Gwern Branwen

But otherwise, I would just neglect it and only review the most suspicious diffs and articles that I was particularly interested in on my kind of like watch list.

I got started in Wikipedia in late middle school, possibly early high school.

It was kind of funny.

I started skipping lunch in the cafeteria and just going to the computer lab in the library and alternating between Neopets and Wikipedia.

Yeah, I had Neopets in one tab and then my Wikipedia watch list coming in on the other.

No, I think I was the only editor there, except for the occasional like jerks who would go in and vandalize Wikipedia.

I would know that because I checked the IP to see where edits were coming from, the school library IP addresses.

And kids being kids, you know, there would be jerks who would just go in and like vandalize Wikipedia.

For a while, it was kind of this like trendy thing.

Early on, Wikipedia was breaking through to kind of like mass awareness and controversy, kind of like the way that LLMs are now.

A teacher might say, my students keep reading Wikipedia and relying on it.

How can it be trusted?

So in that period, it was kind of trendy to vandalize Wikipedia and show your friends.

There were other Wikipedia editors at my school in that sense.

But as far as I knew, I was the only one building it rather than wrecking it.

It was afterwards.

I graduated in the Wikipedia community, had been kind of slowly moving in this direction that I didn't like.

It was triggered by the Siegenthaler incident, which I feel like was really the defining moment in the trend toward deletionism on Wikipedia.

Yeah.

it just became ever more obvious that Wikipedia was not the site that I joined and loved to edit and rabbit hole on and fill in.