User:Cullen328/sandbox/Clovermoth


 * When did you start editing Wikipedia?
 * My first edit was on June 28, 2009. I had spent a couple of months studying how Wikipedia works. My first edit was to create my userpage, which said at that time I never edited previously as an IP, though I accidentally have a handful of logged out edits after I registered my account.


 * Why did you start editing Wikipedia? I do not remember when I first noticed Wikipedia on the internet, but the more I saw of it, the more I was impressed. This was in the 2005 to 2008 time period. The issue that led me to start editing is that I had completed a previous major internet commitment and the Great Recession gave me increased spare time as a self employed person. I knew a lot about notable California mountaineers as a former climber myself and owned many books on that topic area. I was like a Litle League baseball player writing biographies of Big League baseball players, but my biographies were of notable climbers instead. I also knew a lot about various California fine artists and craftspeople, having frequently visited California art museums for about 35 years. The coverage of those topic areas was mediocre at that time. So, initially, I began editing to create and improve articles in those topic areas. I  quickly got "hooked" and evolved into what I call a generalist editor.
 * If you could back in time, what do you think would've helped you as a new editor? I actually received pretty favorable feedback from mountaineering oriented editors from the earliest months of my participation, because, I believe, that I was contributing pretty high quality content from the beginning. I remember an administrator (no longer active) gently cautioning me about edit warring once, when I was on the brink of edit warring with an SPA. I have rigorously avoided edit warring behavior ever since.
 * Did you have help as a new editor? What worked and what didn't? My help was always observing the contributions and behavior of more experienced, productive editors, and modeling my behavior on theirs. And paying close attention to any editor feedback about my contributions, which was largely positive. Positive feedback is wonderful, but it needs to be earned.
 * Do you'll think you'll keep editing for the forseeable future? Yes, as long as I maintain a sound mind. I am well aware at age 71 that an unexpected health crisis could restrict or end my participation at any time. My personal inspiration in this regard is, who keeps contributing his wisdom under the most adverse circumstances. I will frankly admit to being proud of my contributions to the encyclopedia over nearly 14-1/2 years, but readily concede that my invidual contributions are tiny in the grand scheme of things. Whether I depart this project tomorrow or in 15 years, my only hope is to be remembered as a positive contributor.


 * Were you involved with WikiEd? I volunteered as an online advisor to a handful of college classes early in my time editing. One was at the University of San Francisco, where I graduated in 1982, and I actually went to San Francisco to speak to that particular class. My experience was that a large majority of students assigned to edit Wikipedia as part of a class make mediocre edits, complete only what is necessary to get a passing grade, do not engage with the Wikipedia community, and stop editing as soon as their class has ended. I wish that it was different. I have enormous respect for the wonderful people trying to guide and engage with these students, but it is very sad how uninvolved most of these students end up being.
 * Have you ever edited on mobile? If so, what are your thoughts on it? If not, why not? Yes, about 99% of my editing has been on smartphones going back many years, though I edited on desktop computers in my earliest days here . I use the fully functional desktop site on my phone because, frankly, all the mobile apps and sites and so on lack the basic functionality of the poorly named "desktop" site, even when used on smartphones. Full functionality includes the ability to fully engage in collaborative, consensus-based editing with colleagues, and most mobile editors are frozen out from that, due to multiple bad decisions by the WMF going back many years. Billions of people write fairly complex content using smartphones on multiple social media type websites every single day. The notion that these people are unable to improve the encyclopedia on their phones has seemed ludicrous to me, ever since I started using my phone to edit about a dozen years ago. In my opinion, the failure of the WMF to properly support and encourage mobile editing is a shocking and ongoing dereliction of duty that has wasted countless millions of donor dollars and has erected completely unnecessary barriers to productive contributions by mobile users. It is comparable to the Visual Editor debacle. Uncounted millions of dollars spent employing countless well-meaning WMF coders, while coming nowhere close to duplicating the source editor/desktop view functionality that was already robust when I began editing in 2009, and remains so today. They cannot even track and analyze my 100,000 edits, because to them, mobile device edits to the desktop site are unworthy of analysis. Or maybe they haven't figured out to study them after all these years. So sad and such a waste.