Steve Bennett wrote:
And why do you care anyway? Vanity? Curiosity? Is it that important? Is a little piece of text on some idiot's webpage the difference between you contributing your time next time and not? Is the gratification of your name in cyberspace your primary motivation for producing useful free images?
Heh, thinking about it, I *will* swallow the bait. :-)
Let me tell you a real story from my own life...
But before I do that, let me sort of eviscerate a bit of the rhetoric there above. "Primary motivation" is a bit of a red herring in terms of phrasing. There is absolutely no need for something to be a primary motivation, for it to be a net plus when put into the scales as to it's utility.
...but now to my tale:
I committed the cardinal sin of writing a little bit about the school I was attending at the time, albeit as staff, not as a student. And in my defence the school was one with a special mission (The Natural Sciences, to be clear).
One of the teachers in the school brought up the wikipedia article and who were in its history fully unprompted by me, while we and some other people were at the coffee table. I sort of mentioned the last editor she mentioned, was me.
I did not make my initial edit to the article because I thought somebody in the school would be impressed, but when she clearly showed she was sort of impressed to find out the editor was me, I have to admit, I do feel a sort of heightened responsibility for that article and am definitely motivated to look after it.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen