The internet is full of obsessives indulging private vices; pundits, bloggers, trolls and the like. I am no different. I am that peculiar sort of creature known as a Wikipedian; that is, a person who contributes to the online crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. I have been at it since 2005; over ten years now.

I specialize in articles on speculative fiction and literature in general, Elizabethan theater, American comics, and ancient history. In the speculative fiction area, I’ve done a lot of articles on L. Sprague de Camp, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lin Carter and Robert E. Howard, and lesser numbers of articles on scores of other authors. Most of these articles are on their works; on individual series, books and stories, but I have written some biographical articles as well.

In the area of general literature I mostly do biographical articles on semi-obscure figures; important people, in their ways, but people largely unfamiliar to the world, like Alfred Richard Allinson, Reginald Bathurst Birch, Robert Black, Henry Ames Blood, Alfred Elwes, Tudor Jenks, Harold Preece, Wentworth Smith, or Mary Tappan Wright. As a fellow unknown laborer in darkness, I have a particular sympathy for such as these, and am happy to help make them known to a broader public.

What with one thing or another, as of November 15, 2016 I have created 864 individual articles for Wikipedia, and edited thousands more.

Wikipedia articles tend to be multi-authored; if not at first, then as time goes on and different editors add, subtract or change material. Most of those I’ve created have retained a majority of content by myself, unless it was originally a stub, a starter article with minimal content, generally posted by someone who lacked the time, knowledge or resources to do better, at least initially. Yes, I have added my share of those, though I usually return later to beef them up.

The general user may be interested in knowing how to determine the primary author(s) of a Wikipedia article. It is, actually, possible. To do so, click on the “View history” tab at the top of an article. It will take you to a list showing the complete revision history of the article, by time, date and author, from the most recent revision to the initial posting of the article. For an article with multiple revisions the list will likely extend to several screens; go to the bottom of the initial screen and click on “oldest” to get the earliest of these, and then scroll to the bottom of that one to find the initial poster.

Authors are designated by user name rather than actual name; only in rare instances will these be identical. If you click on a given user name in the list it will take you to that editor’s user page, where he or she may (or may not) reveal his or her actual name. My user name is BPK2, and my user page, as it happens, does reveal my actual name. But you can’t count on that happening. An article can be identified as essentially single-authored if the majority of revisions and content added are by one user.

All the articles I have created are linked to on my user page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BPK2.

Edits do not require anyone’s approval, unless a senior editor has “locked” a page to forestall consistent and ongoing vandalism. A would-be editor simply clicks on the “Edit” tab at the top of the article (right next to the “View history” tab) and enters such changes as he or she desires.

There is, obviously, ample scope for vandalism. However, most conscientious users click on the “Watch this page” box at the bottom of the edit screen when they make their initial edit, and thereafter the system will track all changes anyone makes to the article for that user. So in practice there are usually a fair number of watchdogs alert for vandalism ready to revert any malicious changes soon after they occur. Most such vandalism is obvious; such people are not usually subtle.

Of course, legitimate editors can disagree about what sort of edits are appropriate, and edit wars can result. However, Wikipedia has codes of conduct, procedures for resolving disputes, and senior editors who can lower the boom on bad behavior.

As a result, Wikipedia is probably about as good as any crowd-sourced resource can be. Still, one can see why most educational institutions don’t accept it as a proper source for term papers and such. It is most valuable as a pointer to more definitive information. With Wikipedia, it is always best to “trust, but verify.” If a fact therein is unsourced or looks fishy, definitely do some further research—and then, if you’re a kind and conscientious soul, correct Wikipedia!

Wikipedia is obviously something I do for fun, not profit, a situation in which the good deed has to be its own reward. Others have occasional looked at the insane amount of work I have done on it over the years and asked “Don’t you think you deserve to be paid for all that?” Well, it is a moot point. I am not, and neither is any other Wikipedia editor.

There are pluses and minuses to committing research for free. On the plus side, my work becomes part of the common fund of human knowledge. And I know people are actually reading it, since they are adding to it, correcting it, and occasionally ... ripping it off. Which brings us to the down side...

On the down side, I have observed over time that my work has been reused in other contexts without attribution. It is not just that it is credited to “Wikipedia”—that is only to be expected. It’s that it’s not attributed at all, leaving the reader to assume it’s the work of the reuser. I am particularly galled by folks who scoop up Wikipedia content and then publish and sell it on Amazon or wherever as their own work, often for a ridiculously steep price. Any idiot who falls for that sort of scam probably deserves what they get, but for the scammers themselves, I can only hope a special circle of Hell is reserved for them.

This sort of transgression against decency also chokes up the web with duplicate material, unfortunately. Every so often, searching the web for, say, good de Camp reviews, I encounter something that looks promising in the search result, only to find on examination that it merely regurgitates Wikipedia content—most often, mine!

By and large, however, the pleasures of sharing what I know with the world outweigh the annoyances of seeing it plagiarized.

—Brian.