For the past year, I've been doing a lot of work with Wikipedia, examining how it works and peeking in on its community. When I was writing my last post, Walkman Effect and Voice Filters, I was surprised to find out "Walkman Effect" had no presence on Wikipedia.

Long ago, I made many small edits to it to get a feel for how the interface works, but I've only just now created my first Wikipedia entry. It's extremely rare that I come across a topic that I know anything about that there isn't already an entry for. So this is MY first Wikipedia entry. MINE. I am the sole author and you had better not edit it.

Walkman effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Actually, in addition to wanting you to edit for content, I know that I screwed up the formatting in a number of ways. Most obviously, I couldn't figure out how to use the same reference multiple times. The "ref name=" tag didn't seemed to screw all sorts of things up. The result was a line in the References section for each use of the same article. I'm also having some trouble unorphaning it (fostering? parenting?) by finding articles that can link to it relevantly.

My primary motivation for writing it was not simply to add that bit of information to Wikipedia, but rather--more selfishly--to learn more about the editing community. I even added it to the Request for feedback page in the hope that some might come by to offer constructive criticism and bring up issues that I was unaware of. I'm only a little embarrassed to admit that I'd be a little excited if someone mistook my eagerness to learn for Wiki-diligence (because it's only just begun, my friend) and threw a barnstar my way.