User:Deanjens

My username is not cryptic. If you think you know me, you probably do.

How I came to be a Wikipedian

My first edits to wikipedia were minor grammatical and punctuation corrections. After a while, I stumbled on some pages about an island country that appeared not to have been written by someone for whom English was a first language, and I ended up significantly rewriting those passages I could decode. At some point I found an error in a conversion between units; I happened to know that the main figure in the text was correct, and the parenthetical restatement was the one with the error, so I did the calculation myself and corrected it. I was getting bolder. Then I became aware of a historical event that took place in a small town; the small town had a wikipedia page, and the historical event was mentioned elsewhere in wikipedia, and I added a sentence or two on the town's page about the event and linked it to the longer, pre-existing passage. Each time wikipedia encouraged my creating an account, but I never did. Then, one day, I read a news story about a major non-American corporation, and, looking for background, I found that it had no wikipedia page. Studying the guidelines, I became increasingly convinced that this company's story was wikipediable. I created my account, and spent a few hours hunting down information from other sources and created a two-paragraph stub, in what, certainly since I started blogging, is surely the highest ratio of effort-to-words I've put into my writing. Now that I had an account, I added a (quite boring) sentence to another stub that was locked because the topic had become controversial for reasons unrelated to my primary interest in it.

On Wikipedia

I'm a big fan of the idea of a lot of people cooperating to build a project much grander than any one person, or even group of people who know each other personally, could build; I like volunteerism, the wisdom of crowds, and the spontaneous organization that are a part of Wikipedia. I lock my door at night, but it makes me happy to think there are still ways in which the basic good in human nature can so out-strip the more readily efficient evil, even with the relatively light policing and great freedom that Wikipedia still offers. Wikipedia is a great starting point for finding background information about certain kinds of topics, but it's also, in its very self, a living testament to faith in humanity.