This was taken four years ago ... yes, I look a little older now.

ArbCom, not GovCom This user elected ArbCom to resolve disputes, not to govern.

[edit] My self-help writing tutorials

Self-help writing tutorials:

• Beginners' guide to the Manual of Style (NEW!)
• General advice on how to improve your prose
• Exercises in weeding out fluff from article text
• Advanced editing exercises
• Copy-editing essentials, part of the Military History Academy (NEW!)
• Build your linking skills (NEW!)
• Using hyphens and dashes
• Exercises in avoiding the "noun plus -ing" construction
• Exercises in paragraphing and sentence structure
• How to find good copy-editors

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[edit] 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 underlie 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 claim no 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.

[edit] Reform

I’m a reformer; it’s what I do. Thus far, I’ve achieved a degree of success in seven areas:

• Featured article candidates. I promoted the technique of reviewing the prose of nominations by analysing the weaknesses in a sample of the text as representative of the whole, and providing globally applicable advice. This may have been one of several factors contributing to higher standards of prose in some featured articles over the past two years. It has certainly made nominators take Criterion 1a more seriously (“[A featured article is] well-written: its prose is engaging, even brilliant, and of a professional standard”).
• Featured list candidates. I prompted a major overhaul of the process in late 2007, in which a directorate was appointed along the lines of the featured article process, and the FL criteria were recast. Further improvements have since been made by the FL team.
• Date autoformatting. I prompted the move towards dispensing with the misconceived date-autoformatting function, and played a major role in the team of skilled editors that has worked to make this a reality. I have contributed to the program to clean up the mess that date autoformatting has caused in our articles.
• Overlinking. I introduced the term “smart linking” as part of moves over the past few years to persuade editors to use skill and moderation in linking. The main goals have been to strengthen the wikilinking system by avoiding the dilution of high-value links, and improving the readability of our article text. The Silliest wikilink of the month award is an only partially humorous take on this issue.
• Non-free content policy. In 2007, against considerable resistance, I forced through the issue of rewriting the policy text so that it is clearly and logically expressed rather than something that resembled the dog’s half-eaten breakfast. The structure, format and tone I designed survive in the current policy text, although the details have evolved since the revamp.
• Manual of Style (MOS). I have made a considerable contribution to improving the standard of expression and, in my view, the quality of advice in the Manual of Style, main page, along with users Noetica, Kotniski, and others. In late 2006, I rewrote most of the critical Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (MOSNUM), setting it up to approach the characteristics of a professional style guide.
• Gender-neutral language. In 2007, I succeeded in introducing WP's guideline for gender-neutral language against vicious opposition. The guideline is now supported by Wikipedia:GNL, written by other editors.

I am currently working with other editors to persuade the community to embrace two major reforms:

1. To streamline and tighten up the ArbCom hearings process, currently an ungainly, undignified, unprofessional mess.
2. To introduce a proper system of accountability for the use of admin tools, to minimise the erosion of editor morale that the unnecessary angst in the project that is caused by the following toxic combination of
   • (i) a dysfunctional promotions system;
   • (ii) the “position for life” model;
   • (iii) the lack of an effective system for disciplining admins who breach the policy requirements; and
   • (iv) the personal anonymity of admins.

With respect to a major bone of contention in the community—the practice of summarily blocking established users for incivility—I want to promote the practice of first encouraging a withdrawal and apology to the users who have experienced the incivility (the “Warning, Apologise, Strike-through (WAS)” protocol), in which blocking is seen as a last resort.

		The Special Barnstar
		To thank you for sticking with the date-linking issue and for your Herculean efforts to resolve it. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 03:37, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		I could identify at least a half-dozen barnstars appropriate for recognizing your hard work here. I settled on Diligence because I believe it to be one of your defining characteristics as a Wikipedia editor. I thank you for your efforts to reform various parts of Wikipedia (want to stop retroactively decommissioning FAs for lacking inline citations next?). You're a gentleman and a scholar. Laser brain (talk) 22:32, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Date autoformatting and overlinking

	This user believes date-autoformatting is like lipstick on a pig.

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 spread unquestioned like leprosy all over the project. It was always a programmer's toy in search of a problem. The recent proposals to re-introduce DA are little better; although the display would no longer be blue, they would cause major disruption to editors, requiring a cumbersome template to surround every date in the project, and a tag at the top of every article. 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 English-speakers. It’s time to rid ourselves of unnecessary blue dates all over our text. Simple, plain-text "WYKIWYG" dates, or "What You Key in Is What You Get" simplify our task as editors and readers. 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. The benefits of reducing overlinking will be obvious if you consult most articles on the French Wikipedia, in which dates are still linked (without even being autoformatted), common terms are typically linked (“France” on every appearance, if you please) and repeat links are typical. It's a blue-spattered mess.

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

[edit] 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.

[edit] My pet hates

• Religion
• Nationalism
• Celebrity
• Display consumption
• Unregulated television and radio advertising
• Any music with a drum kit

[edit] 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.

[edit] Tone down the bright blue of wikilinking

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)