User:Marcie
Hello and Welcome[edit]
I'm back. This page has gotten fairly long, as I have been doing wikipedia for a long time, but on and off (not that many edits). I finally remembered what the password was to this account (as opposed to Athena18 which I only used a couple of times in the past) so I'm using this. As to changes in who I am and how I write, I think that they will become visible over time.
The articles look similar but if standards have changed or there is a preferred way to do something please let me know.
Question: What is the best way of editing a user's page. I'm not sure if I should archive some of it and then write it as I would now, or if I should just keep it all and just keep adding?Marcie (talk) 20:33, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
Articles I have worked on (including one's from before 2009)
Medicare (Canada)
Therapeutic Abortion Committee
Canadian federal election, 1993
Canadian electoral system Marcie (talk) 00:33, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
Pre 2009[edit]
I am now using the alias athena18
The last time I was active on Wikipedia was in 2005 from what the history is telling me. I believe however I edited a few pages on the Politics of Canada in early 2006.
I no longer have the password to login in this name. The email address does not exist any longer either, as I have changed servers.
However I am aware that I could have solved. The main reason I am using a new user name is to differentiate between my very early writing and the writing that I am doing now (2007 and forward). As time moves on we all grow and change. Additionally it will take a little while before I'm back up to speed on all of the Wiki style. I don't want to give the impression I don't care about it. I am doing it as I remember it, but it has been a long time.
If this is an issue, and for further discussion please go to Athena18. This is the alias that I will be using from now on (Aug 2007) unless this is considered a big issue or is breaking the rules (I have seen a couple of others doing the same so I am moving on the assumption that it isn't (as long as this is openly made clear.Athena18 18:55, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
Small autobiography and introduction[edit]
I have many loves and interests. Most of what i've been currently worked on has come from my interest in women's studies and health care, however i also have many other interests including politics internationally and Canadian politics, feminism, Disability Activism and Poverty Activism.I also love going to see theatre especially the less established spots that show material that would not make it in the "safe" theatres because it is too risky. I also like some Musicals. I got to see Rent a while ago and i loved it. I'm currently slowly getting involved in a GLBT theatre group in her city.
My interest in politics will mean I'm going to be following the news quite a bit in Canada because we currently have a minority government. As i already follow the news closely its going to be a busy time. I have a (Honours) B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Women's studies. I concentrated on Canadian political science, Comparative political science (especially on social programs and social movements) and Women in politics generally. Near the end of my degree i tried to do as much work on topics of disability as would fit into the courses i was taking.
I'm a member of the NDP although so far i mostly work elections and do social activism between elections. I'm also a Pagan Jew, Pagan religiously mostly but you always still stay Jewish. Or at least i do ethnically. Nobody in the Pagan community minds or cares...they all come from different backgrounds too (there are a few folks that have been raised as Pagans but not very many yet, so most of us come from somewhere else)
I'm currently not working in my field and i find it frustrating to have learned stuff and not get to use it and not having the ability to share what i learned. So i started working on pages here figuring i could put my education to some public good use of course i'm likely overstating what my contributions are worth:-).
I also have a style of constitently using lower a case "i" except at the beginning of sentences. I picked the idea up from several places over the years including e.e. cummings. Some crime book i was reading was trying to say it had to do with low self esteem...well not in my case anyway. But its a mannerism so i thought i'd comment (my spellchecker hates it, i keep in the spellchecker for when i'm writing stuff where it matters).
This is not a full list...it's the stuff i've done most of my work on...if you are wondering why so much on abortion...i think i stumbled on the topic here when i was learning about editing and a NPOV....it was used as an example. I am a feminist and the pages needed a lot of work (especially the Abortion in Canada page which has come along nicely with the work of a lot of people since then. Of course often my work has meant work for other folks, especially in the beginning when trying to learn the edit style and NPOV approach, realizing i could run all the text i'd written through a word processor for typo's and spelling (i did run individual words but never thought of it as a way to type edit) and being taught that footnotes on exactly where this or that came from are not important----as long as you are not copying the article just say taking a statistic (for example). Academic habits are hard to loosen.
As an idea of how Women's Studies can be different when people were proofing there was usually one area where it got interesting for them (especially when it was someone i was dating and not for long) was when they came across the use of the word "I" in my papers. Traditionally of course you don't use it, and people point it out as an error where you've slipped....except that you do in most Women's Studies courses (to indicate that everyone comes from some place and has a position...one of the ways that women's studies criticizes some of the current work out there). And then there were the inbetween courses. Over time i got a good idea how it worked...but it took proofers sometimes a while to get used to it.
For Those with Learning Disabilities or Who Are Just Curious[edit]
I would also like to add in that i have a few Learning Disabilities. Most don't make a hell of a lot of difference here, but i do have some difficulties "seeing" the text as well as i could with a printer, and mine broke and i currently don't have the money to replace it. Even then, when i was in almost all of the time someone would proof my stuff. So please try and be patient with me or come up with suggestions that help (the person who suggested i should just run my stuff through a spell checker for typos and spelling is someone i'm very grateful to...its cut down on complaints quite a bit).
If you are out there and you have a Learning Disability don't let other people tell you what you can and can't do. Tests can give you apptitute ideas and show where disabilities are but you can still work around them. I was once told i wasn't likely to get past grade 11 academic math, and i made it to first year Calculus (and through it). I could get the theories but i was bad with the algebra (so the test did show some stuff and in actual alegbra courses i was terrible).I tried to get my preuniversity algebra course (up here it likely was between a high school and a first year course if you are in the US). I sucked at it, and it effected my ability to do Calculus as well. But i had grade 12 physics and had i decided to go ahead in science i wasn't all that far behind (my university already offered courses for those missing those course), and i knew that when i applied. I still hadn't decided for sure between biology and and social science but i knew social science was more likely. In my case though to get the extra credits would have been much cheaper to just pick them up in night school for high schol students. However i was good at Calculus theory a fair bit of the time and understood as much as my friend who was getting an A-. So you never know.
If you are in university fight for your rights. They are important. Find out what they are...they can vary from school to school and province and state. You are worth it!
Even if you aren't in university its important to make sure you get a fair accomodation that put you on a level playing field whenever possible. For example if i wrote the test that civil servants do here i would make sure that i had accomodations on it that were appropriate (and the civil service has a bunch of folks who work doing just that---figuring out what is appropriate). Alas i'm not much interested in the civil service but its a good example.
Don't be too senstive not to take suggestions though. The best one i got was from a second year prof on a free program the university had on helping students write good papers. It helped me enourmously in the 4 months i spent going once a week in learning how to write a paper. On the other hand the biology prof who told me i should go back to high school if i couldn't handle university when discussing accomodations was ignored. I found out what type of tests it was (not hard to guess its likely multiple choice when the class is larger than 200, and at the time did not need accomodation for that [i would later for my ADD] (about 20 people had to appeal it over his head). Ms. go back to high school got a B+ on the course (and was already on the way to one which made it doubly annoying).
Articles I've worked on[edit]
I've worked on the following articles (i've also worked on some other stuff...this is the stuff i choose to list at the moment...)