I am an audio electronics engineer and musician.
It can usually be safely assumed that a given Wikipedian is referred to as "he". I am no exception.
Timeline
editI'd seen Wikipedia once or twice in searches. At the time, I put it in the same mental category as the Jargon File. Sometime around June 2003 I encountered it again, had some free time, and read through documents like Wikipedia:Replies to common objections. I edited a few small things anonymously, and the idea really clicked with me.
Regular web sites and other written works are controlled by one person or a small group of people, and written solely from their point of view, requiring you to waste a lot of time reading the same material repeatedly, from multiple viewpoints, if you want to get a good understanding of what's really going on. (Of course, many people don't want to get a good understanding; they just want to reassure themselves of things they've already decided to be true.) Discussions, newsgroups, and forums re-hash the same arguments over and over and over, with very few of the participants even considering other points of view. Lots of noise; very little signal.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, condenses all of the back and forth down to one document; it distills all the arguments to their essence. I believe that this is the reason for Wikipedia's success. Look up "abortion", "evolution", "gun control", "gay marriage", "moon landing conspiracy", and so on. Why is Wikipedia consistently at the top? When you look through those same never-ending discussions now, you'll often see a link to a Wikipedia article instead of yet another re-iteration of the same arguments. I believe we're having a very significant effect on the way the world thinks and talks. A good effect.
On August 10, 2003, I registered this account. I seem to remember my first edits being to the Mathematics of musical scales and Audio timescale-pitch modification articles, but I guess that didn't happen until early 2004. I made a bunch of big changes to them, expecting some kind of praise or attention for my work. Instead, my edits were chopped up and rearranged completely by others, and the article split into pieces and merged into other articles. My first experience with the "merciless editing" I'd seen in the edit window. (I now know that Wikipedians rarely talk to each other unless they're complaining about something.) I was dismayed, but saw how my work was still incorporated somewhat into the newer articles. I came to accept that the new arrangement was more logical, and continued editing.
I became an administrator on January 28, 2005 (and that doesn't make me better than anyone else). In the summer of 2005, I became an admin on Wikibooks, though this was later rescinded by a policy for de-adminship of administrators who aren't "active enough" (which I think is pretty stupid). On March 3, 2006, I became an administrator on Commons.
In the four years I've been here, I've contributed >30,000 edits and >250 images under multiple free content licenses. On more than one occasion, I've encountered people using my contributed content in real life without knowing that I created it. It's very rewarding.
I have an unfathomable 2,744 pages on my watchlist, and I'm not really sure what I'm going to do about that.
It's better to be open and honest about your biases so people can see clearly whether you are editing neutrally or not.
- Empiricism
- Scientific skepticism, but not pathological skepticism
- Don't believe in anything unless there is evidence for it.
- Don't discount anything without looking at the evidence.
- "I don't know yet" is always a valid position.
- Empirical agnostic or weak atheist or agnostic atheist or some such nonsense.
- Evolutionist
- Generally liberal (but that's not an affiliation. I try to come up with my own opinions, thanks.)
- Registered with these guys (though I try to keep an open mind, and am fully aware of the consequences of Duverger's law)
- I was raised Baptist, with all the Young Earth creationism and conservatism that comes with it, and I believed it myself for quite a while.
- American, anti-American, and anti-anti-American.
- Distrust those with strong opinions.
- Don't defend your beliefs; test them.
My thoughts on the project
editFor the first few years of my editing here, I loved Wikipedia. Wikipedia loved me. Lately, it's become more like an abusive relationship.
As of 2007, after being here for four years, I agree with others who think that there are some serious problems with Wikipedia's culture and quality control process. Unlike the others, I don't think the project is "doomed to failure", and I'm not ready to leave yet, but I've seen too many good, knowledgeable editors leave in disgust, and too many trolls, cranks, and disruptive users overpowering the rest and making a mess of the place. Our original ideals of consensus decision-making, cooperative civility, and WikiLove have been severely eroded. Wikipedia is commonly a battleground, a democracy, and a bureaucracy. I don't have a solution.
The nature and theory of the wiki is that articles only get better over time, as more and more people make edits and correct errors or mistakes. But in practice, some articles seem to only get worse over time, meaning that all the people who added good content over the years worked in vain. As article topics get more popular, they tend to attract more newcomers and poor editors, while the number of good editors maintaining the article stays about the same. The constant influx of bad edits is stressful and difficult to maintain without just reverting everyone, and the good editors get fed up with the job and start to decrease in number. I've noticed this most in articles about concepts that are well-known, but not well-understood; where there are only a few people in the human population who understand it really well, but a lot of people who think they understand it.