A couple weeks I got an email out of the blue from an administrator at Wikipedia, someone I didn't know. The email was a semi-automated communication informing that because of my longstanding absence from any participation in the project, my account would formally de-sysoped (i.e. removed from administrator privileges) within thirty days if there were no further edits made from my account.
Ironically I had assumed that I had long-since been stripped of my sysop privileges (which for the uninitiated include such privileges as banning users, locking pages, and rolling back changes by other uses). Other than a minor edit to my own user page, I hadn't made any real edits since 2006.
Reading the email brought a flood of memories. I had joined Wikipedia in January 2004 right after a rather traumatic personal episode had left me hollowed out and nearly unable to function. For the next six months living in New York, I went crazy with Wikipedia, spending nearly every waking minute editing and adding pages. I thought it was keeping me sane, although my wife (now ex-wife) thought I was going nuts. I probably was.
Back then Wikipedia was much smaller than it is now, so there were many fundamental topics that didn't have pages yet. When I noticed this, I went on a page-adding binge. When I last counted, I had started over a thousand new pages, many of them having to do with American rivers, a topic that became my specialty of sorts. I also researched and wrote a lot of articles on American history, including the history of the various territories, and how their borders changed. As part of the fun of it all, I organized my created articles into a cascading list, a tree of sorts, showing how each one linked to another.
Later that year when I left New York and drove across the country to Oregon, I traveled back roads and stopped at every river and in every little town to take a photograph with Nikon Coolpix 990. I later added these photos to Wikipedia in the appropriate article for that place. At one point I reckoned I was one of the most widely published photographers on the web.
Being an admin had come early. I had been nominated in the Spring of 2004 by a "Wiki-friend," a woman named Jennifer who lived in Los Angeles and who wrote for an online entertainment magazine, and who had just been on the game show Jeopardy. She was one of the most widely known and respected admins at the time. We had run across each other while editing articles on American history. Ironically it was the Golden Spike article about the completion of the transcontinental railroad. As a Stanford grad, she had been interested in the article because of Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific Railroad, whereas I had been editing the Union Pacific article (I can't tell you how ironic that would become in later years, but that's a whole different story).
Jennifer had particularly liked the way I organized my articles into a tree. She nicknamed it the "Decumanus tree" (after my user name) and made one for herself.
We eventually met up in Los Angeles a couple years later, although by that time she had gotten married, so nothing "came" of it (she was sort of wistful at that). Nevertheless we had a good time sharing martinis at Musso and Franks on Hollywood Boulevard.
All this seems like ancient history now. In the summer of 2006, for various other reasons, including general fatigue, I decided I couldn't take it anymore and just quit Wikipedia for good. I became one of those legendary admins who just disappears one day and is never heard from again. My user name went into some list of long-lost admins.
Almost instantly, as abruptly as it all had begun, I went from being a Wikipedia power user to simply being a regular user. I still used Wikipedia as anyone did, but only to read it, and never to edit it. It was like that whole phase of my life just stopped in an instant.
I never thought of going back. I knew it was over completely. But then I got that email a couple weeks ago, and it occurred to me that some part of me didn't want to relinguish my admin privileges. It was like a badge of honor, especially considering how longstanding they were, and how popular Wikipedia had become in the meantime.
So after having my forgotten password reset, I logged back into my old account for the first time in years. It was like coming back into a room in one's house that has been sealed off. It felt eerie to see the Wikipedia page with all my user details and options in the menu across the top again.
But I had no desire to go back to the kind of editing I used to do. Instead I figured I just become one of those obscure admins that contributes random minor fixes. My first edit was simply to fix a typo, and then one night a couple weeks ago, I actually made several edits to expand the plot description of a Star Trek episode as I watched on Channel 3 ("Errand of Mercy", to be exact).
It was tremendous fun, but it did not inspire me to want to edit more than occassionally. In any case, the notice about my pending de-sysoping was removed from user page, so I guess I'm safe for now.
Nevertheless I guess it will a small part of my life again for now. Back in 2004, I had used Wikipedia as a leverage to learn about American geography and history in preparation for what would be a series of road trips across America. Now I have other interests. Over the last year I've been reading through the entire Bible rather slowly, and doing my own Bible study of sorts.
This week I was reading through Acts and thinking about of the voyages of Paul, trying to map them out in my mind while reading the text. I had read about Paul and Barnabus visiting Perga and wondered where it was in modern-day Turkey, so I looked it up in a search engine and read the Wikipedia article about. I noticed that the article mentioned Paul's visit, but did not provide a proper citation to the passage in Acts. Back in my day, we didn't have citations in the pages, so I took the opportunity to learn how to make the minor edit to include the citation.
It made the knowledge of that passage more concrete in my mind. It occurred to me that maybe this will be my own form of Bible study, to add scriptural citations to Wikipedia page. Maybe I'll even go back to Turkey, as I did in 1985, when I stood on a pillar in Ephesus and recited Ozymandias from memory, to the delight of the Episcopal priest who had become my traveling companion for the day. I could so many more places to visit now!
I also enjoy thinking how after I make my small edits, there is some eagle-eyed admin or power user coming the ever-changing Recent Changes log on Wikipedia, scouting for vandalism, as many users do, in order to roll it back. I enjoy the idea that they see my user name and wonder "who is this?" and then go to my user page and realize that they stumbled upon an obscure long-long admin who came and went from the project years before they created their own account.
And of course I learn about things I wouldn't have known about it. When hitting the front page of Wikipedia, as one does while editing, I get to see the list of obscure news items that I wouldn't never have known about. For example, today I read that "Hungarian mathematician Endre Szemerédi wins the Abel Prize for his contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science." Now that's news I can use!
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