Haahaamagician

test Haahaamagician (talk) 18:20, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Reply: Duke University

Hello. I am actually not affiliated with Duke in any way. I only edited the wiki article in question for a while several years ago because I was interested in University wiki articles, and frankly I was a minor contributor at best. I would get in contact with User:Bluedog423, who really took charge with the article and made it what it is today. Good luck. --Ttownfeen (talk) 18:40, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Duke article editing

I think you went about contacting me the correct way. I am affiliated with the university; I'm currently an undergraduate. I'm not too keen on giving out any more personal information because anyone can read user talk pages. Quite a few people at Duke have edited various articles within the Duke University Category. A Whois search reveals that IPs in the range of 152.3.*.* all belong to Duke, and the page statistics reveal that several of the top listed editors are editing from Duke IPs. If you are looking for other editors who have claimed to attend Duke University try looking at this category.
As for my edits personally, the bulk of them were aimed at improving the introduction of the article by describing what was notable about the university. The rest was mostly a little copyediting. You can see the bulk of the changes I made here. Truthfully, I don't think it was that noteworthy of an edit. Looking back on it, I didn't do too bad of a job, although I probably would have done things a little differently now. As for the reason why I edited the article, I spontaneously decided to improve the intro when I visited the article to change references to the Duke University Lemur Center from Duke University Primate Center after the center changed its name. I haven't done any content editing on the Duke pages recently; I last edited them back in spring of 2006 if I remember correctly.
As for comments about the main Duke University article, it is probably of rather good quality since it is rated FA-class. It was featured on the main page on November 26, 2006 and passed another round of review on 11 June 2008. Truthfully, I haven't read all of it recently. It might be more interesting to look at some of the subpages.
If possible please do not specifically mention my username in the article. Thanks. Sifaka ^talk 00:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Reply: Duke article edits

Hamid,
Sorry for the delay in responding. I haven't logged on to wikipedia in a while. I assume your article has not been written yet as I don't see anything about wikipedia recently written on DukeChronicle.com, although I thought that there was only one summer edition, so perhaps the idea got squashed. In any event, I'll try to give a brief reply now and you can certainly ask me follow-up questions if you wish.

Basically, my motivation behind editing the Duke article was that I felt the page in its previous state was inadequate for a webpage with such a high number of hits. The Duke University wikipedia page is currently the second hit (behind only duke.edu) when googling "Duke," and I thought that such a high-traffic page ought to be as informative, detailed, balanced, and accurate as possible. The page (in February of 2006) was not aesthetically pleasing, much of the information contained within the article was scattered or missing, the structure was illogical at times with stubby sections, the syntax and grammar needed improvement, and the article had a total of only 13 references (hardly sufficient for a page about one the highest profile academic institutions in the nation). You'd be surprised at how many people's first source of information about a particular topic is its wikipedia page (both as a result of wikipedia's popularity and google's algorithm that determines the order of results, which tends to rank wikipedia pages near the top due to its extensive linking). I wanted to give those individuals a more complete, accurate, and balanced picture of Duke.

I was a Duke undergraduate (Pratt 2007) at the time of most of my edits (summer 2006) and I completely revamped the article at that time by looking at other university FAs as guidance (I believe there were only three at the time), conducting research about Duke, adding new details with references, taking new photos, modifying the layout and structure, and anything else that I thought would improve the article. The majority of the significant edits (including new photos) between the February 2006 version linked above and the July 2006 version that was identified as a Feature Article were done by me. Obviously, the article still was far from perfect (it's difficult to state everything important about a university in a limited number of words), but it was much improved at least; and the wikipedia community promoted it to FA status (a status achieved by about 1 in 1,140 articles). Since that time, I haven't edited the Duke page nearly as much, although there has been the occasional edit here and there. I'm surprised that the article is actually still quite similar to the version three years ago and has maintained its FA status. My interest in the article stemmed from my love of Duke, and I thought that a high traffic article desperately needed some love as well. While also stating the many positives of Duke, I did my best to maintain a NPOV. Like Sifaka, I'd appreciate it you don't mention my username by name (perhaps you can just say "the user with the most edits on the page" or something like that), and if I could take a look at any quotes attributed to me before printing (if any), that would be greatly appreciated. Cornell had a similar article written about it in its student newspaper a while back (Wikipedia Selects C.U. Page As 'Featured Article' Today), but unlike Benjamin Lowe, I don't want to be mentioned by name at all as frankly I find it a bit embarrassing! (yeah, I'm at least somewhat of a dork, I suppose, but I want that obscured by anonymity; I was in Pratt after all). You can e-mail me at bluedog423 at gmail dot com, if you prefer. Good luck! -Bluedog423^Talk 20:13, 29 June 2009 (UTC)