User:Gog the Mild/Reflections on my first year's editing

Wikipedia is another country

Just over a year ago, I was an inexperienced editor with a few hundred gnomish edits to my account. I was, although I didn’t realise it, about to plunge deep into the rich and varied ecosystem of Wikipedia. In terms of personal experience, I had, one might have thought, been there and purchased the tee shirt franchise. I had hired people and fired people. I had gone through a life changing illness. I had held people while they died. I had lain alone on a rain-swept hillside wondering whether hypothermia or the rescue helicopter would arrive first. All of this, it turned out, was inadequate psychological preparation for being a Wikipedia editor.

I look back and wonder at my luck; there are so many ways to be deterred as a burgeoning Wikipedia editor, but somehow my enthusiasm fell upon fertile ground. My gnomish inclinations led me to GOCE, where no matter how inept one is it is nigh on impossible to not improve any tagged article one choses to work on. Of course, being both ignorant and arrogant, the first ten articles I chose to work on included two FAC candidates. Possibly alarmed by this, GOCE assigned a mentor to me; almost endlessly patient and apparently omniscient on things Wikipedian. I cannot think of a better way to pick up an outline of the MoS, Wiki-etiquette and how to communicate than to have a GOCE coordinator as a personal tutor.

This was just as well. My point being that there is, so far as I have been able to ascertain, no basic guide to Wikipedia. For example, it was a couple of thousand edits before I worked out how to use ping and reply correctly; it was January of this year before I discovered that one could ping several editors simultaneously. Looking back I once made a single edit using AWB, so I must have somehow gained some understanding of it. I certainly couldn’t repeat that today, having just reread the instructions. I fumbled on, no doubt taking the long way around with many an edit. Writing this has caused me to wonder what I will look back and shake my head over in another year's time. Ah well. I then had the inexplicable good fortune to fall in with the Wikipedia Military History Project. I proceeded to make a high proportion of the standard newbie errors and a couple of novel ones. A large part of my problem was a lack of awareness of the myriad policies, guidelines and essays; not to mention a failure to realise that there was any difference between these three. Most of the balance was a pedantic tendency to take those I was aware of at their word. An example was my taking assessment grades at face value; if someone, at some stage, had assessed an article as meeting B1 then fine, it met B1; no need to waste time looking any further at the referencing. At the time this seemed an intuitively obvious approach. And so on, ad nauseum. This would probably have dropped me in deep trouble at many projects, and so have terminated my interest in Wikipedia. But the MilHist coordinators, bless their collective little cotton socks, made huge assumptions of good faith.

Which brings me back to psychological preparedness. I was very far from used to being a combination of the new member of an established group and the slow kid at the back of the class. Relying on the charity of others to metaphorically tie my shoelaces. It grated. This was entirely my own, fairly reasonable (I think), issue. Nor was I prepared for the casual offhandedness which is common. Recently I suffered a mass revert with the edit summary "Learn some intellectual property law". This bluntness rankled. Again, my issue rather than the reverting editor's. This does nothing to reduce the rankle.

Since discovering MilHist I have stumbled around in this small corner of Wikipedia, occasionally bumping into helpful tools which I endeavour to clutch close. For example last week (as I write this) someone mentioned Google Scholar; it looks marvellous and will certainly improve the sourcing of my future articles. Not to mention saving me time. The same thread mentioned n-grams; fascinating, and squirrelled away for future reference.

The near complete lack of usable guides – IMO – to the basics is heavily compensated by the, usually, enormous willingness of complete strangers to spend time and effort correcting my idiocies, reducing my ignorance and remembering that they too were newbies once. As I have written elsewhere, members of the Military History Project have collegiately made the project space a comfortable place to work in such a natural, even graceful, way that what they have achieved seems normal. So here I am, 13 months on (not, note, rounded to "a year"; Wikipedia has taught me the joy of precision), a pillar, as it were, of the Wikipedia community: 16,000 edits, 45 good articles, 35 did you knows, 4 A class articles and even a featured article to my account; more barnstars than one could shake a reasonable sized ego at; editors of a dozen years’ standing, and better writers than I shall ever be, stating "Gog the Mild recently copyedited it" in their FAC nominations. How come, if I am actually this good, I still don't know how to archive a web reference? Or even understand the instructions as to how to? Or can't get my Wikipedia email to work? Or understand the difference between an RfC, an RfA, an RFD and an AfD? Or have just read the instructions for applying to be a new pages patroller for at least the fifth time without understanding anything after, and including, the second flow chart. Or can't even remember where Wikipedia prefers hyphens as opposed to where it requires them? (I don’t like hyphens, but strangely a gang of brownies follow my articles around, inserting them where necessary.) Trust me, none of these are even a little bit exaggerated for effect. Editing Wikipedia seems to be a constant reminder of Einstein's quip that "As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it". Yet I have little doubt that on reading this several people I have never met, and never will, are going send me instructions as to how to resolve each of these conundrums. Some of which, if the syllables per word count is low enough, I may even understand.

Editing Wikipedia can sometimes feel like a high octane version of real life, albeit with less risk of physical harm (although arguably more risk of the psychological variety); which in turn reminds me of Spider Robinson’s advice as to how to deal with life: "Just do the next thing". And so I shall, surrounded by a crowd of invisible strangers whose self-imposed task is to prevent me from stumbling, or to support me if I do. It is a strange and frequently frustrating journey, but I have learnt over the past year that I travel in good company.