I have no idea what I was doing on the 28th of November 2007 but, apparently, that's when I first logged in to Wikipedia. Which means, as of right now, my Wikipedia account is 18 years old!
I didn't make my first edit until April 2009. That was for the nascent Ada Lovelace Day.
Since then, I've racked up a bit over 600 edits which simultaneously feels like a lot and barely anything.
Every edit gives you a crude representation of how many characters you've deleted or added. If I've done my sums right, I've added about 86k letters to Wikipedia and deleted about 25k. So a net addition of 61K characters.
That feels like a worthwhile contribution to the commons.
5 thoughts on “My Wikipedia account is now old enough to vote”
@Edent I quite enjoyed the synchronicity of my account's 20th anniversary being the day after the Wikimedia Summit that I attended in Berlin last year
| Reply to original comment on dataare.cool
Keith Nasman
I just checked mine and am amazed that it is old enough to drink alcohol in the US (21)! My first edit was on the 14th Dalai Lama page back then and I have an appallingly low number of edits until this year, when I thought I'd to an edit each month (failing!).
I’m wondering - assuming age verification ever comes for Steam - if my 22 years old account will just get rubber stamped 🤣🤣
| Reply to original comment on bsky.app
Well you just made me look mine up. Mine was created 28 March 2006, so that I could add a redirect page from "Slope glider" to "Radio-controlled glider", which is apparently a legitimate synonym for a certain subtype of them.
I have no idea why I did that. I don't remember doing it. I have no interest in radio-controlled gliders. But apparently that's my first non-anonymous Wikipedia edit (I definitely did a few anonymous edits earlier on).
I then went on and made a few minor tweaks and bits of wiki-gnoming here and there before going on to write the majority of the article on "session hijacking" a couple of months later. Ignoring the time I accidentally deleted and then quickly reverted a 55,000-character article, "session hijacking" remains my second-largest edit ever, over 19 years later.
I should do more.
Mine is from 2001. But Jimmy asked us PhpWiki maintainers then to be able to use our code, but had so many strange feature requests that we said no. He wanted to represent ' ' as '_' e.g. so pages couldn't be naturally mapped 1:1 anymore. He just took our diff. The first content in the first year was nice though. Not as today.
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