Wiki Update #1

Aug 18, 2008

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I recently made some significant contributions to some Wikipedia articles, most of them being articles on specific dinosaur genera.

Just figured I’d post some links to them. The size of the contributions are estimated and may be rounded up or down, but are generally pretty close.

Antarctosaurus. Redid its citations.

Aralosaurus. 50% increase in article size.

Arrhinoceratops. 30% increase in article size.

Aublysodon. 10% increase in article size.

Avaceratops. 10% increase in article size.

Avimimus. 40% increase in article size.

Bactrosaurus. 80% increase in article size.

Bagaceratops. 40% increase in article size.

Brachyceratops. 80% increase in article size.

Brachylophosaurus. 30% increase in article size.

Centrosaurus. 40% increase in article size.

Conchoraptor. 50% increase in article size.

Corythosaurus. 10% increase in article size.

Drepanosaurus. 100% increase in article size.

Dromaeosaurus. 25% increase in article size.

Dromiceiomimus. 50% increase in article size.

Edmontonia. 30% increase in article size.

Erlikosaurus. 100% increase in article size.

Greys. 30% increase in article size.

Oct 24, 2007

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I’ve been extremely busy in my free time compiling lists of fossil animals. Below is a list of all of my new ones. Most of them need sever formatting and cosmetic work, but they’re still pretty grand. Enjoy!

List of acanthodians

List of eurypterids

List of placoderms

List of prehistoric annelids

List of prehistoric bony fish

List of Prehistoric Bryozoans

List of prehistoric cartilaginous fish

List of prehistoric jawless fish

List of prehistoric sponges

List of xiphosurans

Aug 29, 2007

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I’ve been actively making some contributions to Wikipedia recently. Last Friday I made over 60 edits in a single day.   A couple of days ago, I made even more than that. Despite doing a high quantity of them, the edits I’ve been making have been mostly to do with classifying articles. Here’s the break down:

I made a few articles in the List of Fossil Sites. Specifically, the Gres a Reptiles (which is French) and the Aquia Formation (straddling Maryland and Virginia) and the Baharija Formation (African).

But that was the tiny minority of wortwhile edits. The less interesting but more time intensive edits have been:

Sorting out all of the Ammonite genre which are a member of the order Ceratitida into that order’s category.

Creating the Ammonite Stub Template.

Adding the above to every Ammonite stub (approximately 200 of them).

Removing the ammonite stubs from the cephalopod stub and paleontology stub categories.

Jan 28, 2007

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It’s been a good day for the articles on invertebrate paleontology at Wikipedia! I spent a while today creating a much needed page and category. 

Specifically, I created a page to list all known genera of Trilobite. Needless to say as it now stands it doesn’t include all the known genera of trilobites yet, but at least now there’s a page for that purpose.

I based the idea and structure on the list of dinosaurs and list of pterosaurs pages. That’s why it links to Hadrosaurus as an example of a nomen dubium, I had shamelessly copied that paragraph from the aforementioned dino page.

The category I made was for Ammonite related articles. I was horrified when I saw that one didn’t exist, so I made it myself. It’s a sub category of the extinct cephalopod category, the page of which looks much nicer being uncluttered by the dozen or so various types of ammonite wikipedia has articles for.

Oh, I think I also made a list of ammonites page too. I really have been busy. One thing I had already been beaten to was the creation of a list of plesiosaurs page. Drat!

Here’s the comprehensive list of articles receiving my magic touch today:

Phylloceratina

 Goniatite

 Ancyloceratina

Ammonite

Stephanoceras

Scaphites

Perisphinctes

Hamites

Euhoplites

Didymoceras

Dactylioceras

Baculite

Category:Ammonites

Ammonite

 List of ammonites

List of trilobites

My Grandma Passed Away.

I mentioned in my last post that my grandmother had a severe stroke a few days ago.

The doctors were optimistic at first, and so was I to be honest, but our hopes weren’t enough to prevent her condition from declining. She rapidly went from being fully concious and able to move her left side a bit to being barely able to move at all. My mother told me she could barely nod her head.

Not long after, she was only being kept alive by machines and her prospects were grim. My mother and step father (she was the mother of my step dad, so she’s technically a step-grandma, I guess) decided that it was best not to prolong her life since she had no chance of resuming any amount of independence.

Grandma herself said that she didn’t want to be kept alive by machines before, which made a very hard thing easier than it would have been otherwise.

This all came as a big surprise. It was so fast and unexpected. Yes, she was old, but apart from diabetes I thought she was in pretty good health. I guess you just can’t take things like that for granted with the elderly. I feel sad and all, but it’s kind of overwhelmed by the shock of it all.

When her husband died a few years back, he had been diagnosed with colon cancer and was in and out of the hospital for quite a while before he passed. And I always thought of him as being less healthy than his wife, yet her death was so much swifter and startling than his. It’s all just so very weird.

This has been hard on my brother and sisters, especially Katelyn. Grandma died on the morning of her birthday and she had to cancel her party plans and everything. Worse yet, it wasn’t just any birthday, it was her 13th birthday. Ouch. She just became a teenager and can’t even enjoy it.

And as a weird bit of coincidence, her other Grandma on my mom’s side died the day she was born. Mom didn’t even get to go to her own mother’s funeral. I won’t be able to attend this funeral myself, as I’m out of state at college.

Life sucks.

My Grandma had a Stroke and Latin isn’t Going so Well…

My Grandma up in Michigan had a severe stroke recently that messed up her left side pretty badly.

She’s able to move her left leg a little bit, but I don’t know the extent of her problems. This is really troubling me.

Other than that, I don’t really know what to say. Not much has happened in life. School was just an average day. Had a Latin quiz, which I did poorly on like always. We were quizzed on some random vocabulary which happened to consist almost entirely of words I hadn’t memorized. Yay.

We had to decline the future tense of “I am,” which is the only part of the quiz I did well on. We also had to decline some other future tense word. It was “dormio,” if I remember right. Which I think means “I am sleeping.” I declined it like it was a 3rd or 4th declension verb. Thing is, for all I know it could be 1st or 2nd.

Latin sucks. The main reason I took it was for snobbery, I confess. It was just an uppity “I’m going to be an intellectual who knows Latin” thing. Pathetic, I know. Being able to speak a dead language would make me quite the popular guy at a cocktail party, mirite? I can see the envious looks on their faces now. <_<

It also had the appeal of being exotic and different from what everyone else goes into (Spanish_language, French or maybe German, you know, the staples).

Which is just a fancy way of saying that I was interested in it because it’s completely useless. I’m not sure why it is that I become so enamored with the least pragmatic concepts the universe has to offer, but we are who we are I guess.

Then again, there was sort of a practical side to my wanting to learn Latin, although it was subordinate to the other reasons, but hey, I at least thought practically a little bit. I am making progress. I want to study dinosaur paleontology professionally, so knowing Latin will help me with understanding or creating jargon and acientific names, right?

Turns out not so much. Sounds like a good idea, but the problem is that most dinosaur terminology comes from ancient Greek instead of Latin. I kinda knew this ahead of time, too. That’s what makes this even more pathetic.

BTW, anyone know what that “split post with More tag” command is all about?