Wikipedia admin on reddit

[Vigilant]

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/x ... rator_ama/

Ask away...

[EricBarbour]

This one really disgusts me:

[–]DrMel 2 points 1 hour ago

Hear, hear! I've been able to get >100 college students through the process of editing their first Wikipedia articles by adding it as a requirement in their research papers. All they need to do to get full credit is find two articles that relate to their paper, add content to each relevant to the other article then crosslink between them.

As an example, for a friend's Criminal Justice, we edited the articles for the legal term "Corpus delicti" (meaning "body of evidence") and the "Acid Bath Murderer" - a guy who mistakenly believed Corpus Delicti was literal, thinking he couldn't be convicted if he could destroy evidence of the victim's bodies.

I've been to teaching conferences where I've met other profs who get teams of students to write new articles, but with so many articles actually written and already getting traffic, I like to encourage students to develop the habit of editing to improve other articles before they try to become active at writing new articles.

I wrote my first "brand new from scratch" article a few years ago (about a movie that was coming out called "To Catch a Dollar" and it took at least 12 hours to feel like my 3 paragraphs were worthy! lol.

And this is absolutely dead typical of how laymen view WP. They honestly, stupidly think that administrators fix articles......

[–]Fangurny 5 points 2 hours ago

What does your job involve? editing and correcting articles? Have you written any articles yourself? How do you think the future of wikipedia might look like?

[SB_Johnny]

Good grief. That thread is almost as long as the Fae thread here, and only a day old.

Any guesses as to who this admin is?

[EricBarbour]

That's easy.

Here, the dumb bastard shows a screenshot of his WP user preferences.
Only two administrators created accounts on 27 June 2004: Discospinster (T-C-L) and Johan Elisson (T-C-L).
He shows 155,479 edits, and so he can only be Discospinster.

A classic "evil patroller", loves to indef-block. RFA March 2008.

[Sweet Revenge]

How do you become one

An administrator? You build up a track record of edits and participation in the project, showing that you are willing and able to use the admin tools for good rather than evil. Then you nominate yourself (or are nominated by someone else) for administrator status. There's a whole bunch of questions you have to answer, testing you on your knowledge of policy. Other editors will ask further questions (such as "What would you do in this situation...") and then they vote.

I dont know what to write all the good stuffs already taken wikipedia isnt for me

You don't have to write about anything, you could just fix things up like I do (typos, vandalism, adding links to other Wikipedia articles).

sigh...

[thekohser]

Question (thekohser):

Do you ever feel like you have been duped into providing tens of thousands of dollars worth of time and effort, not getting paid a cent for it, while Jimmy Wales jets around the world, invited to speak about (essentially) your work, such that he gets paid tens of thousands of dollars for a couple of hours of his time talking? If not, when do you imagine you will wake up to this fact?

Answer (wikithrow):

It doesn't bother me. I'm doing it because I'm dedicated to the exchange of knowledge. Nobody has duped me, I know exactly what it means to work on this project.