Testimonial: A Born Again Wikipedian
editSEPTEMBER, 2005 All these years....and just this week I've finally discovered my true calling in life.
It happened like this: somebody at work asked a question that I didn't know the answer to, so I quickly slipped over to Wikipedia, found the answer in under a minute, impressed the hell outta everybody in the room, then went dutifully back to work.
But I left the Wikipedia page up. That was my first mistake.
When I got back from the cafeteria with my plastic fork and to-go lunch, I went poking through all the screens I had up. Something on that Wikipedia page caught my eye. One link led to another, and to another, and -- and that's when it happened: I saw a mistake.
I might've skipped over a minor typo, but this was glaring - the kind of error that really grates on a wannabe wordivores like me. I hadn't edited a Wikipedia page before -- the thought hadn't even occurred to me - but it hit me, "Hey! This is open source. I can edit this page. I can fix that mess. And while I'm at it, that second sentence is somewhat awkward...where's that edit button?"
Things went downhill quickly from there. I made a second serious mistake: "Hmm...I wonder how much they've got out here on Fly Fishing?" Not much, as it turned out -- but after three hours of poking at it during boring meetings, there's considerably more out there now. This could get ugly.
At my little Lutheran grade school in Colorado, two classes shared a single room and a single teacher. When your math or geography (or Bible) session was finished, you'd be assigned some work to keep you quiet while the teacher stepped over to the other side on the room and taught the other grader. For better or worse, most of that work came easily to me, so I had a considerable amount of free time on my hands.
I was a tall, gangly kid who always got stuck in the back of the classroom. In 4th grade that fateful arrangement dropped me next to the bookshelf holding the encyclopedias, and I started reading them when I'd finished my work. Almost from the beginning, I was captivated. Encyclopedia Brittanica punctured the first small holes in my whitebread Lutheran bubble and lit fires of curiosity that consume me still. For the next 4 years I was almost never without an encyclopedia; these days I'd be utterly lost without Wikipedia.
Now I see that things have come full circle. I must admit that some surprise accompanies the belated discovery of my true calling: all my life I've been a frustrated encyclopedia editor. Thank you, Wikipedia. Hallelujah, I'm a born-again Wikipedian.