become a Wikipedia contributor

I can’t get on there without some red message popping up and disallowing me.

Wikipedia has become one of those things, like Google, that is there and isn’t thought about a lot. It’s where you find things out. I’ve always wanted to contribute, but have been a bit intimidated by it. I’m reading, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton now and I’m amazed at how things have evolved around the resource and the community. It’s a solid reference with many systems and traditions that ensure that it is relevant and accurate. I was skeptical about getting a book to read about Wikipedia until I read Nat Torkington’s post Thinking in Wikis which convinced me to buy the book and to start contributing.

Found 2 small bits of knowledge I was able to add. So I’ve made a couple contributions.

To date, I have 243 contributions, of which over 100 during the last three months.

By the way, check this out: Wikipedia visit statistics. Compare the number of visits for education to those for sex. The world is going down-hill… ;)

And I’m reviewing the editing rules.

this goal used to be to become a wikipedia contributor, which is very hard to define. So I changed it to a to-do item, which would be much easier. I need to:

- register
- identify topics I can contribute to
- I guess the easiest thing I can do is translate into my native language

I use wiki for evrything, might as well give something back

First I have to become a partial expert on some obscure and random topic!

I just haven’t gotten around to doing this yet but I will.

But I spent a year or so stubbing out a bunch of articles and improving and editing others.