User:Wilhelmina Will/Wikipedia

(As of August 2021, I wish to note that I personally consider the following content to be archived; please note that much of what I wrote as contemporary by the time of my tenth anniversary in Wikipedia has since become outdated.)

I began editing Wikipedia as an anonymous user in January 2007, and became a registered editor on June 16th that same year. My typical contributions have changed over the years since then, but I like to cover as many fields as I can; leaving Wikipedia with something of a hyphenate editor, on my part. Right now I am most interested in the making/developing of new pages, and have long been interested in the clearing of backlogs, notably the Guild of Copyeditors, and for a long time the Wikification, and Great Wikipedia Backlog drives. On the sidelines, I have also periodically reviewed good article and Did you know nominees, the former especially during their backlog drives (surprise-surprise!) or during the WikiCup games, although as of July 2019 I am temporarily cutting back on the areas I focus on, while I get a number of things online and offline into order. I am also a qualified online ambassador, though I've been out of practice for a while. If you're new and interested, however, you know where to go!

I am prone to taking long wikibreaks without warning or notice, usually due to surprises in real life, or simply a need to take a rest, and usually even when I am on Wikipedia, I am very engrossed in whatever I'm doing, so it may take a while before I reply to messages; some might even go unnoticed for months, it's happened once... Or twice... Actually, quite a few times. :} My apologies in advance for such occurrences.

In the beginning

Long before I registered in Wikipedia, I wanted to contribute; mainly to South Park-related pages as this show was a major interest of mine at the time, and I saw a lot of shortcomings in the pages I thought I could fix. Most of the time, however, my IP address was blocked from editing - apparently it was a revolving one or something like that, even though it was residential (I'm not even sure what that all means; I've never been the most technically-savvy person about). Not understanding much of the behind-the-scenes of the encyclopedia, I persistently sent emails requesting an unblock, but was instead repeatedly encouraged to create an account for myself, to disassociate myself from the penalties inflicted on the more raucous people in connection with the blocked IPs. Several times I tried to follow their advice, but for reasons I've never understood it never seemed to work. It's not surprising that I found the whole thing frustrating, but I followed one of my tactics of postponing a difficult accomplishment until I can sort things out. The very fact that I am recording this on my userpage right now - and I'm here to see it - is proof that it paid off, and on 16 June 2007 (or the 15th, as it was in my location then) User:Wilhelmina Will became an existing figure amongst the Wikipedians (Not to give anyone a complex, but this is sort of how I perceived the event, myself). I'd thought of incorporating my middle names, but that might have been a little over-the-top...

As it happened, however, I did not turn out to be quite the editing prodigy I had painted myself as in my mind, at any rate not at the start. Because what went on "behind the scenes" in Wikipedia (what happens in the non-article-space) was still largely a mystery to me back then, I frequently found myself walking into walls, falling down gopher holes, sticking my feet into basins, and generally doing things that I would want to draw my head in over the thought of, now, if I were one of these. Then, there was my behaviour. At the best of times I probably came off as a meek, eager young space cadet, but though it might have just been that I was in my early teens, due to my appreciation for extravagance I could be quite outlandish at times. I'd even go so far as to say I was often very goofy, which is fine when you're not in a serious discussion but not the best idea when you are. To think I used to think people were just giving me the brush-off because I was inexperienced... tsk tsk. Then there were the times when only my mother could have wikiloved me, if she had an account. My theoretical tactic with vandals or other shady editors was to use force, and soon I came under the impression that I could stand up against anything I did not approve of in like manner, never comprehending that as it boiled down into this more and more, I was gradually sinking to their level. To make a long story short I did not get the most pleasant of wakeup calls, but when I did I hastened to turn things around 45 degrees. I became largely reclusive, and more often than not I refrained from interacting with other editors for the longest time - it's a tendency which follows me even now, though since the middle of 2010, I've tried to inch my way out of this phobia.

Progression

In 2008, after the aforementioned events, I underwent a lot of developmental changes in contributing. I discovered I had a particular passion for the creating of new pages, and expansion of them when I could; this made up what I'd put around 95% of my editing for the next two years. I wanted to rebuild my reputation, and this aspect of constructing Wikipedia into what it's meant to be seemed the key to that door. I helped out in large part at WP:AFC for several months, and it was through my contributions there that I discovered Did you know; that is to say, two articles I'd accepted and created for an IP editor (through the old-fashioned AFC process) were nominated, by the editor as I presume, and they must have listed me as a/the creator of the pages because after they were featured on the main page I received a notification. Intrigued, I looked into this project, and I thought to myself, "Hey! Here's something else I can do!" I then began making pages and expanding them as much as I could, as well as going back over my older creations and making them more robust, in hopes of getting as many of them into DYK as possible.

After a couple of months at DYK, however, another user created a lot of conflict around me. With regards to their possible motives, I don't know how to touch that, so I won't, but it seemed they had some sturdy connections in that wiki-region. To make a long story short, they blew their scenario out of proportion, got me banned from DYK, and nearly scared me out of Wikipedia for good. There was, however, one user who observed what was happening, and offered me both defense and consolation; I'm indebted to that user, as I would most likely have retired for good without his encouragement.

Thanks to that encouragement, I came back a few days after things had cooled down, and mostly kept to myself again, sticking to the tried and true project of making pages, but not putting as much investment into each one as I would if I were going to enter them for DYK. It wasn't much later, actually - I don't think even a month had lapsed, come to think of it - that a new discussion was commenced, which I avoided participating in (after my rambunctious early months in Wikipedia, I never really trusted my tongue), and my DYK ban was lifted. I dipped my feet into that proverbial water again a couple of times, but it had lost a good deal of its charm for me, and I gradually drifted out of active DYK participation over the rest of that year.

2009 was not a particularly active year for me, in Wikipedia, due to other obligations in my life which arose, but I did have editing bouts from time to time. About the only thing I trusted myself not to bumble about with was making pages, and occasionally prepping some for DYK if I was feeling brave enough - and I always had to have someone proofread them first. Ah, but then came my personal "Renaissance" in 2010...

The aforementioned "Renaissance"

In early 2010, I began to pick up the pace with my editing in Wikipedia, again. Although I was also working extensively on several projects in Wikia, during the first half of this year, I missed the days of making new pages in Wikipedia, and wanted to get back into that scene. I had three areas of page-creating that I was working all but simultaneously; crustaceans, several families of fish (most notably eels and blennies), and extinct taxa. It was around this time, if I remember correctly, that I became acquainted with the "(Year) in paleontology" lists, and thus was able to start making pages for more recently described paleotaxon on a regular basis - which very happily culminated in my creating a few dinosaur pages; something I'd been a bit frustrated over not being able to do before, because every dinosaur genus I could think of seemed to have already been done. Can't really blame anyone; who doesn't want to jump on a dinosaur-related wagon as fast as they can? I know what you're thinking; this doesn't sound like anything particularly new or different based on what I'd done previously, but the year was just getting started...

In late May that year, I decided, after having wanted to for pretty much my whole duration as an editor up to that point, apply for adminship. I didn't see anything in the there and then that would impede my application's potential success, but as it turned out, a good deal of users who participated in the discussion wanted to see me expand my horizons as a contributor a bit more than they already were - from what I've observed since in other users' nominations, content creation is an important feature, but by no means enough. Naturally I was disappointed, but I remember being grateful that most if not all of the commentors, regardless of their stance, were courteous and respectful of my feelings. I'm almost certain it had something to do with the attention my self-nomination brought about, but I was actually "Identified as an awesome Wikipedian/awarded my own day", an honour I had not the least bit expected, soon after my nomination was closed early as a NOTNOW case. That definitely brightened my spirits. Along with that, I also took to heart some of the advice I'd been given about broadening my areas of experience in the encyclopedia's numerous facets of production. It was in that discussion that I learned that one did not need to be an admin simply to verify another editor's DYK nomination; administrative privileges were just needed to operate the listing of hooks in the queue, and such. This inspired a neo-bout of DYK participation for me, in which I happily began reviewing other users' submissions while once again making my own. Later that year, I learned that non-admins similarly could review and approve Good Article nominations, and as I've mentioned in the overhead of my wiki-biography, this went on to become, over the proceeding years, one of my most active areas of participation outside of content creation/expansion.

I think the biggest long-term adjustment to my editing habits began in November 2010, however; that was when I learned of the Guild of Copyeditors' new tradition (as of six months' prior) of Backlog Elimination drives held on a bi-monthly schedule. Reading up on the premise and requirements, I felt excited by the idea of an editing competition, and became as of then a regular in their drives and later on their blitzes in the months in-between. The month after my first time participating, I also learned that in the months alternate to the copyediting drives, the Wikification Project also held backlog drives, and I took up frequenting here as well. In the months which followed, I eventually got around to signing up as a member of both projects, and in the case of the wikification drives I went on over the next couple of years to be the unofficial coordinator, until at some point a number of factors I'd like to research into more before I label, lead to the drives falling out of practice. That factors into a later part of the story, however...

During the year 2011, I joined the Great Backlog Drive, but again, I'm not sure what exactly happened, but eventually the whole project just sort of unceremoniously faded out. This was also the year I began participating in the annual WikiCup games, and over the next two years, I began to try and cover as many areas of editing on a routine basis as I could. Having given up on Wikia sometime in mid-late 2010, due to a change in their system which clashed with my ideals, I took it as an opportunity throughout this two-three year period to devote the efforts I had tried to use in editing Wikipedia and also managing several categorical wikis, into just whatever area of Wikipedia I could somehow contribute to. It was finally in 2013, that I began to realize that I couldn't carry on like that. It turns out it doesn't matter what vicinities in which you spread yourself too thin, the wearying effects are all the same. Go figure, huh? So it was in that year that I gradually worked out how to cut down to the basics:

After having explored several different areas of biology for long-term committments in the area of page-making, I found one back at the end of 2010 in the realm of Lepidoptera. I formed a page-making partnership with fellow moths-and-butterflies editor Ruigeroeland, which has continued into the present day. Cut to 2013, and having finally finished the coverage of eel-pages to the point where all species pages listed existed (until such time as new species may be discovered/described) that autumn, I decided to trim my daily editing down to a measured quantity of moth pages each day, most of the time, and at minimum a perceived "adequate" amount of contributions to each backlog drive for copyediting and wikification, with occasional add-ons for other areas if I felt up to the challenge. Writing down a monthly planned editing schedule in print really helped me to get things in order. Then came the end of the waning Renaissance, and a step into what I might as well call my "Industrial Revolution"...

The Industrial Revolution

This era's beginning is defined by a chance advent in my internet usage that occurred in/around February 2014. Prior to this time, the internet browser I had used from my earliest days on the web had always been Internet Explorer; as I stated when I began this story years back, I'm not much of a techie, so I usually commit to what I know until some sort of ulterior need to change or move on from something comes in to shake up the status quo. As it happened at this time, for a non-Wikipedia related project, I had to switch from Internet Explorer to one of a number of more advanced browsers; after talking it over with my father - who actually does know his way around this stuff - I went with the one which he uses. I went in having a general sense from his description of what to expect, but with regards to my overall day-to-day internet experience, especially where Wikipedia was concerned, I was in for quite an enjoyable eye-opener...

One of the longest running and most annoying setbacks of my routine editing prior to this browser upgrade concerned my development of a standard formula for page-making namely in the area of taxa. I'm certain I'm not the only page-maker who's thought of this, and I'm willing to take it for granted I wasn't the first, either, but when premiering articles in their most basal, stub format it is quicker and easier to have an open edit link in one tab, with all but the specifics for the taxon whose page you're making filled in, so that you can make a cluster of taxa pages on that same level all in one bout. I later went on to discover for myself a few other little shortcuts which made this formula even more efficient, thereby further adding to the suitability of the term "Industrial Revolution" for this time, but to get back to the point we started on in this paragraph, one of the inefficiencies pertaining to life as a page-maker on an Internet Explorer-based browse (along with the general slowness and frequent crashing if so many or more tabs were open at the same time) was that one could only copy/paste the formula for a certain count (if I remember correctly, this was just over 100 if I was lucky) before right-clicking the mouse wouldn't even bring up the menu of options. On offline programs, the right-click menu worked like a charm, but on the internet, nothing. After a while of leaving the tabs alone, sometimes as little as half an hour, it would work again for a very short while, then the ability would shut off again. It got frustrating enough that I would sometimes turn off my computer whenever this nuisance began, then restart it just to keep going, which worried me because I knew it couldn't do my machine any favours.

Then, the browser upgrade was made, and I found that not only was everything I'd normally access on the internet faster and easier, but that I could open more tabs - lots more tabs! - in tandum and not cause a crash! Better and more significantly still, I to-date have not encountered an end of my "right-click menu supply" on any occasion! Suddenly I was able to make over ten times as many contributions in the course of a single day as I could before - on the rare occasion when I could make time in my day to do so - and in far less time than it had once taken me. To those who already used any of the more advanced browser options than IE, by that point, it would seem a pretty "uh, duh!" realization, but give the subpetram dweller who learned of fresh air her due...

In the years since then, I've still continued my career-long trend of editing for a time and resting for a time, although these days I feel more like I've earned a break when I take one and less like a break is needed just to re-inspire myself. I still gravitate to making new pages on a regular basis, although in this era I've also regulated the practice of reviewing my recent creations and filling them in a bit more (with the exception of moth species articles, which Ruigeroeland sees to), and arguably spend a bit more time on this job than the other. I do my best to make time each month to contribute to the copyediting drives and blitzes held by the Guild of Copy Editors, though I periodically forget, and I miss the days of the wikification drives, though for my part I couldn't bring myself to continue coordinating them after the first of my family dogs passed away in the summer of 2015 - there'd been an increasing lack of participation in the prior months, anyway, and in the throes of depression it all began to seem like a waste of time. Someday I hope we of the Wikification Project will be able to revive the drives and make them compelling again, but in the meantime I participate in other drives and games when they're of interest, and I make a point to enter in the WikiCup Games each year - so far I've made it to the second round in one edition, and I'd really like to make it into the third someday. Most of all, on the eve of my tenth anniversary as a Wikipedian, making this wiki-biography which has been five years in the making contemporary at last, I look forward to the next ten years, and all the contributing/development I'll get to do then!