User:Awien

SEMI-RETIRED

This user is no longer very active on Wikipedia.

Words to live by

"It's good that we have rules, but it's always important to keep in mind the greater goal of making a good encyclopedia. Blocking socks is good. Putting stops to crazy edit-wars is good. But whoever has a point, has a point. If there's a person breaking several rules at the same time because they don't have a clue (either temporarily or permanently) then yeah, we have to deal with that, with warmth and good humor I hope. But we also should never make Wikipedia wrong so that some annoying person doesn't "win" something." Jimbo Wales, September 5, 2012

Me

You may call me Awien, pronounced ah we EN, three almost equal syllables, but with slight stress on the last.

I became aware of Wikipedia in the summer of 2006 when Wikipedia articles started showing up among the first half-dozen results of Google searches. By following those links I became aware of the project, and its objectives rang a bell with me right away. This is hardly surprising since I was a teacher (French lecturer) before I retired.

My initial reaction was that it was an interesting experiment, which I decided to follow in order to determine whether or not the result would be the useful and trustworthy reference work Jimbo envisioned. So I read a lot of articles on subjects I was familiar with, and was immediately impressed by the fact that even though many of them were pretty sketchy in those days, the information was usually correct, and the references led to good sources of fuller information. I also put those pages on my watchlist in order to follow how they evolved, and here too I continue to be impressed and even amazed at how consistently good information drives out bad. I had to declare the project a success.

At the same time, I started editing myself, initially fixing the typos and grammar and spelling mistakes I encountered, but gradually moving on to working on content too. And here I still am, basically a gnome, but doing my bit to ensure that what we say continues to be correct. Along the way, I have learned a lot about a lot of things, and have come a little bit closer to the goal I had when I was four years old of knowing everything about everything. Only a little over three and a third million articles to go and I'll be there.