User:Thebiguglyalien/Autobiography

A retrospective look at major events in my time as a Wikipedian. Each section was written at least one year after the events took place. I freely admit that this is mostly a vanity project, but maybe I'll accidentally say something insightful in the process.

2015–2021

The account of User:Thebiguglyalien came to life on 30 November 2015. I do not remember where I was or why I created an account. Clearly I didn't need it, because my first edit was one and a half years later, on 20 June 2017. I added a wikilink! I made two more edits that December, reverting a bad IP edit and adding a redundant category. I made a handful of sporadic edits over the following months, minor fixes and the like. From 30 September to 7 December 2018, I worked on my first long-term project on Wikipedia: expanding and formatting the articles from List of state leaders in 1901 to List of state leaders in 1920. They were merged into List of state leaders in the 20th century (1901–1950) a few years later, which is probably for the best.

I gave more serious consideration to becoming a Wikipedian in March and April 2019. I made a genuinely awful user page on 31 March and then tried my hand at maintenance tasks by fixing a few articles at Category:Articles with too few wikilinks. I cast my first !vote with my first ALLCAPS policy in a requested move on 9 April 2019. I made a few more sporadic edits between May 2019 and December 2021.

While I don't remember exactly when it was or what it is that I edited, I took a WikiEd course for a college class in this time period. I did not give it much thought, and it did not contribute to any interest in becoming a Wikipedian.

2022

January–February 2022: Getting started

After a few more small edits in January, things changed in February. Curious about how young adult fiction is defined, I opened the Wikipedia article and found a poorly written criticism section. I didn't know the specific terminology for balance or sourcing practices, but I saw the issues and removed the section on 19 February. My removal was reverted by User:Schazjmd with a request that it be discussed on the talk page. When I opened the discussion, they worked with me to write a better version. This taught me two things: how to write sourced content on Wikipedia, and how to use Wikipedia collaboratively. This was my first real hit of Wikipedihol, and I wanted more. The same day, I did major cleanup at war studies and proposed a revamp at Talk:Deep state in the United States. I consider this day, 22 February 2022, to be my official start date as a Wikipedian.

I worked on other articles with maintenance tags over the following days. I browsed through Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/List of stubs until I found Irreligion in Germany and completed my first destubbification. Continuing on this theme, I created my first article by converting Irreligion in the Netherlands from a redirect and then expanded several more European irreligion articles. I discovered the beauty of edited volumes when I began using Freethought and Atheism in Central and Eastern Europe as my main source.

On 28 February, I made the first major change to my user page by adding a section titled "Pages to which I've made substantial contributions". The interesting takeaway here is that I never made a list exclusively for articles that I created. From the beginning, it felt self-evident to me that your noteworthy contributions are the articles where you added significant content—simply being the first person to edit an article is worth just about nothing.

March 2022: U.S. presidential history

Going into March, I briefly explored Wikipedia:Requested articles, which led me to create Obama coalition and Nonviolent extremism. I then found my next area of focus: US presidential timelines. With the foresight to start with simpler ones, I went back to the early 20th century and fleshed out most of the timelines from William McKinley to Herbert Hoover. Over the following weeks, I worked tirelessly on Timeline of the Warren G. Harding presidency. Though I had yet to develop a strong understanding of sourcing, I still intuitively knew that handpicking events based on my own metric of "significance" wouldn't create a comprehensive, neutral list. So I went to the one newspaper archive I was familiar with, Chronicling America, and did quick filtered searches for each day of Harding's presidency to find front page mentions of the president. I sought other opinions on this approach at WikiProjects History and United States, but I was mostly left to my own devices. This concern about whether a source demonstrated significance for inclusion became a recurring theme in my editing.

I took on three other large projects in the latter half of the month:

• I decided to expand History of the United States government. From 14 March to 31 March, I added a section for each presidency, bringing in 14,532 words of prose. Sources were an afterthought. I occasionally searched for a webpage to hopefully support some of the additions, but I took a content first, sources later approach. It is not a coincidence that this is by far the fastest I've ever written content at this scale, and that it also remains some of my weakest.
• On 24 March, I began rewriting Political ideologies in the United States. When I found it, it was nothing more than a description of the political model used by the Pew Research Center. I essentially rewrote the article from scratch, though when my deletion of the Pew information was reverted, I split it to Pew Research Center political typology. Once I was satisfied with my rewrite, I opened a peer review to see if I did it right. One decision that stands out was the creation of File:Pew Research 2021 Opinions Graph.png. I wasn't entirely sure about this graph, and I'm still not. It was based on the File:Liberal opinions copy.png graph that was in the old version, but for my graph I did some math that pushes the limits of "basic calculations" to map the statistics to generic ideology labels.
• I briefly worked on term limit on 27 and 28 March before creating a few country-specific term limit articles for Russia, France, and Term limits in South Korea. Mostly unsourced, of course.

April 2022: First GAN

I continued working on "Political ideologies in the United States" in April. User:Rublov responded to my peer review request, which was the first time I got significant feedback on my work, and it's when I learned that you're not supposed to use contractions in articles. Rublov was then kind enough to give me my first barnstar, which was a huge boost to my ego. On 17 April, it became the first article that I nominated to be a good article. I was in for a wait, as it became the oldest pending nomination in the backlog six months later.

I created User:Thebiguglyalien/Authorship on 11 April to list contributions on my user page. I was afraid of taking credit for the work of other people, so I wanted links to my edits and the overall contributions to the article. I changed the template later on, so the handful of versions of my user page using the original template no longer display properly.

May 2022: Central and Eastern Europe contest

My new interest in May was articles about Public policy of the United States. I created or edited numerous "policy of the United States" articles, but two are noteworthy. I wrote Education policy of the United States from scratch, but I mostly cited primary sources such as government websites and court cases. The second was a major restructuring of Foreign policy of the United States. The article suffered from coatracking, excessive detail, and a lack of citations, among other issues. I fixed several of these issues, but the article was subject to WP:OWNERSHIP and my changes were reverted. I did not yet know how to challenge disruptive editors, and many of the problems I fixed have remained in the article years later.

The other major change to my editing in May came about from the Wikipedia:Wikimedia CEE Spring 2022 contest. I joined on 12 May, about half way into the contest, and my editing for the rest of the month was in relation to its two areas of focus: Central/Eastern Europe and Esperanto. By the end of the contest on 31 May, I had created 21 new articles on these subjects. Most of them were around start class, although Liberalism in Poland and Human rights in Hungary weren't bad for someone with only a few months of experience.

I placed third in the overall CEE Spring 2022 contest and first in the Esperanto category, winning a total of €75. Receiving €75 was another matter. It became apparent that the contest's coordinator was not a regular contributor at the English Wikipedia, and he went inactive at the end of the contest. I reached out across several pages before eventually resolving the issue in November. If you're curious, I spent the money on trying out a new hobby: terrariums.

June–July 2022: Writing a Vital-3 article in a week, too naive to be intimidated

By June, I went back to my pre-CEE editing on American public policy and presidential timelines. I also created an article about something in real time: Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Except I created it at Bipartisan Safer Communites Act so I had to move it and G6 the redirect. Oops.

I continued working on the subject of American policy and creating related articles going into July. This is when I took notice of WP:Vital articles. Browsing the main list, I began work on Injury and Country. I nominated Injury to be a good article; it was quickfailed on comprehensiveness, but both the reviewer and myself were experienced and seemed to be holding it to a featured article level of comprehensiveness. My edits at Country were challenged, and I lost motivation to work on the article.

I took on my biggest project yet when I began editing Dictatorship. Between 26 and 31 July, I doubled the length of the article from 3,500 to 7,000 words, most of which I wrote from scratch. The speed may have been in part because I was not as thorough with the sources as I would have been as a more experienced editor, but I didn't realize until I was done just what a massive undertaking that was.

August 2022: Vital Articles 30 kB drive

I became more involved with the vital articles project in August, and most of my edits throughout the month were for the Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/30 kB drive. I added content to a few major articles, but even more importantly, it gave me the chance to work alongside and get to know other up-and-coming editors, like User:Aza24, User:CactiStaccingCrane, User:DFlhb, User:The Night Watch, and User:PerfectSoundWhatever. Over time, the relatively similar age of the accounts here has led me to believe that vital articles is a rite of passage that new editors go through and then graduate out of once they better understand Wikipedia.

My first DYK appeared on the main page on 1 August; it featured an intensely boring legal fact for Education for Economic Security Act and probably shouldn't have passed. On 24 August, frustrated with people using their user pages to arrogantly declare their political beliefs, I created User:Thebiguglyalien/Userboxes/No politics. It did not solve the problem.

September–October 2022: Women in Green

For much of September, I continued working on public policy articles. I also kept working on the two biggest projects I took on during the previous month's drive: History of literature and Human behavior. In both cases, I had issues with deciding what should go in the article in advance rather than using overview sources, which has since soured me on them. On 5 September, after six months of waiting, I finally got a reviewer for my first GAN at Talk:Political ideologies in the United States/GA1! But getting my hopes up was premature, as the two-month-long review had only just begun.

On 24 September, I signed up for the WP:Women in Green editathon at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Green/Meetup/3. I didn't realize it at the time, but this decision more than any other set the path for my editing career. I was unsure where to start, because I had yet to write a biography at this point. My main interest was U.S. presidential history, but that presented two problems: presidential articles are insanely difficult, and none of them are women. Enter the first ladies of the United States. This was the perfect way to write newbie-friendly articles about women's history and presidential history. Over the following month, I nominated six articles about U.S. first ladies to be good articles. The event was also my introduction to good article reviewing, and I completed my first seven good article reviews in October. It's possible that I didn't understand how to check sources in the first few.

Amid my work on the first ladies articles and my long review for political ideologies in the United States, I got my first good article with Mamie Eisenhower! In line with my luck, it was a quick pass without any actual review. The good article talk page wasn't helpful in telling me how to proceed. I took it upon myself to open a reassessment, and everything worked out with User:Femke's help.

Jane Pierce became my first real good article, followed shortly after by Caroline Harrison. The review for Caroline Harrison, provided by User:SusunW, was another major step in learning how to edit. It's the point that I really got in the habit of meticulously citing my work, especially when it came to page numbers. As I got more comfortable writing the first lady articles and got my first few good articles during the editathon, I turned my sights toward featured article candidacy. At the end of the month, I reached out to User:Vanamonde93, who was the only name I recognized on the list of volunteer FAC mentors. Vanamonde provided a useful pre-FAC check for Caroline Harrison which helped me with the article and editing more generally, but I did not go through with the FAC as there was one source I could not access. I took on my next major project at the end of October when I began editing History of the United States (1776–1789).

On 31 October, I took notice of Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates. I was shocked to see editors blatantly ignoring the principles that I had spent the year learning, essentially applying their own likes and dislikes to determine content, and on the main page no less! I voiced my concern about editors who were citing the number of people who died as if that were policy, but the users who participated there seemed unable to understand why this might be an issue. This issue with ITN, and with current events articles more broadly, became a cause of mine over the following years.

November 2022: The early years (so to speak)

My next project was another that would become a defining aspect of my editing career: articles about years. I decided to try my hand at one on 8 November when I began expanding 2021 in China, which I nominated at DYK on 11 November. User:BorgQueen took notice of this nomination and began a sort of unofficial mentorship/partnership with me across a few different projects.

I noticed that WikiProject Years was quite disorganized and its project page was severely outdated. On 12 November, I began discussing things on the talk page to see if we could get more focused efforts, and I went through fixing up the project page. I was not aware that this was one of the more ownership-heavy projects. My changes were reverted in their entirety any attempt to discuss even minor changes proved futile. At the same time, other ongoing disputes were taking place regarding the use of images in these articles and other miscellaneous problems. A side effect of the fact that despite the activity around them, no one has substantially improved these articles since they were created at the dawn of Wikipedia. This will not be the last of the issues arising from this project. The November discussions of the Years Saga can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years/Archive 14.

On 14 November, I began working on the article Politics of Botswana. I felt that Wikipedia needed a good example of a top-level politics article, and I decided that working on one for a small developing nation was the best option. It would be more limited in scope than a larger nation, it would be quieter than that of a more prominent nation (the issues at "Foreign policy of the United States" were still fresh in my mind), and it would help with systemic bias on Wikipedia. The latter reason is what truly motivated me. I loved the idea of giving an overlooked country deeper coverage. The following day, I also began working on 2021 in Botswana. By the end of the month, I was expanding into more articles related to the country.

I took my next big step for the years articles on 20 November when I started adding citations to the items listed at 2001 and adding some important missing items. As the start of the millennium, it felt like a good starting point for cleanup. I continued through 2002 and 2003. I raised the possibility of years as featured lists, and BorgQueen brought 1346 to my attention. That article had been a GA for some time, and I decided that getting 2001 to GA was entirely possible. With her assistance, I began expanding 2001 with real content.

Unaware of the historical "userbox wars", I made an effort in November to clean up what I saw as obvious problems with WP:SOAPBOX activity on people's userpages, nominating several politically charged userboxes for deletion and reporting users for keeping a pro-Hezbollah userbox substituted on their user pages after it was agreed that it should not be used. Very little was accomplished, and this was when I first realized that the conflict-averse nature among many on Wikipedia made them impotent in the face of even basic, obvious POV pushing.

December 2022: The Years Saga continues

The article for 2001 was coming along nicely going into December, but then the years ownership took notice of it. A number of factors were in play, but the core issue was that the years editors enforced a pseudo-guideline of "international notability" that severely restricted what they let people add to articles. This was an adaptation of a guideline proposal that was rejected by the community in 2009. Another participant who came to see the problems with this prior to its bursting, User:InvadingInvader, wrote a summary in the aftermath at User:InvadingInvader/Against international notability. The Years Saga continues in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years/Archive 15, which covers December and early January.

After a long wait, the good article review for Dictatorship took place in December. The reviewer, User:Grnrchst, was incredibly helpful and became another one of my influences on the project. I tried my hand at an outline, Outline of the American Revolutionary War, on 15 December. It was underwhelming. I also took a brief foray into Wikipedia:WikiProject Lead Improvement Team, but I gave up on this when realizing that articles with bad leads usually had bad everything else. This convinced me that it's more efficient to fix everything in one article than one thing across many articles.

2023

To be continued...

See also

• User:Thebiguglyalien/Philosophy – The lessons I've learned from these events