Your role
edit- What exactly do you do (most specific user group)?
User groups aren't always a great way to narrow down what people do on Wikipedia—I have a few user rights (see [1]) but many of the most similar editors to me will have few of these or many more. I started editing about TV shows I was interested in, and this makes up a large part of my editing today, but I also write about books and people and a little bit on many other topics of interest (politics, internet culture, music, comedy, maths). Those are the topics where I create articles or improve them (often to good article status, or to the point where they can be featured on the "Did you know?" section of the main page). Outside of this, I: do lots of reviewing of other people's recent projects and new users' Articles for Creation drafts; take part in meta-discussions about how our policies and guidelines can be changed or what processes we can improve; offer opinions and work towards neutral and appropriate articles on controversial topics; do little maintenance/repetitive tasks across large numbers of pages here and there when I find them; and maintain a watchlist full of edits so I can spot vandals or people acting in good faith but not improving the encyclopedia, in order to make improvements to their changes or undo them entirely.
My userpage lists many of the most major contributions I've made.
- How long have you been an editor/admin/user of Wikipedia?
A reader for at least 10 years and an editor for 7 years (since December 2013).
- How active are you in that capacity?
I had phases of inactivity in 2016 and 2017 and have been most productive from 2018 onwards. Over the last year, there have been periods where I've had lots of free time and was able to spend a few hours every day working on creating new content. There have also been periods where I'm busier and might do a 6- or 8-hour block of creating a new page or massively improving an article all in one go once a fortnight. But every day I also read some discussions or watchlist changes to keep up with new developments which I can act on more quickly.
- Do you consider this your primary occupation or only a hobby?
It's a hobby, but I consider it my most important one, and the only one which really has a big impact on other people (hopefully a positive one!). The fact that it is unpaid does not mean that it is less important than some paid jobs.
Your thoughts
edit- What do you think of Wikipedia as a project?
I think people have forgotten how revolutionary it is, because it is so normalised. For centuries, knowledge has been protected by the ruling classes, whether it's Bibles written in Latin so that only highly privileged people could read them, or tobacco companies deliberately spreading lies about the health issues of smoking. Older generations couldn't just look something up on Wikipedia when they wanted to know the population of Algeria, or the name of the Twilight Zone narrator, or who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1936. Either they had bought an expensive encyclopedia with some of the answers, more specialist writings on subjects they're interested in, or they wouldn't know. Our work is imperfect and highly flawed, but we act pragmatically given that we only number a tiny fraction of the readers and are volunteers who only have our free time to give. We have given knowledge to billions of people. We have changed the world.
You should never trust Wikipedia blindly, but you should never do that with any one source. Content is often missing from Wikipedia, content is poorly written on broad or complex sociology topics, content is often written by fans who have a tendency to exaggerate and content is inconsistent on political topics and current events. The more you learn about how Wikipedia is written, the more skilled you will be at reading it, so that you can identify where the content is likely to be flawed, where it is likely to be very strong, and how you can cross-reference other sources (such as the cited references in the page) to get other perspectives.
- What do you see in the future for the site?
Unfortunately, I think Wikipedia will face more challenges in its next 20 years than it did in its first 20 years. We have a declining number of new editors joining us. One reason is that it gets harder to join all the time, because more content is stable and written already and so it is hard to find an easy way to jump in and edit. Another is that the community can be quite hostile to new people, because we have to deal with so many new users who are only damaging our content that it is so much less time-consuming to shut down everybody new than to find the people who could become great assets and help them. Another is that people can find it quite difficult that Wikipedia editors have a huge diversity of opinions and political ideologies and nationalities and cultures, and that our disagreements and differences come up in discussion more than our similarities.
- How might the subjects covered by Wikipedia be expanded?
First we need to ask whether expansion is a good goal. Many of the articles we have already need more care and love. And many are damaging our reputation and should be deleted, because they are biographies written by the subjects themselves or articles about companies written by people paid by those companies, which causes them to write with a lack of neutrality. But at the same time, there are many more articles to be written that no editor has had the time to write about yet, or continuing events and media (like films) which will be created in the future. So I would like to see compression and expansion at the same time–keep plodding along with the types of content we have that are working, but with an improved focus on coverage of women, people of Africa, Asia and South America, and other underrepresented topics; and find ways to keep out the content by people taking advantage of us who do not share our aims.
Your experience
edit- What have you seen, do you have any stories?
I've seen a lot of crazy things. People come here for so many different reasons, some bad and some good and some neutral. I've seen people who are really hurt and angry in real life and take it out on Wikipedia and specific editors, after getting blocked for rudeness or making articles worse. Some of them keep coming back to harrass us for months or years on end. I've seen the subjects of Wikipedia articles come to us and talk about how what we've written has affected their life—mostly in a negative way, unfortunately, because the people who are happy with our articles don't make the effort to talk to us about it. I've seen collaborations between many people who have almost nothing in common about their background, but share a passion for accumulating knowledge that the whole world can read. I've seen people who are so prolific that their writings will have been read by hundreds of millions of people.
- How big a problem is vandalism?
Not a big problem in the way that non-Wikipedians expect. The cases of people writing "Jenny was here" or making jokes or pretending a public figure has died are often reported in the news, but we fix them fast enough that the majority of readers will very rarely see them. But we do have problems with people who come here to promote themselves, or a product or company. We do have problems with rich people who want to cover up criticisms or certain facts and will pay outside people a lot of money to try to get their way on Wikipedia. And we do have problems with a small but very harmful group of very angry and upset people who spend a lot of their free time coming to attack us personally and vandalise in subtle ways that are hard to spot (such as by changing a date forwards one day on a lot of articles).
- How easily is vandalism dealt with?
ClueBot NG detects a lot of the more obvious vandalism automatically (people writing "Jenny was here")—it's a machine learning bot that uses classification of past edits to guess whether an edit is bad or good. ClueBot NG will revert edits automatically if it is confident that they are bad (it's rarely wrong, but I do see it from time to time), and if it's not confident but thinks it probably is bad then it sends it to a queue where volunteers can assess for themselves. Watchlists also help us undo vandalism, particularly on high-profile pages. So almost all vandalism done as a one-off or a joke can be dealt with very easily (though it is still time-consuming). However, some very experienced vandals can sometimes introduce small factual errors, like wrong dates, or damage little-read pages for a period of months until somebody spots it, and in extremely rare cases entire articles are hoaxes.