On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 3:58 AM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Like most time-consuming hobbies of mine, it started as a form of procrastination, in this case, when I was supposed to be job hunting, in late 2005. Somehow I got involved attempting to mediate a long-running ridiculously trivial yet incredibly acerbic dispute between two editors of [[Paris]] and related articles. 3 years later it was still going. I think what keeps me participating in various forms is: 1) Interest in acquiring knowledge - and restructuring and rewriting existing articles, or writing new ones, is a much better way to acquire knowledge than passively reading. 2) Vanity, in posting photos. 3) Nerdy satisfaction in rewriting bad prose.

I found pseudoscience on Wikipedia and resolved to correct it. Took way too much of my time..:) On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:58 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

"David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> quoted news:fbad4e140906151058wc6f789dxaedcbfde40e782e1@mail.gmail.com , citing I was reading the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and [[prion]] came up, defined as a great mystery. I thot I understood it. I still think it is pesticide poisoning if it is not heavy metal poisoning. To my surprise, the topic was not in the wiki article. At first I did not bother getting an ID, because I thot that once the work of Brown, Purdey (and others!) took hold on some minds, it would become dominant theory, because it does not contrast with prevailing doctrine that life demands [[DNA]] to reproduce. When I went to the wiki article and put in a narrative with attitude, someone almost immediately put a POV tag into it, then toned down my text. Then I did some of what I do best and made it easier to read. Then I went meticulously through the entire talk page, adding headings where there was a change in topic -- and tried to answer everything. Much later, perhaps in 2008, I began a "Make your headings blue" crusade, which goes against a style guideline based on an undocumented browser bug (one that probably does not exist, and certainly *should* not exist), and that was the first time I got any direct feedback regarding my [[prion]] activities. Two reasons are to make a heading that is a link, in my book: 1. The section is only started, perhaps with nothing but references. 2. The section started talking about something that does exist as though it was something that does not, so I deleted the section's text and made the heading into a link. _______ Line from Darth Vader in Star Wars to sanitize: (Exhale, Inhale) "Luke, you are my bastard!".

As I recall, I was looking something up to mention in an argument, and much to my surprise the article I found was (gasp!) up for deletion. Quite curious, I looked at the AfD page and left a comment. The article was kept, though in retrospect I know it would have been with or without my minor addition to the discussion. Maybe about a month later, I wound up posting an article. By the time I checked back on it, someone had tweaked my writing for NPOV and some vandalism had been committed and reverted. These two glimpses into the sausage factory were enough to get me interested. The chance to be part of something greater than oneself, and to aid in the work of so many others, was something I just couldn't pass up. For better or worse, there's never a dull day on the wiki. -Luna

I think it was through the b3ta newsletter (http://www.b3ta.com/newsletter/), back when they were often marvelling at Wikipedia's extent rather than encouraging childish vandalism. Pete / the wub