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[edit] What is a Wikipedian?

An excellent question. Like many clubs that both wish to sound non-exclusive but actually, really, be exclusive, the word "Wikipedian" has changed, morphed and wiggled out from under all sorts of definitional rocks over the years. In its purest form, a Wikipedian is simply someone who uses Wikipedia. Or, more accurately, who edits Wikipedia - if you're just some tourist stopping by to browse and find out when John Wayne Gacy was born, well, don't say you heard it from us, but you're a meat-turd. Totally out of the game before you even started. A true wikipedian would look at that John Wayne Gacy article, and do something to "improve" it... maybe cut out a sentence you didn't understand, or change the spelling to the (wrong) way you spell it, or maybe just drop in some trivia about Gacy you heard about him losing a lung to cancer... oh wait, that was John Wayne. Well, someone will fix it.

But say you're someone who edits on Wikipedia. Well, congratulations! You're a Wikipedian! Uh, sort of.

[edit] The First Slap

See, it's one thing to edit on Wikipedia. It's another thing to edit a lot on Wikipedia. In an ideal world, you're considered a Wikipedian since you're doing work, but it is a lot of work? Look at some of these guys. Thousands of edits. Hundreds of changes a week. And you, with your pathetic 20 or 30 little dashes in and out of the database, with a smattering of additional bits of information, what are you? Really, what are you? We're thinking meat-turd again. Sorry, keep trying.

Within a relatively short time, you're probably going to run into a little, shall we say, conflict. You're going to make a change to an article, come back to do more editing, and find it was changed back to how it was. Hey! You put that in there for a reason! Well, let's go look at this "discussion" tab, because you've got a bone to pick, mister!

So you put down a little question: "Hey, what the nuts with removing my fact?"

And, after a short time, someone will probably write back something helpful, something informative, like:

"Thanks for your contribution, but it does not comply with Wikipedia's NPOV-policy. Therefore, I have removed your contribution. Also, please use a real signature...at the end of your posts." [1]

Huh? That wasn't even English. What in tarnation is a NPOV? What policies? Who is this nard who just blew away my work?

[edit] A Vital Decision

You have two choices, at this juncture. You can come to the horrifying conclusion that Wikipedia's open-editing rule means that not only can people work together to improve it, they can also sit around masturbating out jargon and acting like school marms on everyone else who is trying to help. You can check the bookmarks on your browser, find some pornography, and blow out of Wikipedia's editing window as fast as you can. Check on Wikipedia's entries every once in a while, take away the basic facts, don't get hung up on it, and stick to places where shit makes sense.

Or, you can decide to hunker down. You can set up a user account, start editing everything you can find, enmesh yourself into the politics, the lameness, the backstabbing and moronity, and fight an ever-present desperate whirlpooling battle of contract law, miserable personalities and microscopic anal details. You can run out of additional information to add to subjects you know, and instead tunnel deep into shit you don't have the slightest notion about, using your intense knowledge of Wiki-jargon and gaming the system to fight every bastard who tries to change an article in a way you don't agree with, or which might have any information you're unable to garner in the first 5 matches of a Google search.

[edit] A Sad Realization

After a while at this, you will look up from your screen, realize you have achieved an expansive case of Secretarial Spread, your computer surrounded with soda, chips and candy, and your hands twitching, wanting to reload the page to see if that meat-turd from Whocaresia dared question your changes to that article on that dead king that someone else is trying to have deleted...

...and congratulations, you are now a Wikipedian.