User:Josh Grosse

I'm a student of pure mathematics, with interests also including sciences and histories, who came to wikipedia relatively early from an invitation on the original wiki. For the most part I've been dealing with the protists, which so far has attracted relatively little attention from other editors. So if there are places where their treatment is biased, obsolete, idiosyncratic, incomplete, or incorrect, it's probably my fault and you should let me know about it. But I think we've covered a reasonable amount of ground, and have kept fairly up to date on them. Protist pages I've made significant contributions to are:

Protist - Alga - Green algae - Zygnematales - Desmid - Red algae - Glaucophyte - Stramenopile - Diatom - Chromulinales - Synurid - Axodine - Silicoflagellate - Actinodine - Actinophryid - Haptophyte - Dinoflagellate - Dinophyceae - Noctilucales - Cryptomonad - Chlorarachniophyte - Protozoa - Flagellate - Euglenozoa - Kinetoplastid - Euglenid - Euglena - Excavate - Heterolobosea - Amoeboid - Heliozoa - Amoeba - Ramicristates - Mycetozoa - Dictyosteliida - Pelobiont - Entamoeba - Vampyrellid - Nucleariid - Centrohelid - Desmothoracid - Gymnosphaerid - Acantharea - Ciliate - Heterotrichea - Spirotrichea - Litostomatea - Nassophorea - Oligohymenophorea - Peritrichia - Hymenostomatida - Peniculida - Plagiopylida

Note these are mostly freshwater groups, which I'm more interested in. I encourage you to help out! Thanks to 68.5.87.19 for the choanoflagellates and 165.21.154.10 for the Charales. Other kingdoms have attracted more interest, but I've done some dabbling in them, most notably:

Animal - Cnidaria - Rotifer - Mollusk - Roundworm - Arthropod - Trilobite - Chelicerata - Hexapod - Insect - Hymenoptera - Ant - Water flea - Cypriniform - Characiformes - Perciform

with smaller contributions to various other pages, and a fair bit of worrying about classification systems. Wikipedia's approach to taxonomy has been peculiar - the three-domain system has been treated as essentially uncontroversial, yet the definitely obsolete Cronquist system is insisted upon for flowering plants, with just enough of the more recent systems being retained to keep things confusing. Part of the difficulty is that taxoboxes require a single taxonomy, and though they have proven fairly useful, I think we should reassess their value if it turns out their contents need to be duplicated in the articles proper, as on bird.

For the protists I've tended to avoid imposing a formal taxonomy, except in a few cases where one is relatively well-defined, like the ciliates. Relationships among the protists are mostly unclear, and their classification is very controversial, so I've organized them primarily in terms of functional groupings. For instance, the dinoflagellates are treated as a group of flagellates, of algae, and of alveolates, without implying much about their taxonomic status. It occurs to me that this mixed approach might be preferrable for many other groups, instead of trying to cut a path between traditional taxa and clades, both of which we have frequently misunderstood.

I've also taken some photos of microscopic organisms, a number of which can be seen on this page (http://cyaxares.tripod.com/protozoa). Many of the identifications are uncertain or incomplete, and the quality does vary somewhat, but some are decent enough. I've uploaded a few of them to wikipedia:

I haven't seen much that's available for our use, but if you do, please feel free to replace these. Conversely, if you think that some of the other photos I have taken are worth including here, I would be delighted to hear it. I should mention that a number of other wikipedians have contributed photos they have taken, and many are very high quality.

In other topics, I've added various ancient stuff like hoplite, trireme, Thrasybulus, Conon, and so forth, as well as some things about polyhedra and various random topics. For the most part, these sorts of disciplines are already being handled by people who are much more capable than I, and so I've mostly left them alone.