Burntblossom is a Wikipedia editor.
Userboxes
 | This user is a member of WikiProject Unreferenced articles. |
History
Okay, let's do this!
I think I was afraid for a bit to make this page more personal, and maybe even afraid of like, getting more personally involved in Wikipedia as a project. It means a lot to me, it was one of the first places I found myself to feel free when I was a kid: Wikipedia, books, video games, and the woods. Anything I was curious about, I could look up on Wikipedia, and I learned so much. About the world, about myself through the things I was interested in, about other people and the way they saw things too.
I could talk about what it means to me now to be able to edit the virtual world that brought me ... not joy exactly, but some kind of meaning, or some kind of space in which meaning could rise up.
But ultimately,
editing Wikipedia itself is probably my biggest love letter to it.
Then there's imposter syndrome thoughts, thoughts about whether or not I can actually do justice to it. I don't have much original knowledge of topics that really intrigued me when I was a kid, like ball lightning for example, because a lot of what I learned about ball lightning I learned from Wikipedia itself.
But then, even though my editing is largely probably meaningless, it still feels good to try. To be an active part of this homonculus of a social experiment, even if it's small. And maybe sometimes it's not small. I do think I can find sources that others can't, sometimes. And I have some knowledge that others don't....
Anyway!
No one is really going to read this.
But,
I still think it's worth it to try to articulate how much Wikipedia means to me, and specifically now how much it means to me to be trying to learn how to edit it, how to do right by it, it's a kind of time travel back to my past self, to all past selves maybe
I'll figure out how to talk about it, some day.
If you read this, and are touched by it, as it unfolds into whatever it is becoming, drop me a line! Maybe some sort of essay I'm wholly unqualified to write about virtuality and shared dreaming, shared lucid dreaming, participation in the collective defining of reality itself