User:Wilhelmina Will



Welcome to my userpage! Feel free to look around, on this page and the subpages linked below. When you're done, you can leave your signature in my guestbook. Thanks!

Wikipedia has been a center-point of my online world for fourteen years out of its present 20 years of existence. When I first came to edit here in 2007, I possessed an eager desire to contribute to this global resource, but being a part of this ongoing project has increased in its importance to me since then; far more than I could ever have anticipated. Every time I do even the smallest thing to make it a better encyclopedia than it already was, I feel like I've just won a globally-regarded prize!

About me
For non-Wikipedia related information, see here.

I began editing Wikipedia as an anonymous user in January 2007, and became a registered editor on June 16th that same year. My typical contributions have changed over the years since then; I have covered a wide variety of fields with varying degrees of investment of my time, and have generally been a somewhat hyphenate editor. In the modern era, I usually can only make time to contribute to the Guild of Copyeditors' backlog elimination drives and blitzes, and have previously worked extensively on other community drives, such as the Wikification and Great Wikipedia Backlog drives. For many years my main focus was on article creation, and frequently the development of articles, predominantly the ones I myself had started up. I have also periodically reviewed good article and Did you know nominees, the former especially during their backlog drives (surprise-surprise!) or during the WikiCup games. I am also a qualified online ambassador, though I've been out of practice for a while. If you're new and interested, however, you know where to go!

These days especially, I am prone to taking long wikibreaks without warning or notice, due to outside commitments. Even when I am on Wikipedia, I am very engrossed in whatever I'm doing, so it may take a while before I reply to messages; some might even go unnoticed for months, it's happened once... Or twice... Actually, quite a few times. :} My apologies in advance for such occurrences.

(Last updated: August 22nd, 2021.)

For the full story of my first ten years on the job, see here.

Major contributions to Wikipedia
These include what pages I've created, what images or articles I've saved from deletion, etc.

Things I've created || Things I did not create but take credit for expanding || Things I've rescued, so to speak || Things I've reviewed.

Other things relating to Wikipedia

 * Hall of Signatures - The ever-lengthening, winding, overall perilous-to-tread (just kidding) corridor which houses the memorabilia of previous methods I've employed to present myself when engaged in communication with other Wikipedians.
 * Recognitions - Simply a collection of things given to me by other users. I find it amazing that nobody's given me the finger yet...
 * Amazing experiences - A list comprising all of the milestones I've experienced here, including promotions for me or my child-articles, and the like.

Sandboxes
Prior to the creation of the first of these sandboxes, I had to use the official Sandbox if I wanted to work on potential articles, or if I wanted to experiment with some editing technique. It could grow pretty tiresome at times, since that sandbox receives so much traffic; you never knew when an edit conflict could destroy all your efforts. So when I observed that a lot of other users make their own, personal sandboxes out of user subpages, I got the great idea to do the same for myself! After I had used the first of my sandboxes for everything a sandbox can do, for some time, I began to realize it would be much more convenient to have multiple sandboxes, because then if a project I was working on came to some form of lull, I could move on to the next without waiting for the "lull" to conclude. So I decided to devote the first sandbox exclusively to writing out drafts for future articles on award-winning members of the film and television industry listed at the Internet Movie Database, and "invest" in another one. This second sandbox soon became the one I used for working on extinct animal/plant articles. Time went on, and I decided, since I was then actively reviewing AFC submissions (in the old-fashioned way, when all submissions for a particular day were listed on one page, and the reviewers created the accepted submissions for the writers), that I should have one in which to list AFC suggestions I was not sure about, before asking more experienced users for their opinions.

As these three projects have long since fallen out of my editing habits, these "assignments" no longer apply to the sandboxes. Mostly I just use them for whatever form of editing I want to practice, or for holding links, lists, formulas, and things I want to remember. The closest to the original applications that any of these get is the fourth sandbox, which I created some time ago when the user profile links in the top right corner of the screen began including a default sandbox, so it wouldn't be redlinked.


 * Sandbox 1
 * Sandbox 2
 * Sandbox 3
 * Sandbox 4

Keeping in touch with the big things in Wikipedia


"Now and then I may see one of mine, standing neat below this line..."