User:Daniel.Bryant/The Age
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These are a compilation of the answers given to The Age reporter David Adams when he asked if any Australian Wikipedians would like to be interviewed for an article to be published in the paper.
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[edit] Daniel Bryant
Daniel.Bryant (talk • contribs)
You live in Adelaide? Age?
16 years.
You're a student? What are you studying?
Year 12 (next year); subjects: Maths Studies, English Studies, Geography, Legal Studies, Business Studies, and Religion.
How long have you been "contributing" to Wikipedia?
About 8 months or so, I believe.
How many edits/new articles do you think you've made?
I have contributed significantly to about 20-30 articles, and made around 10,000 edits. Amazingly, this isn't much compared to many other contributors - I only edit when I get a spare moment or two between homework, sporting and social commitments.
What sort of articles do you tend to contribute to?
Mainly sporting articles, particularly football (I mean, soccer) and cricket. I contribute mainly in the areas of A-League and FIFA World Cup, especially the former. Being a huge fan of football all my life, I was overjoyed to see the new A-League form back in 2004. This subject naturally took my interest.
Why do contribute - what is it that drives you?
It is probably a combination of reasons. My introduction to Wikipedia was to fix up a misspelling in an article when I was doing an assignment for school. From here, it has blossomed, so now I’m the one writing articles for people to use. To think that I'm helping a lot of other people in their research, as well as providing a free encyclopaedia, is the main reason that comes to mind. Nearly every day that I go to school, people are talking about how they rushed to complete that are due. The answer to the question "well, where did you find the information that you needed?" is becoming "Wikipedia" more and more often.
Have you met people through Wikipedia that you've met up with in the real world?
No.
How do you find the resolution of disputes works?
It is inherently flawed, however it is probably as good as you will ever see on something like Wikipedia. To think that the process in which disputes are handled on Wikipedia has all been developed from scratch - as there was nothing similar to it prior - makes it a pretty remarkable achievement. As I mentioned, there are a number of major deficiencies with it, however on the most part it holds up well. It's when we get complicated disputes - for example when two "rival" political/ethnic/social/religious groups attempt to add their point of view to the article - that things get very messy.
Do you have an image of yourself or could we take an image of you to go with the piece?
Sorry, no - I'm not comfortable releasing that. Maybe add a picture of Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder – he has an article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales
[edit] Michael Billington
MichaelBillington (talk • contribs)
[edit] Rant about Wikipedia
- (snipped out intro that would be of no interest to readers of this page)
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anybody who is reading an article and sees a minor problem (maybe a spelling or formatting error, or a broken link) can fix it in only a few short seconds, with or without an account. Most editors start out reading, then they find out about the 'edit' button, and so they edit. Before long they write a paragraph about something in an existing article. Eventually, an editor will find a topic on Wikipedia that nobody has yet written about, one that interests them. They go through the 10 seconds it takes to make an account, and create the article. It starts as helping to fix small errors, it gets to writing full articles, they do this, and they can go and say "I helped write an encyclopaedia this weekend" which is really a good feeling. However, there is a lot more to Wikipedia than writing articles.
There's a term on Wikipedia called 'namespace shift'. new users help to write articles, as experience grows you discover other things that happen on Wikipedia, for instance, there are pages for discussing articles (we call this the 'talk' namespace), pages for talking to other users and answering their questions (called 'user talk'), pages where policy is kept (called 'project'), pages for discussing those pages ('project talk'), and even one called 'user', where you can write a bit about yourself. As users become more experienced, you find they do a lot less writing of articles, and a lot more talking about ways they can write them, which is sort of odd when the site exists to be full of knowledge, but in the end it makes the whole project very efficient.
As for articles contributed to, personally I've made quite a few. I've written articles about AFL umpires, sailing ships in the US Navy, soccer, horses, varieties of rice wine and any number of other things that are only of remote interest to me. One that may be noteworthy however is Delta Blues (horse), which was written within a few minutes of the win.
Next thing I'd like to mention about Wikipedia is the community, which has a grapevine like none other. There's mailing lists, notice boards, chat rooms, discussion pages and other ways that we all keep in touch. Using this communication people discuss articles with other people, and they make decisions about what will be done to improve the article. There are different 'article improvement drives' which select articles in need of help and spend a week or two getting the article up to standard before moving to the next. There is an Australian one called 'the Australian collaboration of the fortnight' which we all get involved in.
Also, you seem to be interested in the Australian parts of Wikipedia, so on a side note, there are currently efforts to get an official Wikimedia Australia chapter, as there are in England and Germany already, though there is not yet any indication of how long it may take, or if it will be possible at all with the geographical distance between the editors, as well as money and time constraints we face.
Another side note, on the topic of there being more to Wikipedia than just articles, we have dedicated developers (Tim is one of them who is from Australia) who work to develop the software behind Wikipedia, which is free to be used by anyone without cost. We also have people such as myself who write programmes to interact with Wikipedia, to generate statistics, or assist in stopping unconstructive edits, as well as another bunch of volunteers who help the main developers fix bugs without having ever been paid to do so at all.
Now, in case you just briefly read over the above paragraphs, here's a shorter summary:
Why we do it: Because we like the feeling of helping I suppose, though editing Wikipedia is considered addictive by some.
What articles I contribute to: (to list a few) Hayden Kennedy - Jim Mahoney (umpire) - Nigori - Delta Blues (horse) - Pop Rock (horse) - Katsuhiko Sumii - Operation Midnight Climax - Information diving - Tax collector
- (snipped out closing that would be of no interest to readers of this page)
[edit] Answering the questions
Can I ask how long you've been contributing to Wikipedia? And how you became involved?
My account was created 14 December 2005, exactly 11 months ago as of 7pm tonight (found via account creation log: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=newusers&user=MichaelBillington) I found Wikipedia through google while looking for information for a project. After a while reading I noticed the 'edit' button, so I took it on as a hobby from there.
Also, what do you do in the "real" world and can I check your age?
In 'real life', I'm a student, I'd rather keep my exact age private, but I'm in my teens if that tells you anything.
Are you Sydney based?
Victoria actually, I currently reside in/on Mount Dandenong, around 40 kilometres from the Melbourne CBD. (in an Eastward, and a bit Northerly sort of direction)
How many hours a week would you spend working on Wikipedia?
Hm... Hours per week... quite a few I'd guess. A (very) rough estimate would be 24 hours per week, that's four hours a day excluding sundays, but I've never measured it myself. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
And the big question - why are you involved? Why do it?
Yes, that is a big question, I'll have split it into a few paragraphs:
I guess it has something to do with helping out. I'm not sure if you've heard of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, but it is planned for those laptops to contain a static copy of Wikipedia on them, and it's a nice feeling to know you've helped write something that may be distributed among children in developing countries. (If you haven't heard of that project, there's a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Machine)
Another thing is that it's useful and practical, which makes it something worth spending time on (even if it wont benefit you directly). When you know the site has helped so many people learn so much, it's always good to be a part of it. It's also one of only a handful of websites on the internet today which parents wont mind their children spending hours on.
Writing is fun for some people, writing informitive articles is even better, because it's not only fun, but it's useful as well. The other people on the project keep it from becoming at all boring. Also, contributing to such a large collection of free knowledge gives you a good feeling. (And by free here I mean really free: it can be copied and redistributed even for commercial use without paying a cent to anyone but the paper and ink companies)
[edit] Riana C
Hey Daniel, just thought I'd store this here - yep, I ended up doing it in the end... :) I just used the questions he asked you and Mike, and asked him to email me anything else he needed later.
riana_dzasta (talk • contribs)
You live in Adelaide? Age?
18 years.
You're a student? What are you studying?
I've just completed my first year of university at Flinders. My course is Bachelor of Science (Hons). My topics are Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics and Introduction to Research, and I'm interested in pursuing organic chemistry further.
How long have you been "contributing" to Wikipedia?
I've been using Wikipedia as a secondary research tool for 4 years, but I've been contributing since May this year.
How many edits/new articles do you think you've made?
I have created one article, significantly rewritten about 3, and have about 7000 edits. I generally edit at night and during holidays.
What sort of articles do you tend to contribute to?
I try not to limit myself to a particular type of article, although lately I've been focusing on Indian music and Chemistry (strange combination, I know).
Why do you contribute - what is it that drives you?
Initially, the fact that every Google search I did came up with a Wikipedia article somewhere within the first 5 results made me think "What is this thing? What's so special about it?" I looked a bit further into it, and I was hooked. It's a combination of being able to find information on almost anything under the sun, the knowledge that my work here might be helping someone across the world, and the collaboration between users to ensure an article becomes better and better. It's the first time I've considered time spent on the Internet to be a practical use of time! Honestly, it's a project I (generally) have faith in.
Have you met people through Wikipedia that you've met up with in the real world?
No. We do have "wikimeetups", where Wikipedians meet in real life and talk about Wikipedia, discuss improvements, etc, but I've never attended one.
How do you find the resolution of disputes works?
It's as good as you might expect from such a hugely collaborative project. Dispute resolution is broken into many steps - "face-to-face" communication (discussions on article talk pages/user talk pages), requests for comment, mediation and requests for arbitration. This, at least, helps split the process into manageable segments. Dispute resolution can end up with undesirable consequences - users becoming even more uncompromising, articles degrading due to personal interests, to an extreme of users leaving. However, I would estimate that it works 60-70% of the time. It's the best we have right now.
Do you have an image of yourself or could we take an image of you to go with the piece?
Sorry, no. Also not interested in releasing my full name, but thanks.
