User:RowanElder
I am a relatively inexperienced editor primarily treating my Wikipedia editing as a more prosocial alternative to a crossword habit. This seems to require little further explanation.
Secondarily, I am also interested in learning more about Wikipedia as a phenomenon in itself. This may deserve more explanation. Initially, I began volunteering here after seeing highly publicized claims that the Wikipedia community has trouble retaining editors, in particular editors who add new substance as opposed to those who make mostly formatting and patrolling edits (Wikipedia#Community covers this well; User:L235/Our biggest challenge is another serendipitous find just after writing the rest of this version). It seemed worth understanding the state of retention by trying the experience of being retained or not myself and by surveying page histories as I did my crossword-itch-scratching work. I am particularly interested in (a) Wikipedia as a common good resource and thus an arena for collective action problems and (b) Wikipedia as an emergent authoritative reference and thus an arena for credibility-determination dynamics. Some friends of mine are journalists and experts on misinformation, others are AI developers using Wikipedia as a training corpus, and so this can be fun for me to talk to friends about.
Editing history
[edit]Initially I performed mostly newcomer copyediting tasks. I had a smooth start, and I enjoyed the habit in an uncomplicated way for my first few hundred edits. However, the more I copyedited math pages, the more I became worried that crucial material (for instance level 3 vital articles) in the area was poorly sourced, poorly organized, and often incorrect. I began to change my pattern of editing to include longer major restructurings of math pages, but, being inexperienced, I did not pretend to know what I was doing yet. I received little constructive guidance, mostly just learning by rare, and thus precious, but also typically curt and biting, reverts; my talk page discussions about how to do things were mostly either ignored, replied to with only a short inscrutable-to-me-as-newcomer standard policy link, or treated as if they were bad faith or thin-skinned (especially if I didn't understand the policy links *immediately* without further clarification).
One lesson I was happy to have learned is that while old unsourced material is rarely deleted or corrected, new unsourced material is deleted or corrected with prejudice and experienced editors do not often take kindly to the unsourced correction of existing unsourced material. As a newcomer, I initially wrongly interpreted the current persistence of the past unsourced material as a current tolerance for unsourced material. In any case, I accepted the slow and biting learning curve until another few hundred edits later I decided I was enabling bad habits, left the mathematics area, and sought quieter and more polite regions. In retrospect, math is not a good place to learn the ropes.
For the last couple hundred edits since that, I've focused on developing the habit of hewing closely to sources in my editing and on learning how to judge the choices and applications of particular sources. For now I am also sticking mostly to history, particularly stubs and unsourced material around the history of science and math and historians of science and math. In this area, the Wikipedia Library's generous journal offerings have been a lot of fun to use and the deeper humanistic tradition in the field of history seems to make for a clearer, better-shared (and thus more welcoming) collaboration ethic among the Wikipedia editors in history. I plan to stick with this for another few hundred edits and then reconsider my approach again after that.