Submissions:2015/How 100wikidays Got Me Back to Being a Wikipedia Contributor

Title

How #100wikidays Got Me Back to Being a Wikipedia Contributor

Theme

Community

Type of submission

Self reflexive presentation

Author

E-mail address

Sadads[at] gmail [dot] com}}

Username

Sadads

Affiliation

N/A

Abstract

I have been a contributor to Wikipedia for over eight years, and have over 90,000 edits. These contributions have been wide and varied, and as the edit count suggests, a large percentage of that volume comes from maintenance of Wikipedia, doing the curatorial work that keeps the project organized and running, not necessarily focusing on the content that I care about (or motivating myself to share our immense amount of public knowledge with the world). In the last few years, a part of me has noted that I was “selling” the community as an outreach person, more than I was contributing. Enter #100WikiDays : I discovered the project by off chance, from Asaf Bartov through my outreach work, and I can confidently say that in the last couple months I have returned as a contributor!

What is #100Wikidays? Vassia Atanassova, User:Spiritia started the #100WikiDays challenge this past spring, where editors from many different global language communities, challenge themselves to contribute 1 new Wikipedia article a day for 100 days. The challenge is mildly sadistic, with a very basic set of rules:

• No missed days and no catch-ups.
• No preparation of articles in advance.
• But also: Ignore All Rules

In my presentation, I am going to reflect on my own experience joining the activity: both its powerful revitalization of my contributions as a volunteer, my return to creating new articles, and the broader power I see in having more self-empowering frameworks for editors to feel more engaged in our Wikipedia community of practice. In doing so, I will also do a self reflexive of my own experiences as a Wikipedia editor, exploring how content creation, content development and the experience of developing and choosing new topics to work on create a personalize experience on Wikipedia. I will also, self reflexively explore The challenges information can be found at: *https://www.facebook.com/groups/1426807560950747/

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/100wikidays

Length of presentation

15-20 minutes.

Special schedule requests

I recommend that my experience be on a panel with http://wikiconferenceusa.org/wiki/Submissions:2015/100wikidays

Will you attend WikiConference USA if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Interested attendees

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1. Tokyogirl79 (talk) 08:55, 26 August 2015 (EDT) (I'm interested, but this might be seen as redundant to the submission at Submissions:2015/100wikidays. Are you the same person? The name and way that this is styled is extremely similar. I'm interested, but I'd likely only go to one of these two since there would likely be other, different things I'd rather attend to get a well rounded perspective of the conference.)
2. Add your username here.