User:Louise Valmoria
Louise Valmoria is a student of Bachelor of Sciences and Arts at the University of Melbourne. She is also now studying an LLB with the University of London with a focus on EU and international law, and human rights.
Experience is of a 'jack of all trades' sort. Among other fields, she has worked in recruitment, infrastructure, electrical transmission, industrial real estate, logistics and transport, and global financial services. Roles range from your friendly receptionist, to project coordination, to database programming.
She has performed some field work and analysis, research as well as administration activities to support the work of the IEEE SC3 committee (investigating the effects of Extremely Low Frequency electromagnetic waves on the human body), under the supervision of one of the SC3 co-chairs. Currently she works with the International Public Health section of a non-profit organisation, in the Monitoring and Evaluation team that is developing health education plans for children and young adults in developing countries.
Louise is currently also the Citizendium's Mailing List Manager and co-coordinator of the Wikiconverting group with Anthony Sebastian. This role requires the creation and maintenance of workgroup mailing lists, which support the writing and organisational efforts of our authors and editors.
Working with Citizendium
I thoroughly enjoy research, and one of the best ways I learn is to write about it (CZ:Article Mechanics). Encouraged to write by the CZ:Monthly Write-a-Thon, right now I am trying to focus on supporting the CZ:Core Articles initiative as well as kicking off collaborative articles where I can.
My hobbies and interests include literature, poetry, art history, architecture, travelling to far-flung places and coming up with rather off-the-wall life projects (such as translating old manuscripts--note that this requires a deep understanding of the languages I am trying to read so I already know this will take my whole life--or observing the behaviours of ducks. The duck study is a long story, but an excellent example). I am proficient in several languages other than English; my strongest languages would be French, Czech and Spanish. I have particular interests in art history, media history, intellectual history, history and philosophy of science, and Central European history; though I read anything I please.
I also play the violin. Although I began lessons later in life it turns out I'm actually not that bad at it, and this has deepened my interest in music, its mechanics and its history in a way that learning the piano as a child somehow didn't. I learned a mixture of French and Russian styles from a really excellent Romanian violin teacher, but have not performed recently aside from examination settings.
All this aside, I am not an 'expert' in any one field. Just a supportive contributor and a wide reader, in effect one of the 'general public'. I feel that right now I can best work with Citizendium through a support role and kicking off articles where I can--may as well put my massive library to good use.
Currently reading:
Resurrection - Leo Tolstoy
Obsessive Genius - Barbara Goldsmith (biography of Marie Curie)
The French poems of Rainer Maria Rilke - dual translation, translated by A. Poulin Jr.
Il Pendolo di Foucault - Umberto Eco
Анна Каренина - Лев Толстой / Anna Kareninovà - Lev Nikolajevič Tolstoj (Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, in Russian, Czech)
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius - Niccolo Machiavelli
Albion, The Origins of the English Imagination - Peter Ackroyd
History Derailed, Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century - Berend
And let's not forget my textbooks, and my science journals of reference: Science, Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Medicine ... yep, someone's swamped by subscriptions here.
Mailing Lists
As Mailing List Manager my current role involves setting up and administering an increasingly large amount of mailing lists, which means I need to keep an eye on Citizendium Workgroups as well as other initiatives which may require extra support.
- CZ:Workgroups
- Mailing Lists - Workgroups section for reference when updating the mailing lists record
- Workgroup Mailing Lists (Mailman page for my reference)
I have a couple of statistics regarding Mailing List usage and growth--nothing on the par of the CZ:Statistics page, however--but it provides an interesting baseline on the growth and development of Citizendium in its first year of organisation.
Sandbox - Mailing List Statistics
Wikiconversion
Wikitext may seem daunting to the new user, but for budding contributors there is a way to help. The Wikiconversion team is a group of volunteers who are able and willing to convert documents from .txt or .doc files into the required format for Citizendium. This is a service that we are offering to those who would like to contribute, but are unsure of how to deal with wikicode. Currently, this initiative is in the process of being set up.
If you are familiar with wikicode and willing to help, interested volunteers can sign up here. The initiative is led by Anthony.Sebastian.
Update: The Wikiconversion initiative has kicked off! Thanks to Anthony Sebastian for leading the charge and for Citizendium's excellent volunteers.
How is it done? CZ:Email us an article in word processor format
This project has been officially launched!
General Administration
CZ:Unchecklisted Articles--assist where I can with clearing the backlog!
No approval page--quick way of assisting with unchecklisted articles; these are the ones that just haven't had their approval page saved
Unexpected template errors - a good way to fix articles and also learn more about the subpage process
Internationalisation
As 2008 is the UN International Year of Languages, it's a good time to raise awareness of the benefits that our international contributors can give to a growing site like Citizendium.
On a personal note, I learn languages like they're going out of fashion (and, if you look at statistics of endangered and extinct languages, they probably are). My main languages other than English are French, Czech, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian; and I have some facility in other languages (Scandavian based and regional dialects).
There is now discussion about CZ International in the Proposals Queue: see discussion in the Proposals: Internationalisation Sandbox.
Infomation About CZ and Copyright
Pages for my Reference
How to add optional subpages (i.e. works pages): Additional Subpages Instructions
Exactly when and where a 'stub' article can be graduated to a 'developing' article: All about the Article Checklist.