User:Tony1.html



About me

I'm a professional editor and research consultant. My doctoral dissertation was in the psychology of music reading, including the roles of working memory and eye movement. I work with researchers and academics in their preparation of grant applications for competitive research funding. Most of my clients are staff at the University of Sydney who are applying for funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. This typically involves the negotiation of text in the areas of engineering, chemistry, physics, biology and information technology, although some of my work brings me into contact with a much broader spectrum of research.

My first career was in the European art music of the 18th and 19th centuries, specialising in the compositional techniques that underly the main styles—how acoustics, culture and psychology intersect in harmony and voice leading—and the psychological and musculoskeletal patterns that support excellent performance, particularly on keyboard. That career crashed and burned eight years ago, a matter of sadness to me.

My daughter, Ruby

I’m a keen advocate of systemic functional grammar, as embodied in Michael Halliday's and Christian Matthiessen's Introduction to functional grammar, 3rd edition, Hodder Arnold, London, 2004. Traditional grammar sucks; while it might be helpful in the early stages of learning a foreign language, the parsing of written words into inflexible categories doesn't help people to write better. What does help is a knowledge of the functional relationships between speakers/writers and their listeners/readers as embodied in the grammar. But it's damned complicated: theme and rheme; the given and the new; hypotactic and paratactic clauses; mood; texture; cohesion; tone groups; and much more—it's a whole science of how the language fits together on many levels. Although I've started writing short articles on aspects of functional grammar, such as thematic equative and nominal group, I can't claim more than amateur status.

I enjoy the teamwork aspect of working on Wikipedian text, and I’m interested that the NPOV thing works so well. I like the way in which the project brings anglophones into a relatively homogenous international community to share their wonderful language.

Featured article candidates and good prose

I encourage contributors to significantly improve the quality of FACs, particularly the standard of their prose; for this purpose, I tend to hang around the FAC and FAR/C rooms. Typically, I take a sample from the nominated article and critique it to show the authors why they should already have arranged for a thorough copy-edit. I’ve written a guide for the improvement of writing and editing skills in relation to Criterion 1a of the featured article criteria (which requires prose that is “engaging, even brilliant", and of "a professional standard”); there, inter alia, I develop my concept of "strategic distance" in writing and editing. The guide is accompanied by four sets of exercises:

• identifying and eliminating redundancy in prose;
• constructing effective paragraphs, sentences and lists; and
• advanced editing exercises, particularly the troublesome noun plus -ing construction; and
• Know your Manual of Style, a set of exercises on troublesome issues at MoS—thus far, only exercises in hyphens and dashes have been prepared.

Date autoformatting and overlinking

Wikis are a relatively new idea, and have evolved rapidly over the past few years. On Wikipedia, the standards of writing and formatting have risen significantly, and we're now in a better position to sit back and coolly assess a few of the technical features that I believe were unwisely adopted in the early days. One of these is date-autoformatting (DA), which has spread unquestioned like leprosy all over the project. I believe that it was always a programmer's toy in search of a problem; the problem is illusory, since the difference between "5 March 1956" and "March 5, 1956" is trivial, and both formats are readily understandable by all anglophones. It's time to rid ourselves of unnecessary blue dates all over our text. Plain-text "WYKIWYG" dates, or "What You Key in Is What You Get" reduce colour-clutter and don't dilute the high-value links in our articles. They simplify the task of editing, look more attractive and make for a smoother reading experience. The consensus for getting rid of this silly feature is overwhelming. Another part of the sea of blue is caused by the chronic overlinking of common terms; these dilute the appearance and significance of high-value links in the vicinity.

MoS

The Manual of style is a central part of creating a cohesive project in which a huge number of editors who speak many varieties of English are involved. The main page of MoS has improved significantly since 2006, and although parts of it need further development, I believe that it now serves the project quite well. However, many of the jungle of more than 50 MOS subpages need to be rationalised and coordinated; this remains an unresolved issue.

This editor is not an administrator and does not wish to be one.

My heroes

• JS Bach, the 18th-century German composer
• Michael Tippett, the 20th-century English composer
• Patrick White, the Australian novelist, and
• Geoffrey Miller, the American evolutionary psychologist.

These are the people whose work continues to have the deepest impact on me.

This user runs Mac OS X.

My pet hates

• Supernatural religion
• Nationalism
• Celebrity
• Display consumption
• Unregulated television and radio advertising
• Doof-doof

Patrick White

I run a Yahoo group for lovers of the work of Patrick White (1912–90), one of the great novelists of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation runs an excellent online resource packed with text, images and audio streams of his voice here.

Transform your Wikipedia experience: attractive new wikilink formatting

Linking, which is often overused on Wikipedia, looks seriously messy in densely linked text and makes reading more difficult. You can very easily change the display colour of links on your monitor from the current gaudy blue to a more subtle shade. Try it and see. It will take two minutes; here's how.

• (1) First, choose how subtle you want your links to look: here's a comparison over whole paragraphs of the current default colour with four other, decreasingly bright colours.
• (2) Create your own user stylesheet, if you haven’t done so already: [[User:YourUsername/monobook.css]]. Mine is [[User:Tony1/monobook.css]]); take a look.
• (3) At the top of that page, paste in the following, starting with “a” and ending with the curly bracket: a { color: #003366 } (this one is for midnight blue, the second darkest—simply replace that code with the one that suits you on the comparison page).
• (4) Then go to your user preferences. Make sure that you’ve selected “MonoBook (default)” under Skin, and “Never underline links” under Miscellaneous.

Empty your cache, and you're done. To use another colour, simply replace “midnightblue” with the name of your choice; remove the pasted text to return to the default. Feedback on this is welcome on my talk page. I'd like to see WikiMedia adopt this as the default colour, and decouple the date-autoformatting and linking functions: it's ridiculous that dates have to be blue links to activate the formatting mechanicsm.

The Encephalon Cross
For commendable contributions to the featured medical article Asthma.

The Original Reviewer's Award for Tony, in appreciation of his outstanding efforts in striving to maintain the quality of articles going though FAC. — Ambuj Saxena (talk) 12:53, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

I =Nichalp «Talk»=, award Tony this Barnstar for his great work copyediting the Bhutan article. =Nichalp «Talk»= 12:51, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

Enjoy this Barnstar of Diligence for raising standards across the board. Keep at it.

		The Original Barnstar
		A bit random, but I want to award you with a barnstar for your contributions in User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a, which—ironically—I thought should be something like the "featured guide" if there was such thing. :D —Jared Hunt August 20, 2006, 16:14 (UTC)

I hereby award Tony1 the Barnstar of Diligence for his excellent copyediting of the Encyclopædia Britannica article. Keep up the good work! --NauticaShades 10:18, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

osx This user contributes using Mac OS X. The Content Review Medal of Merit   I, Woody, do hereby award Tony1 the Content Review Medal due to the sheer number of reviews that he undertakes. Tony1 strives to uphold quality prose throughout wikipedia. Your activity at WP:FAC and WP:FAR is truly appreciated. Thankyou. Woody (talk) 20:27, 11 December 2007 (UTC)