User:S Marshall

 S Marshall uses his real name on Wikipedia. AfD | PR | New pages | My sandbox AfT | DRV | LFH Google Translator Toolkit | UCP | ReFill

''I've just discovered that I'm not receiving emails from Wikipedia because I use Yahoo and, well, this. I do want to talk to editors, but you'll just have to use my talk page I'm afraid.'' Hi, I'm Stuart Marshall. I live in Cambridgeshire in England (but am originally from Hertfordshire). I have varied interests on Wikipedia; look for me in unlikely places!

I edited occasionally as an IP in 2004 and 2005, and I registered this account in 2006, but was only sporadically active until 2008 or so. In 2009 I nominated two people for adminship: User:Fences and windows and User:LinguistAtLarge. Although they both seem to have worked out rather well, I've never nominated anyone since.

It's on .

We're here to write an online compendium of knowledge (🇬🇧 Traditional English: encyclopaedia; 🇺🇸 Simplified English: encyclopedia), and to share it with everyone in the world in freely-reusable format without cost. That's a profound thing to do.

Historically, what people who had knowledge did was to monetize it. In the past couple of decades, Wikipedia, together with other more reliable, but less broad, knowledge-sharing initiatives driven by universities and libraries, have started to subvert that monetization. We're slowly but I think importantly disrupting the knowledge economy.

Editors get various benefits from contributing, the most important of which is learning the right kind of skepticism. We learn to analyze sources. When I started contributing to Wikipedia, early during the rise of social media, I didn't know how important the right kind of skepticism would become. Editing Wikipedia over the years has made me brighter, which is an outcome that the person I barely remember any more, S Marshall in his thirties, wouldn't have expected for a moment. But it's true. Now that I can find the right information in the right source more quickly and surely, I make better decisions, faster, than I did in the past.

Wikipedia is of course deeply flawed and heavily distorted in many, many respects. But, whether you measure it in terms of the labour that went into it, or its importance to our culture, it's reasonable to call it the first Information Age Wonder of the World.