Dan York

Celebrating 20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 20 years ago that I set up an account and first made an edit to Wikipedia! On that day I became a "Wikipedian"... although I'm not sure if that name was being used yet. Wikipedia had only been launched in January 2001, so it was a VERY different world in those days.

With the complete transparency of Wikipedia, I can of course go back and see what my earliest edits were. It's fun to scroll down the list. Amusingly, my very first edit would be frowned upon today. I added the URL for my employer at the time, Mitel, to what was then a very sparse article with five paragraphs of text with no sources or references. (Compare that to today's article for Mitel.) Today this would be considered a "COI edit" as I had a "conflict of interest" and per the "WP:COI guidelines" it would be recommended that I not make this edit directly (although it was just adding something factual in the form of a URL, so other editors may allow it).

But back in 2004, those were still the very early days when everyone was still trying to figure out what this Wikipedia thing was all about. The norms and conventions for things such as WP:COI hadn't yet been developed.

The only other edit I made that first year was that same day when I first created my "user page" with one sentence linking to the other sites where I wrote. (How many people remember Advogato?😀) Twenty years later, that user page looks MUCH different!

Then in January 2005 I started creating and editing pages around Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and later in the year about.. Canadian food! 🤣 (We were living in Ottawa, Ontario, at that time.) And then a whole bunch of other pages, many of which are still in Wikipedia 20 years later, although substantially edited by others since that time.

After that, I didn't really do a whole lot of editing. In the first 15 years (2004-2019) I made a grand total of 146 edits.

And then... came the COVID pandemic.

As one of the ways I dealt with my own mental health during that time, I started livestreaming Wikipedia editing to Twitch! 🤣 (Which I haven't done lately, but will probably do tonight just to celebrate the anniversary.)

Every. Single. Day!  For most of a year-and-a-half! 🤯

You can see this clearly in one of the tools available to see contributions from Wikipedia editors:

You can see there was even a year (2008) when I didn't make a single edit, and one year (2012) where I made only one single edit.

And then... BOOM... 2020 hit and there I was!

What's interesting about 2020 and 2021 is the salmon-colored block on the right. This was what is called a "template" and was where I was manually copying in the daily data from the Vermont Department of Health to update the chart that appears on the side of the article about the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont. Every single day. Later in 2021 someone thankfully automated that so that it pulled the data direct from the Vermont Department of Health's system, but for all that initial time it was a completely manual process - and was part of what I did each night on my Twitch livestream.

With that burst of activity during the pandemic, it caused me to dive deep into Wikipedia and learn about parts of the site and community that I had never really engaged with, and that in many cases hadn't even been around in the earlier days when I first got involved. I learned a huge amount.

And out of that I became endlessly fascinated with how the whole Wikipedia community - and broader Wikimedia movement - has evolved, and I continue that fascination today. As you can see from the chart, I'm continuing to edit in 2024 and plan to keep on going.

In fact, I'm seriously thinking about bringing back the livestreaming. (Follow me on Twitch to be notified or over on Mastodon where I'll post if I'm streaming.)

Wikipedia has definitely changed a huge amount over time, from being a site that was initially dismissed and derided, to today being one of the sites where you can go for well-sourced information. Sure, it definitely has its quirks and problems, but overall I believe it's definitely a positive force in these times when we are so challenged for good information.

Given all the changes that are happening with the way we find and consume information (thinking of generative AI in particular), it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia evolves over the next 20 years!

Meanwhile, there are articles to edit and users to welcome... 😀🎉

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An companion podcast episode is available at:

DanYork · TDYR-416-20-years-of-Wikipedia-editing

Should I Stay (In) or Go (Out) Now? The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma

The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma: do we leave our houses and go out and enjoy all the eclipse-related festivities? Or do we just stay at home and leave all the events to the 534,873,937 people that are expected to arrive here to visit?  (Not the actual number, but that’s what it feels like according to the media articles!🤣)

In case you weren’t aware, there’s a solar eclipse happening on this coming Monday, April 8, 2024. And we here in northwestern Vermont are right in the path of “totality”. For about 3 minutes on Monday afternoon, the moon will completely block the sun. It’s supposed to be amazing by those who have seen it!

And … ABC News and other sources have declared the Burlington, VT, area to be THE best place in the USA to view the eclipse! 😲🤯😱

Now, the “path of totality” stretches from western Mexico up through Texas, Ohio, and on up through northern New York (including Niagra Falls), northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and then through Maine into New Brunswick and maritime Canada.

Everywhere along that path, hotel and AirBnB rooms sold out months ago. You can’t book any rooms unless you want to pay obscene amounts of money. Events are sold out. Everything’s sold out! People have been planning trips for years, in some cases. And with all the media attention, so many people are expected to drive to the path of totality on Monday.

Here’s the thing… we here in Vermont were expecting to see some visitors, but in early April it’s usually cloudy and rainy. The early predictions were for all of that. If you really wanted to see the eclipse, the smart approach was to head to Texas where the chances of sun were SIGNIFICANTLY higher!

Still, we have prepared. Our schools are closed on Monday. Many businesses have encouraged people who can work remotely to do so. Everyone has been encouraged to do all their grocery shopping before the weekend. Big signs on the highways are telling everyone to STAY HOME if at all possible!

You see, we’re a rural state. We only have around 646,000 people in total.  And about 150,000 of those people live up in the northwest corner when I live. We have only two Interstate highways: I-91 running up the east side, and I-89 going diagonally northwest across the top half of the state.

Outside of those two interstates, almost all of our other roads are your regular old two lane roads (one going one direction, one going the other). Sure, we sometimes might have sections with two lanes on both sides. Sometimes we’ll throw in a passing lane or a turning lane in the middle. We might even have small stretches of divided highway.

But most of our roads are small. We don’t need them to be huge.

And so… what happens when 10s of thousands - or maybe 100s of thousands! - of people come up to visit? On roads that are really more for hundreds of people? (If that!)

Yeah… that’s why we closed our schools and told everyone to stay home!

And of course, with the weather being as unpredictable as it is, current forecasts for Texas are that it will be CLOUDY on Monday! 🤦‍♂️

And we… are expected to have bright, sunny, clear skies! 🤯

Hence the news from ABC and other places that Vermont is the place to be! 

Add to this the fact that we’re only a few hours drive for people down in Massachusetts and even Pennsylvania and New York… there truly are 100s of thousands of people who could make the drive.

So we’re ready… we have so many different events planned. Restaurants that usually are closed on Monday are all opening up. Massive events are planned for the Burlington waterfront, the airport, and in so many other places. We’ll welcome you all up here warmly!

But for Vermonters we do have the dilemma… do we actually go out and join in any of the festivities? Or do we leave those for the visitors … and just watch the eclipse from our yards? 

Either way… we’ve got our eclipse glasses and we’re excited to experience this once-in-a-lifetime event!

Bring it on!

P.S. Good luck to all the visitors trying to get home on Monday after the eclipse… did I mention about our small roads and only two Interstate highways?  Have you considered staying until Tuesday? 😀