Interesting Links for 26-04-2013

[andrewducker]

• Each can of sugary drink per day increases your chances of diabetes by 22%
  (tags: diet diabetes sugar )
• Kari Sperring - Why I started #Womentoread
  (tags: fiction writing women )
• Suicide: Probably not something you want to use to advertise your cars.
  (tags: epicwtf advertising suicide )
• BT (and TalkTalk) manage to exceed their usual appalling

Comments

[steer]

I started editing wikipedia in about 2004... made a bunch of fixes to things and added detail on short articles. Got really into it and started editing things. For three years I was really active got one of my articles to good article status, learned about procedures and so on. I never had anyone say a rude word to me the whole time. Early I made some mistaken edits and people helpfully corrected me. The only time I got reverts which put me off editing was the article on sci fi which some people were fiercely protective of and I just backed off. They were polite but they were also clear that they did not want major changes to it in the way I did. I stopped editing things in 2006 as it was taking up too much time. I don't know if that makes me a wikipedia person. I don't think it does I've no formal role, I'm just a guy who logged in and made a bunch of edits. The experience was great... really great, people would complement me on my articles, occasionally question what I'd done but usually fruitfully. Had a slightly heated exchange where I was a bit rude about someone on an article about traffic lights (in retrospect he was correct -- but not citably so) but to be honest, it was no more than a slight brusqueness of the tone between the two of us. I have more heated discussions on your journal most weeks.

Since then I've done almost no editing apart from fixing typos, then not logged in. Probably the most major change I've made in the last few years was adding Duke Nukem to the list of games which had major financial losses. That was reverted twice then accepted. That surprised me. The guy doing the revert was polite and gave reasons and then accepted the change.

It would sadden me if wikipedia's culture had changed to be what you described but I have never ever seen it at all. It may be that it has changed massively, we're now nine years after I was actively involved in regularly editing.

I still make small edits and the culture does not seem to me to have changed except that maybe people are slightly more revert happy.