I started here on July 25, 2003. Because I'm such a nice guy, I was quickly elevated to admin status. I became a wikiholic almost immediately. I went through an early period of anger and frustration over "others" and their edits, but came out of it a pretty mellow guy with a changed philosophy on what a "commmunity" really means.

This concept (Wikipedia) is one close to my own hopes for the WWW. I am an environmental consultant specializing in ecology, biology, and water quality. In my free time, I maintain numerous web pages for professional groups to which I belong and pages on general educational themes about the environment in the Hawaiian Islands where I live. Editing is one part of my real job (as a consultant) that I enjoy very much.

I have been rewriting or revising Wikipedia articles on coral reefs and places in the Hawaiian Islands with which I am particularly familiar. My coral reef experience comes from extensive travels to Central Pacific atolls while working on a dissertation as a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. I still travel around the Pacific as part of my work, conducting environmental studies, although in the last decade or so I have shifted my interest from the marine environment to terrestrial plants (vegetation surveys), streams, and wetlands.

Other areas of interest include water quality, geology (especially as relates to aquatic environments), wetlands, and botany. I also spend a lot of time at Wikibooks where I work on the Invert. Zoo., Botany, and German textbooks.

I've had to give up working on Wikipedia. It was taking way too much of my time, and quite frankly I was finding much of the process stressful and unfulfilling. People here can be rude and negative feedback is a regular occurrence. On the other hand, I've never been one to require any kind of feedback and I'm quite satisfied with my knowledge and skills at this point in life. I think it is really me, not the Wikipedia community, but it started to be obvious that if one takes any degree of ownership of one's contributions here, one will eventually end up in an argument with some dullwit. And I'm not sure that is wrong for Wikipedia, but may explain why many leave disappointed from what has to be one of the more fantastic experiments on the web.

And the real problem that Wikipedia faces is becoming clearer: it is the problem of the "average". A regular encyclopedia or a published book is worked on by a group of experts and is put out there as an authoratative source of knowledge for others to learn from. Wikipedia, no matter who having what knowledge prepares what pages is always forced towards the common "wisdom". I do not mean this in a elitist way (although some rightly will say I am being elitist). I simply point out that Wikipedia will always have a problem being taken seriously because most people will come here not to learn, but to promote their own intelligence and ignorance. You see it time after time: information is changed not to fit some standard of excellence in a particular field, but because "most people" think or believe or use the information a certain way. And "most people" becomes the standard that is followed.

Anyway, when I say I had to give it up, I do not mean I will not continue contributing. I just have to do it on terms I can live with. I won't be "monitoring" pages I've felt ownership for, because quite frankly, life is too short and Wikipedia is, hopefully, forever.

Resources

• Wikipedia:Blank maps