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The motto of the AIW is conservata veritate, which translates to "with the preserved truth".
This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.
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Welcome.
Hello everyone. I have recently started to try and follow Wikipedia policies (most of which I don't really like, but I see how they serve a purpose) and hence I am trying to have a user page that follows recommendations on the topic. I do have way too many userboxes, but they do help visitors learn my interests and expertise, two things that may indicate them areas in which I may be of help.
I live in Lima, Peru. Before that, I lived in Munich, Germany, for three and a half years while attaining my graduate degree. I am a population geneticist more by opportunity than choice and at the moment I work part time as a researcher at a local university. At my lab we mainly work with plants, figuring out ways to help out farmers by producing better cultivars or studying pests and the like.
My personal interests lean towards the biological foundations of sexual orientation, for obvious reasons. I have never collaborated in the article, I just recently discovered it as I was doing some online search on the topic, something that I do at least once per year.
I have no vision of what I want Wikipedia to be, therefore I don't see my role in it either. I just know that I don't agree with what some editors do and I'm not the kind of person who likes to complain and never do anything about it. I like to complain and then do something about. So this is me, trying to do something about it. So following something I read recently, I'm trying to be bold. Recent further reading (apparently I will never finish editing this page as I learn something new about Wikipedia every other hour) helped me learn that I'm a Wikignome, who alongside Wikifairies and Wikielves take care of small things that let WP run smoothly. I would like to become first a Wikielf (if I find a user who adopts me) and then maybe a Wikifairy (I'm not driven by the visual pleasure of WP, but sometimes I want insert a picture and have no idea on how to do it, so I think I'd benefit from learning their ways). As a final goal, I think I'd like to stop working on small edits and do bigger stuff, like help with whole article translations.
I have a hard time following WP policies. Most of them I find idiotic, but I play by the rules. My motto is: if you find yourself in a building where it is mandatory to wear only green, you either change your clothing appropriately or leave the building. Hence, I strive to follow WP policies. I guess I am a bit of a free spirit and feel that WP editors need to be a combination of soldiers who follow orders without question and lawyers who argue their cases based on WP policies. Neither is my strong suit. But I love WP articles. I find them extremely informative and I think that the process through which articles are created and edited works. So that's why I am here.
As you can see from this mess of a page (this is no longer the case thanks to my adopter), I suck at using templates and giving format. That's another reason why I'm here. Often I find myself wanting to edit an article and not being able to do anything by myself. So, since I want to help out, I hope to learn this things and then be able to do them myself and then teach other people interested in learning how to do such things.
As you can see from the Wikipedia:Babel thingy up there on the right, I'm a native speaker of Spanish. I also speak English really well, but some times I have problems with people using expression and idioms I've never heard. Also, I don't know why native speakers of English, specially from the USA, use abbreviations and acronyms so freely. I always have to look them up. Please, please, pretty please, avoid both when you're talking to me, specially when it comes to Wikipedia terms. I'm not versed in that jargon, so it takes me precious time to look it up and read what they mean, and I'm lazy person. My next language is German, which I caught while living there. I can also read Portuguese because it's so similar to Spanish and to a lesser extent the same is true with Italian. So if you need help with any of these languages, I may be of help.
I have very particular views on pseudoscience and skepticism. I am, I guess, a very uncynical scientist. Therefore, I believe that the scientific method is the perfect tool for investigating the physical phenomena both within and outside the life kingdoms. However, it has its limits because in the life kingdoms not everything is a physical phenomenon. That said I am an evolutionist, I do believe in God but not in organized religion, I'm inclined towards AIDS denialism (although I rather say I have serious doubts about the current theoretical and empirical approach to it) and I've been known to defend homeopathy in a certain journal's online forum (whether it was Nature or Science, I can't remember any longer). Just in case you are wondering if I were ever to vote in a USA election (I am not citizen, in fact I've never been to that country) I would be a democrat.
All that above in the last paragraph was so that you could get an idea of my worldview. So that was it. I hope it was fairly painless. If you got this far, you probably deserve one of those barnstars that I've seen here and there. Maybe it's also worth mentioning that I don't take things too seriously and I have a fairly good sense of humor. In fact, I was about to include a personal ad here to look for a boyfriend, but I thought it maybe was a bit too much. A lot of people wouldn't have known I was joking.
See you around.
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