There are now 0 articles in the English Wikipedia.

• On 21 October 2004, I created my 100th article!
• On 29 November 2004, I made my 5000th edit.

What I'm doing on Wikipedia

• Links to my articles
  
  

I am a Wikiholic, and proud of it!

Since joining Wikipedia on January 3, 2004, I have clocked up 5638 edits as of December 8, of which 631 are current. The great majority of my edits have involved maintenance work: I have a passion for wikifying names and dates, and believe it or not, I actually find copyediting quite enjoyable. Such edits are mundane, and I have not bothered keeping a record of them. I have, however, kept a record of the articles to which I've made a major contribution. As of December 5, there are 200 of these. They include 109 original contributions of mine, plus a further 6 rewrites - articles started by others, usually as stubs, but which I have so totally rewritten as to make them effectively my own work. Another 85 articles have undergone major editing at my hands. Almost half of my articles (87 altogether) are connected with the Fiji project I undertook in February 2004; all but 9 of them are original contributions. On that topic, there was just so little written by others for me to edit. I am determined to ensure that whoever wants to contribute to Fiji-related articles in the future will not have that problem!

I have two main reasons for undertaking the Fiji project. First of all, I have a passionate interest in that country, although I have yet to visit it. Secondly, it has been said that the English Wikipedia has a built-in bias towards countries with a high number of internet users, among whom English is natively or at least competently spoken. Wikipedias in other languages reflect a similar bias towards countries where they are widely spoken by a large population with internet access. Every Wikipedia has a dearth of articles about small nations, especially of those that do not use the language of the particular Wikipedia project in question. The only solution to this imbalance is for Wikipedians to take an interest in smaller nations and adopt them. I started with Fiji, a nation where English is widely spoken, but where the number of internet users is low. It was heartwarming to find a Polish Wikipedian named Alberto Berasategui taking a similar interest in Fiji; he translated a number of my articles, wholly or in part, into Polish. Wikipedia needs more people like Alberto.

When my goals for the Fiji-project have been met, I will adopt another small nation, probably another Pacific Island nation, to write about.

Of course, I've made some contributions to a number of other topics as well. These mostly concern political affairs and biographies. Whenever I need a wikiholiday from writing about Fiji, I turn to one of these topics. In the second half of 2004, I took some time out to cover the Pitcairn rape trial of 2004, a crisis that shook the world's tiniest country to the core, and of necessity added some touches to related articles as well. I am also one of the volunteers helping out on the Multilingual statistics page. I designed one of the tables found there and redesigned two of the others. I help to keep an eye on the monthly statistics for the 164 languages in which Wikipedia now operates.

One topic about which you might expect to find material written by me is New Zealand, but as of now, there are a mere handful of New Zealand-related articles that I've had anything to do with. This is not for lack of interest in my homeland, but mostly an acknowledgement that there is already a considerable number of eminently qualified Wikipedians from New Zealand working in that department. As my own time is limited, I prefer mostly to leave it to them pursue what they are doing so well, while I concentrate on filling gaps in the content, such as Fiji-related material, in which fewer writers have been taking an interest.

I have also made the occasional contribution to a number of other wiki-projects, including Vikipedio, the Esperanto version of Wikipedia, as well as Wikisource, Wikiquote, and the Meta. Outside of Wikimedia, I belong to a number of other wikis, including HierarchyPedia (where I am a sysop/bureaucrat as of 6 December 2004), and also Disinfopedia and Wikinfo, but have not as yet played an active role in the last two.

I became a sysop, otherwise called an Administrator, on 3 July 2004 - six months to the day after I became a Wikipedian. I have expressed my thanks here to the 23 people who recognized my passion for this project and voted for me. I feel honoured to have a role in building this incredible online resource, which I envisage as ultimately consisting of literally billions of articles worked on by millions of editors in the world's 6,500 languages. As of 1 December 2004, the total Wikipedia project consists of just over 1.2 million articles in 164 languages. That is indeed a great achievement that all of us should be proud of, but the time will come when we will look back and see it as no more than a small stepping stone to something that will have grown so huge that we cannot presently conceive of it.

When speaking as a sysop, I identify myself as such by including the word administrator in my signature, like this: David Cannon (administrator). The vast majority of my edits, however, are as an ordinary Wikipedian. In such edits, I do not use the administrator label.

My personal ambition as a Wikipedian is to become the undisputed number-one contributor of quality articles to Wikipedia.

Articles (Index)

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