Category Archives: History

Celebrating 20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor

a pink-ish box with 2004 in big letters on the left side and then on the right side the text 'I have been editing Wikipedia since 2004-04-21, twenty years ago'

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 20 years ago that I set up an account and first made an edit to Wikipedia! On that day I became a “Wikipedian”… although I’m not sure if that name was being used yet. Wikipedia had only been launched in January 2001, so it was a VERY different world in those days.

With the complete transparency of Wikipedia, I can of course go back and see what my earliest edits were. It’s fun to scroll down the list. Amusingly, my very first edit would be frowned upon today. I added the URL for my employer at the time, Mitel, to what was then a very sparse article with five paragraphs of text with no sources or references. (Compare that to today’s article for Mitel.) Today this would be considered a “COI edit” as I had a “conflict of interest” and per the “WP:COI guidelines” it would be recommended that I not make this edit directly (although it was just adding something factual in the form of a URL, so other editors may allow it).

But back in 2004, those were still the very early days when everyone was still trying to figure out what this Wikipedia thing was all about. The norms and conventions for things such as WP:COI hadn’t yet been developed.

The only other edit I made that first year was that same day when I first created my “user page” with one sentence linking to the other sites where I wrote. (How many people remember Advogato?šŸ˜€) Twenty years later, that user page looks MUCH different!

Then in January 2005 I started creating and editing pages around Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and later in the year about.. Canadian food! šŸ¤£ (We were living in Ottawa, Ontario, at that time.) And then a whole bunch of other pages, many of which are still in Wikipedia 20 years later, although substantially edited by others since that time.

After that, I didn’t really do a whole lot of editing. In the first 15 years (2004-2019) I made a grand total of 146 edits.

And then… came the COVID pandemic.

As one of the ways I dealt with my own mental health during that time, I started livestreaming Wikipedia editing to Twitch! šŸ¤£ (Which I haven’t done lately, but will probably do tonight just to celebrate the anniversary.)

Every. Single. Day!  For most of a year-and-a-half! šŸ¤Æ

You can see this clearly in one of the tools available to see contributions from Wikipedia editors:

Dyork-wikipedia-yearly-edits

You can see there was even a year (2008) when I didn’t make a single edit, and one year (2012) where I made only one single edit.

And then… BOOM… 2020 hit and there I was!

What’s interesting about 2020 and 2021 is the salmon-colored block on the right. This was what is called a “template” and was where I was manually copying in the daily data from the Vermont Department of Health to update the chart that appears on the side of the article about the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont. Every single day. Later in 2021 someone thankfully automated that so that it pulled the data direct from the Vermont Department of Health’s system, but for all that initial time it was a completely manual process – and was part of what I did each night on my Twitch livestream.

With that burst of activity during the pandemic, it caused me to dive deep into Wikipedia and learn about parts of the site and community that I had never really engaged with, and that in many cases hadn’t even been around in the earlier days when I first got involved. I learned a huge amount.

And out of that I became endlessly fascinated with how the whole Wikipedia community – and broader Wikimedia movement – has evolved, and I continue that fascination today. As you can see from the chart, I’m continuing to edit in 2024 and plan to keep on going.

In fact, I’m seriously thinking about bringing back the livestreaming. (Follow me on Twitch to be notified or over on Mastodon where I’ll post if I’m streaming.)

Wikipedia has definitely changed a huge amount over time, from being a site that was initially dismissed and derided, to today being one of the sites where you can go for well-sourced information. Sure, it definitely has its quirks and problems, but overall I believe it’s definitely a positive force in these times when we are so challenged for good information.

Given all the changes that are happening with the way we find and consume information (thinking of generative AI in particular), it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia evolves over the next 20 years!

Meanwhile, there are articles to edit and users to welcome… šŸ˜€šŸŽ‰

An companion podcast episode is available at:

20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web

IMG_3981This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, ā€œLJā€ was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today.

My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier in April 2009 saying where people could find my writing. I havenā€™t really written there for most of 16 yearsā€¦ since back in 2008.

In those early days in the mid-2000s, LJ was a vibrant, social place to be. There were no advertisements and it was one of those amazing places of creativity during that time. Strong communities were built and thrived. Many of the ways we started interacting there (ex. ā€œfriendsā€) would carry over into later services.

Wikipedia outlines some of what happened after thatā€¦ Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site to SixApart and I think they understandably wanted to figure out how to turn it into a business. But then in 2007 it was sold to a Russian media companyā€¦ and things changed more and more after that.  (Viewing my site today I am amused to see some of the ads displayed to me having Cyrillic text.)

In my own case, Iā€™d started to branch out. Those were the glory days of ā€œbloggingā€ as a thing, and at the end of 2005 Iā€™d launched first Disruptive Telephony and then Disruptive Conversations as places where I very prolifically wrote on different topics. I continued to use LJ as a place for ā€œpersonalā€ bloggingā€¦ up until I decided to start up the site you are reading this article on.

Still, for a few years, it was my home on the Web – and Iā€™m grateful for the time that I was there!

Capturing My Own Memories Of The Internet’s History (and Pre-History)

449160366_memories_of_Internet_history

Last month I boosted a post on Mastodon where an early pioneer of networking relayed an amusing story about shutting down part of the ARPANET during a storm. After I did that, I was asked ā€œ@danyorkĀ Do you have a similar story from your archive?”

As I said in a reply,I have stories, but none quite so dramatic. Born in the late 1960s,Ā I got involved with the Internet in the mid- to late 1980s at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).Ā Ā I was not part of the late 1960s / early 1970s group that was involved with the ARPANET.

But I was at UNHĀ before it became part of the Internet. We used BITNET and there was UUCP and USENET around. It was during my years there (1985-1989) that UNH became part of the Internet. I remember it being a Very Big Deal for those of us in the Computer Science program. Suddenly we would be getting ā€œ@unh.eduā€ email addresses and could connect to everyone else on this growing Internet.

And I was involved with BBSs and early ā€œinformation servicesā€ that pre-dated all of that.

Ariā€™s point struck me, though. There are many of us who were around in those early days of networking who are walking around with many stories in our heads. Stories of the early days. Stories of how things were before we have the ubiquitous connectivity we have today in many parts of the world (but not all!).

There is value in capturing those stories. In part so that others can perhaps understand how things came to be the way they are. Or to learn how things once were. Or to perhaps spark memories in others. Or for the history fans to just read about what people remember.

There is value in writing or recording these stories NOWā€¦ before we forget more of them. Before people get too old to communicate – or before people die. Or, as someone I knew once wrote in the prologue of a memoire of hisā€¦ ā€œbefore our memories get so good that we start remembering things that never happened!ā€ Ā šŸ˜€

So I think Iā€™ll start this for myself. Here. On this site in a new ā€œHistoryā€ category. I donā€™t know that any of my memories are particularly dramatic, and may only be of interest to myself and a few others. But Iā€™ll start capturing them, probably in no particular order.

What about you? If you have stories of the early days of networking, can you share them somewhere?

Image: generated by DALL-E 2 with the prompt “memories of Internet history”