Saturday, December 23, 2006
Some user feedback
Finished about 12 more articles on the woredas of Ethiopia and put them up on Wikipedia. Now only the woredas of seven more Zones in the Oromia Region -- about 80 in number. What makes this last leg of this project so slow is integrating the information from the Oromia Regional government website.
Yvette and I went down to Salem to have dinner with my sister and her daughters. At the end of the visit I mentioned to her youngest, who will be 15 in a few days, that I had been contributing for four years to Wikipedia -- something that she found cool. Then again, this may not be a typical teenager reaction, seeing how she's not a typical teenager. She's big into Star Wars, and even had her own light saber -- an impressive artifact that she bought on the Internet for US$ 120.
Perhaps a little more typical is the reaction of her sister's boyfriend. He didn't know of my relationship to Wikipedia at the time, but commented that Wikipedia can be pretty useful -- "unless you encounter an article that was written by someone who thinks he knows everything." I have a pretty good idea of the type of person he means, having encountered a few who have exhibited that trait in the course of making my contributions. I only hope I'm not another of that type, although I sincerely believe that I do know a great deal about certain subjects I've contributed to.
Geoff
Yvette and I went down to Salem to have dinner with my sister and her daughters. At the end of the visit I mentioned to her youngest, who will be 15 in a few days, that I had been contributing for four years to Wikipedia -- something that she found cool. Then again, this may not be a typical teenager reaction, seeing how she's not a typical teenager. She's big into Star Wars, and even had her own light saber -- an impressive artifact that she bought on the Internet for US$ 120.
Perhaps a little more typical is the reaction of her sister's boyfriend. He didn't know of my relationship to Wikipedia at the time, but commented that Wikipedia can be pretty useful -- "unless you encounter an article that was written by someone who thinks he knows everything." I have a pretty good idea of the type of person he means, having encountered a few who have exhibited that trait in the course of making my contributions. I only hope I'm not another of that type, although I sincerely believe that I do know a great deal about certain subjects I've contributed to.
Geoff
