An Answer and Help

Beta request (sort of) and wiki question by Hieronymus Graubart on 2014-08-04 16:12:00 UTC Reply

After all this time I finished at last what I intended to do with my user page since I joined the PPC Wiki. But since I’m not a native speaker, and I don’t want to embarrass myself for an indefinite span of time, I would appreciate if somebody looked over it and pointed out all errors which escaped my alpha reading and any bad ideas that may have crept in. (I expect your comments on my talk page, although this isn’t really much less public than the board.)

Question: The user page offers a Blog, which, to explain itself, says “Blogs are used by wiki communities for fan fiction or original work ...” Would it be a bad idea (like taking up too much space on the wiki server) to put writing exercises on this Blog and ask for concrit? I’m aware that there are better choices, but I’m already loosing track of my accounts and passwords and don’t want to create more.

HG

An Answer and Help by AdmiralSakai on 2014-08-04 19:41:00 UTC Reply

Back at the Metroid wiki I used my blog mostly for idle technical speculation (since one of my main jobs there was to be the science consultant) and... I guess you could call it editorial content on the meaning and implications of the games. Few people bothered to read it.

Looking over your page, superficially it looks good but you seem to use the word "German" a lot. One would assume after you mentioned you were a native German citizen living in Germany, most of what you interacted with would be German in one way or another... also you don't have to sign edits to your userpage.

Thank you by Hieronymus Graubart on 2014-08-05 16:14:00 UTC Reply

Signing the First Person interjection should emphasize the fact that the rest is in Third Person and apparently not written by Hieronymus Graubart.

I may have overdone the warnings, but this is important to me. I can never be sure to know what I’m talking about when I try to discuss a book I didn’t read in the original language.

May I give just one example?

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Harry and his friends are captured by Dolores Umbridge and the Inquisitorial Squad, we see
Draco Malfoy, the personification of "bad boy"
Vincent Crabbe, strangulates Neville Longbottom
Warrington, apparently handled Ron Weasley so roughly off-page that Ron’s lip is bleeding
Millicent Bullstrode, pinions Hermione to the wall, but lets her go when Hermione starts to cry into Millicent’s robes
a large Slytherin girl, holds Ginny Weasley’s upper arms in a tight grip
Luna Lovegood’s captor, is just standing there doing nothing

So there are three bad boys and three not so bad^(*) girls. RAGE! FROTH! Such a cliché!

Then I found out that J. K. Rowling never actually wrote that the sixth person is a girl, the translator decided this because it’s so difficult to write genderless in German.

^(*) I don’t dare to call them "good", but besides being in the IS, which is bad in and of itself, they never do anything a good police officer wouldn’t do in the situation.

HG