User:Pyropylon98/musings

Yeah, I know WP:NOTABLOG, but I’m pretty sure a blog about being a Wikipedian is permissible so up yours WP:P&G (I’m just messing around, policies and guidelines exist for good reason).

Anyway I intend to use this page to document my perspective and experiences throughout my first year as an active editor. Maybe I’ll actually make it to November 7, 2025. Most likely my ADHD scatterbrain will abandon the project in two weeks. Eh, tis is life.

— Pyropylon98 (talk • contribs)

Week of Sunday January 19, 2025

This entry is more about January 19th itself, but I did get engrossed in a bio I was working on, and got to know a new editor earlier in the week so there is a few details from prior.

I’m going to start with the 19th.

Wikipedia Day Meetup

On Sunday, I woke up nice and early to miss two busses (felt the intense urge to edit List of NHL on-ice officials fifteen minutes before I was supposed to catch them thinking i’d have enough time to get ready… I didn’t). Eventually I got on a bus, and managed to inadvertently arrive at the transfer point just as the bus I thought I already missed rolled on by. Like a true Canadian, I walked over to the nearest Tim Hortons, bought a muffin, and waited for the next GO bus to Union Station.

An observant reader (or a doxxer lurking in the shadows) may realize that I was heading to Toronto, and to Toronto I headed. I quasi-napped on the ride and arrived at the Union bus terminal with time to spare. I hopped off the bus, and wandered over to some community centre that was not far from the terminal. After finding the right room, I had finally made it to the meetup. I was corralled over to User:Z1720’s registration table where I confirmed that I had signed up, and found somewhere to sit down.

It was a pretty neat experience to see a bustling group of actual people associated with the online community I had been actively engaging with for the past two months. Since Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, and not intended to be a social networking site, it is pretty easy to feel isolated as an editor. It’s already easy enough to lose touch with the fact that there are humans behind the usernames in places on the internet where the sole intent is to communicate with other users. There was a diverse group of attendees, from casual readers to active administrators, and older Zoomers to Baby boomers.

When I came in, an editor (I think it was User:OhanaUnited, who was also the meetup organizer) was providing a tutorial on how to contribute to WikiVoyage on the community room monitor. Z1720 also provided some guidance on citing sources on Wikipedia, while making it clear that his one true love is William Lyon Mackenzie.

The next presentation was a video call with Nunavut-based long-time admin Alan Sim. Although there was a bit of confusion concerning how to get the audio working, eventually we could hear him and gave whoever figured it out a round of applause. Alan provided some pretty interesting insight about what led him to become a Wikipedian back in 2005, and an admin a few months later, as well as the unique challenges that come with editing above the Arctic Circle. One of the main issues is lack of reliable internet access in the North, which ironically was one of the factors that fostered his editing hobby (besides the weather being absolutely freezing) as Wikipedia doesn’t take up much bandwidth. Nowadays, internet access is a bit more reliable as his area is being serviced by Starlink.

He talked about the intersections between his career in meteorology and his contributions to the project, including creating articles for airports in Northern Canada and uploading photographs of aircraft to Wikimedia Commons. His job, and residing in a fly-in community, is definitely reflected in his major contributions, but he also finds himself editing whatever happens to capture his interest, such as a time where he was focused on articles relating to Islam. There is an excellent write-up on Alan and his contributions that was published earlier this month by CBC News that covers a lot of what he talked about on the call.

The major takeaway from chatting with him is the desire to encourage more editors from further south to tackle subjects relating to Northern Canada. There was also a moment at the end of the call that I found to be personally heartwarming, as there was one other Wikipedian from another remote town in Nunavut who joined the call, and they exchanged contact information.

Following the video call, we had lunch and got to socialize with other attendees. There were plenty of sandwiches, fruits, and charcuterie board snacks to go around. User:Clovermoss was going around to folks and chatting about some of her works in progress so I joined them. We shared an interest in Canadian potato chip flavours and discussed what led us to becoming editors among other topics.

(Will continue shortly)