User:GRuban/Wiki-bio
Written to summarize my Wikipedia experience for an interview with Rob Walker, who made it a condition of releasing a picture to illustrate his Wikipedia article. Afterwards he said I didn't really have to write this, just to give the interview; so it goes.
I was born at a very young age...
I've been editing Wikipedia since December 2005. As of December 2015, about 8000 edits since then, which is low for the time, Wikipedia:Service awards#Requirements implies maybe 78,000 would be a dedicated editor's production. 8000 in 10 years works out to just over 2 edits per day, but it varies, from going days or weeks without any edits to days with tens or more.
I started by writing about my hobbies (vintage role-playing games - the "tabletop" kind, and a couple of board games), then sort of went wherever the wind carried me. I get to learn new things as I write them. Most articles I made are listed on my user page. I made a dozen articles for Wikipedia:Requested articles (am working on one right now, in fact), even more for Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias. That's a great project that tries to compensate for the fact that most Wikipedia editors, by the nature of the beast, tend to be educated males of European ancestry. The one out of those that I like best was Philip A. Payton, Jr., the "Father of Harlem", a real estate developer that arguably made Harlem black, partly by expelling his white tenants. However the most active part of WP:CSB has now become the feminist side, the Gender gap task force; I've made a fair number of articles on prominent women as well. I made other articles prompted by newspaper stories I read, saved one on a prominent local murder from deletion, made another about a writer who was complaining on a noticeboard about being confused with his father, another about an ancient Chinese play from trying to help with a Wikipedia:Featured article, two "series" (one on writers who won an award, one on creationist museums) prompted by debates I randomly happened across...
A lot of contributions have been in the form of images on Wikimedia Commons; they're shiny, a picture is worth a thousand words, and all that. I uploaded just over 500 images there, mostly to illustrate articles that otherwise don't have images. My user page there doesn't have all of them yet. Most weren't taken by me, just found, with free licenses on Flickr, or US Government sites, or YouTube, or Vimeo, or wherever. That's because in taking photos myself I quickly determined that as a photographer I'm a good computer programmer - the ones I do take myself tend to be blurry in places. (The one that got the most traffic recently was one of Holly Holm, who was just another fighter until she unexpectedly won the championship.)
That was indirectly connected with my current paying work. When I interviewed with a web search company named after a misspelled large number, among other things they asked what I would like to do should I be hired. I told them that I was a Wikipedian in my spare time, and really wanted to be able to find freely licensed images that could be used here. Turns out another developer was already working on that. I joined him, and it sort of worked out; unfortunately the best sources don't follow standards in the way they mark their images, and change their markup every so often, which makes our parsers fail, so in a strange turn, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are now one of the main sources for free licensed images, when part of my goal was to make more images available to them. But it's all good. Also I regularly hope to get some more work time to work on parsing more sources, and sometimes do.
Lately I've been doing some of the "experienced editor" thing. I used to weigh in at the Wikipedia:Reliable sources noticeboard a bit (that's where editors discussed whether various books, newspapers, and websites that were used to get statements for articles could be used for that purpose), while the last year I have been evaluating the results of arguments at Wikipedia:Requests for closure.