User talk:TeresaFogarty
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Teresa, pleased to see you here after our EMail correspondence; i was a little concerned about not having heard from you for a while, but to coin a phrase, Wikipedia "grinds exceeding slow, tho it grinds exceeding coarse" [chuckling at my own supposed wit]. Ours is an unusual process, and there isn't a lot here that doesn't deserve patience.
You're of course under no more obligation to participate further than you have been under so far. But it'd be neat if you catch the bug; from our point of view, it'd be neat bcz you are a very skilled writer, and tho our style-book may be far from what you're used to, i'll bet your experience and insight will be valuable here if you get interested in writing in other areas (including other performers) and in fixing imperfections in what others have written in many, many areas.
I've made several comments at Talk:James MacArthur that apply more there than they do here.
I think you can also expect at least one semi-formal welcome from someone else.
You may want (sooner or later) to follow the link to your user page and edit it into something of a local home page. Here are a small but diverse set of examples:
But this second arrival of yours at WP is not typical (or at least not typical of the "Wikipedians" who get to know each other). While i don't want to be presumptuous about how far your interest in WP extends, i do want to be sure you realize how large and varied a field this project presents. As i may have said in our EMail correspondence, it isn't a good place to get credit for good writing and research beyond immediate collaborators (who are likely to know and care who has worked productively with them). On the other hand, if you have a certain degree of curiosity, its really takes no effort to find yourself collaborating with a wide variety of eventually appreciative colleagues. That's because it is so natural to find unexpected interests here.
For instance, i took an interest in James MacArthur not because i ever saw more of his longest role than the high surf and i think Diamond Head at the start of the show, but because i noticed that something was missing in the treatment of John D. MacArthur and either the MacArthur Fellows or MacArthur Foundation: probably that JDM did not have a link to either of the others.
I may have done some editing on Charles MacArthur, but in any case something led me on to James, and i was concerned that the editor you previously proclaimed your authorship to had been like the store clerk who doesn't compare your signature and the signature on your card: she "got you out of the store" with dispatch, but could easily have been accepting the word of one of the many irresponsible unregistered editors (or the much smaller but more dedicated subgroup of irresponsible registered editors!) without protecting your real interests. (It became clear that i needed to be able to send EMail to you in order to pursue that, and partly bcz i am committed to remaining pseudonymous on WP, it took me a embarrassing while before i got my act together to arrange that.)
Another example fresh in my mind arose because of noticing how hard to use the List of people by name is; i don't remember right off what originally took me to List of people by name: Ha, but i ended up moving all the names on it onto a series of smaller pages, and it'll be a long time before i stop massaging those several hundred lists. Yesterday, i noticed that Basho is on the list, with his surname (which i'd never seen mentioned before). I wanted to be sure whether "Basho" was his surname or given name, which Westerners who aren't taking extra care are in my experience likely to mess up on. I ended up adding a sentence, catching a long-standing typo, and improving (IMO) the chronological flow of the article.
Same day, i notice "Marie, Rose" listed in the Ms, learned some neat stuff about her, and tho i didn't write a "stub" article about her, added her to List of people by name: Mas-Maz as well, and got what should be a valuable start together for someone who eventually does do an article.
I also noticed the proposal to remove Altar boy, which points at Catholic minister. I feared i'd find it was another bad joke about clergy sex abuse, but it turns out to be an interesting, and to some reader, probably quite valuable clarification of ecclesiastical theory and practice. (I didn't edit it, but hopefully i helped steer consideration of its fate in the right direction.)
Well, you already know how i love to "hear myself write"; it's probably time to shut up. Please feel free to send me questions at User talk: Jerzy (or by Wiki-EMail or straight EMail, if privacy is an issue). (On user-talk pages, "Post a comment" works pretty well, but any logical place you want to edit in a msg will also.)
Hope you won't be a stranger. [smile] --Jerzy 05:34, 2004 Jan 21 (UTC)