[WikiEN-l] What sparked your interest in Wikipedia? (was Google thinks Wikipedia is a news source)

[Steve Bennett]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 3:58 AM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/6/15 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:
>
>> And then I ask what sparked other people's interests in Wikipedia, and
>> a really long thread results.

Like most time-consuming hobbies of mine, it started as a form of
procrastination, in this case, when I was supposed to be job hunting,
in late 2005. Somehow I got involved attempting to mediate a
long-running ridiculously trivial yet incredibly acerbic dispute
between two editors of [[Paris]] and related articles. 3 years later
it was still going.

I think what keeps me participating in various forms is:
1) Interest in acquiring knowledge - and restructuring and rewriting
existing articles, or writing new ones, is a much better way to
acquire knowledge than passively reading.
2) Vanity, in posting photos.
3) Nerdy satisfaction in rewriting bad prose.