User:Qwerty0/progress

Milestones in my activity on Wikipedia

This is where I'm trying to keep track of significant firsts in my Wikipedia career. Usually tackling a new subject involves self-education using the byzantine guidelines documents. This means that these milestones are roughly equivalent to the progress of my Wiki-education.

I could also see this being useful for others, serving as a briefing on protocols I'm currently familiar with. A Wiki-resume, if you will. note: this list is likely to never be comprehensive

Created account

December 30, 2005 5:48AM

Unknown when I started using the site or if I made any edits without a username.

First edit - Modest Mouse

March 23, 2006

Added a link to Modest Mouse's listings on songmeanings.net in External links section of Modest Mouse. Man, that was a bare article then. Almost seems the wild wild west of Wikipedia days, even though it was already 2006. Oh the rules, guidelines, and policies I had no inkling of! Did no one else, from the looks of it?

Oh, and as an epilogue, my edit of course did not survive to the present day.

First major edit - Braid (video game)

Nov 6, 2007

Actually wrote prose instead of simple fixes to others' writing. Took an article from consisting of an intro and trivia section to having two genuine sections and an in-depth description.

Created a userpage

April 14, 2008

"Wikipedia peruser and somethetimes editor if I find something amiss."

First image upload - Howard House

May 30, 2008

Went around DC taking photos requested for DC-related articles. Figured out rules for image uploading, then did so and included in the relevant articles.

Discovered "recent changes" page

Sept 16, 2009

So that's how vandalism gets reverted so quick! Yeah, I had some fun with that for a while, as evidenced by my contributions page. Also discovered how to quickly revert changes at this time.

Productive exchange on a talk page - elf-advice

Oct 3, 2009

Not really a milestone, but I just wanted to note the time I commented on Alfred the Great's talk page that the translation of "Ælfrǣd" to "elf advice" might be subtle vandalism. Within an hour I had two very learned responses explaining how the translation from Old English was correct.

Wrote a fair use rationale

Dec 17, 2009

Wrote for File:Adventskalender_1.jpg (by Simplicius, a German editor) for use in Advent calendar.

Involved a "my own work" photo which contained a product displaying copyrighted artwork. Figured out what licensing applied, figured out what is required to add to a fair use image's page, and wrote fair use rationale (for a situation with no available examples).

Fun facts:

Involved an image on Wikimedia Commons, so I had to discover the fair use policies for the Commons (none), then find out how it works changing files present in the Wikipedias but that come from the Commons.

Also involved a German editor, requiring me to find out where he spends most of his time (English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, or German Wikipedia), then use my German Wikipedia account and the translation powers of Google Toolbar to try to get him to make the changes to the image.

Current status:

Instead of the German editor fixing it, the guy who originally objected to my own photo's licensing accepted my rationale and fixed it.

First upload to Commons - File:Watergate Deep Throat parking garage space.jpg

April 8, 2010

Found out that uploads at Wikimedia Commons only have to be potentially useful to a project. So my photo can appear before it's approved for inclusion and added. Also, I learned the process of tagging, categorizing, and geocoding on Commons.

First update with recent news - Nuclear Posture Review

April 8, 2010

(kinda.) Small, perhaps forgotten article. But, I swear, the news was significant (three NYT articles). Obama's revision of the U.S. policy on use of nuclear weapons. It all came out two days ago and no one had added it yet.

First editing & replacing of an SVG diagram - Uniform Resource Identifier

July 3, 2010

Did my research & described it in talk page: the idea of a URI that is neither a URL nor a URN seems to be at best a theoretical idea from the beginnings of the Web. The original diagram on the page suggested this possibility and resulted in long confusion, seemingly for many people, trying to find one example of a pure URI.

After waiting a long time and hearing no objections, I downloaded the diagram, edited it to reflect the apparent reality, then re-uploaded it. I posted it on the talk page for review, then after hearing nothing (for 11 days) I put it in the article.

First use of article header "This article is about [word use]. For [other use], see [other article]." - FASTA

October 27, 2010

FASTA is about the software package that originated the file format. Many visitors are surely confused arriving there when searching for "FASTA", so I put an explanation at the top using the standard {{About}} template.

First contribution to a deletion discussion - AFD/November 9th, 2010 Southern California Missile Launch

November 10, 2010

I was actually the third contributor to this article after I read about it on Wired. It was being reported that there was a missile launch off the coast of LA and the Pentagon was scrambling to explain it.

But then it became apparent that it was just a jet contrail and was going to die in the news very quickly (i.e. end up not notable). So, having read plenty about the situation I actually weighed in on the deletion discussion in favor of Delete.

First redirect - Why animals don't have wheels

April 26, 2011

The plain-English title of Rotating locomotion in living systems (an awesome article, by the way).