
• Non-parallel bulleted lists.
• Run-on paragraphs. (This ain't the 19th century, guys.)
• Editors who edit, or rewrite, or update a complex article without regard to whether or not their edit has inadvertently subverted the original material.
• That the creative geniuses who adapted HTML for use here in Wikipedia didn't come up with a <grumble> tag.

I don't want to start any fights, but I have seen some really lousy work on Wikipedia in the three or four years I've been here, that never seems to get dinged. Bad articles get tagged and the tags stay on for years, and nobody doesn anything about it.

On the other hand, I have seen some really well-researched (though arcane) articles that have been almost instantly vivisected.

I think Wikipedia needs to be shaken up a bit, to stimulate a higher standard of writing -- not just cosmetically, but actual, better articles! I hope to contribute in that regard.

TheBetty1921 (talk) 20:21, 24 January 2012 (UTC)