contribute more to wikipedia

I have been doing very small changes in the past few days, like pointing links to the good articles (like The Swan Princess (film) instead of The Swan Princess alone). I also added two articles about voice actress from Québec and a picture of concept art for an upcoming Disney movie. I guess it’s a start… I just never know whether to write articles for the English or French part of Wikipedia. What a dilemma! :P

the place gets worse every day. leave now while you have less invested.

It’s no longer worth trying to help Wikipedia. The “management” is stuck in this “authoritarian utopia” model, where they have the one and only vision to move the encyclopedia forward . . . but they’re spending WAY too much time arguing about things like “what constitutes original research” and “what’s the best way to delete a category that we don’t want to maintain”.

It’s coming apart at the seams; so I’ll do all my future contributing to wikis at Centiare.com.

Ok, I kinda tried this just now.
I’m stuck on how to add pictures :|

I’m up to four thousand or so edits. The politics of the place still really piss me off. Right now, I’m working on my book, so very little work gets done on my behalf at the wikipedia. I still use it extensively for research, and when I am researching, I correct errors I find or add articles which they don’t have.

So while I’m not at the frenetic pace I once was (about a thousand edits in one month), I am still contributing.

And I find it rewarding. Most people I meet don’t know the meaning of the word “pyrophoricity,” but there’s an article on wikipedia about it. It’s an incredibly valuable resource, and it only keeps getting better.

Contributing to the wikipedia is so hard when the place is embroiled in the political machinations of seen or unseen cabals. I’ve made a lot of contributions since I originated this goal, but I am not quite satisifed yet with the corpus of things I’ve contributed. I’d like to be able to look at my edit history and not see anything that I would look at and say “well, that was a useless contribution…”

a whole bunch of stub articles were incorrectly characterized as “weapons-stub”. I think a more appropriate category is “firearms-stub”, and thus i have created it, and moved all the firearms stubs out. the hard part about this is how to tell a firearm from an artillery piece, or similar. do you draw the line at non-man-portable? what about propellants? naturally, since it is not a topic of much favor on the internet, i have gotten no assistance and no feedback. i will probably go over the mil-stubs next, and break those out (since not all firearms are solely military, and they are first and foremost firearms, secondly military firearms). it’s kind of irritating how much work it actually was to do, and that nobody even noticed. i make a point of thanking people for doing unenviable arduous tasks, or even for small things that i myself was avoiding doing (such as unit conversion, adding tables, and format cleanup).

I have been spending a lot of time in Hawaii (TBI and Oahu). I’ve been documenting the State Parks and adding articles and pictures where appropriate. Learning more about Hawaii, cleaning up the wikipedia, and getting a tan. Nice.

If I could also contribute to wikipedia by helping them with disaster recovery routines, and analyzing the points of scalability and stability failures they have. Which appear to be manifold.