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!

I have been a registered member of the Wikipedia community since January 3 2004. I actually discovered Wikipedia sometime in 2002, curiously enough through the Esperanta Vikipedio, while searching the web for Esperanto resources, which were then scanty. I did not sign up, however; I was a slow starter in recognizing the value of the project. I rediscovered Wikipedia in late October 2003, while doing a Google search for materials relating to Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), following her recent death at the age of 106. This time, I began to rate the project a little more highly. I made a few anonymous edits here and there, before deciding to "commit myself" by registering formally on the third day of 2004.

As of 24 March 2005, I have clocked up 7905 edits, of which 5410 are in the main article space. 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 21 April 2005, there are 250 of these. They include 130 original contributions of mine (not counting categories), plus a further 19 rewrites - articles started by others, usually as stubs, but which I have so totally rewritten as to make them effectively my own work. Another 102 articles have undergone major editing at my hands. Almost half of my articles (101 altogether) are connected with the Fiji project I undertook in February 2004; all but 15 of them are original contributions (plus 3 complete rewrites). 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. Accordingly, when my goals for the Fiji-project have been met, I will adopt another small nation, probably another Pacific Island nation, to write about. As of now, the project is still far from finished. I have recently resumed work on it, following a two-month hiatus.

Of course, there are a number of other topics to which I turn whenever I need a wikiholiday from my Fiji project. Most of these concern political affairs and biographies. In the second half of 2004, I took some time out to cover the Pitcairn rape trial of 2004, a crisis that shook the tiny island to the core, and of necessity added some touches to related articles as well. In addition, I have recently been updating quite a number of Lebanese-related articles, and have also contributed some of my own, as the recent national uprising in that country has stimulated public interest and brought about an urgent need for a comprehensive, reliable, and up-to-date resource for the public. Unfortunately, I found that many of the articles concerning Lebanon were two or three years out of date, many were biased towards a particular POV and some were downright inaccurate. Worst of all, many significant political figures and movements in Lebanon were not documented in Wikipedia. I have decided to play a part in rectifying that situation. To date, there are 39 articles pertaining to Lebanon that I significantly edited; of these, 15 were created and a further 9 completely rewritten by me.

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 175 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.

Outside of Wikimedia, I belong to a number of other wikis, including HierarchyPedia (where I am a sysop/bureaucrat as of 6 December 2004). Almost all of my contributions there are copied from my contributions here. That will probably change in due course, however, as Hierarchypedia's objectives are different from those of Wikipedia.

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 11 April 2005, the total Wikipedia project consists of almost 1.5 million articles in 175 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.

A certain creative tension exists among Wikipedians who describe themselves as inclusionists and deletionists , respectively. I long avoided taking a stand, concurring with Australian evangelist John Smith 's summarizing of his own political inclinations as a bird that has both a right wing and a left wing. I would now say, however, that I have come to lean increasingly towards the inclusionist position, though not rabidly so. I still have a "deletionist wing," especially when it comes to material that I consider to be pornographic. I take a negative view of editors, whom I consider vandals, who insist on uploading reviews (euphemistically code-named "articles") on every latest pornographic movie that hits the video industry.

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