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Wikipedia Résumé

A precis of my work on the English Wikipedia, 2004–2017 (edit counts, articles by subject, and particularly notable articles)

Over the more than decade I have worked on the English Wikipedia, I have written a few things. Some might wonder what, exactly, but not want to dig through >95,1331 edits (on English only). But even I don’t remember everything I have done!

Sources

I’ve done my best to pull together a list of my major contributions; I’ve based it on the results from the toolserver, specifically 2 of Soxred’s tools which return lists of pages created and articles most edited for a user:

  1. Most edited articles:

  2. Articles created:

Those lists are unreliable, however. They are incomplete; ‘created’ may be misleading, as I make many redirects which may be turned into an actual article by a later user (for example, I am credited with creating the valuable computer science article green threads when all I did was redirect that name to the main article on threads). The tool tries to filter out redirects, but may be wrong. The most-edited listings are also misleading in the sense that a great many edits on a page may simply be undoing vandalism; I do not list René Descartes below because my dozens of edits there are just reverts and I do not feel reverts are a particularly valuable service. Article writing is. Some such articles are listed where I have watched them for many years and feel that my supervision has risen to the level of a major contribution. Conversely, sometimes I have written articles offline and then added them as single giant edits with a few followup edits to fix formatting errors; such articles would not show up very highly on the most-edited list.

I am certain that some of the following entries are erroneous, and I have omitted some articles that should be included. But I have done what I can. I am especially proud of the highlighted articles such as the Medici bank, Brethren of Purity articles, and the Fujiwara no Teika article.

Subject Areas

Psychology

Technology

Functional Programming

History

American History

Japanese History

Philosophy/religion

Islamic

Art

Japanese Art

Philosophy/religion

Chinese

Literature

Chinese

Japanese

Anime/manga

Western

SF

Star Wars

  1. This is based on summing total + deleted edits through Kate’s editcounter; this apparently leads to an underestimate, since the live editcount (2012-05-12) in Special:Preferences for User:Gwern is 42,400 edits versus 38,806 according to Kate.↩︎

  2. My Teika article bears a unique distinction: it is the only Wikipedia work on which I have profited (as opposed to the 3 stalkers I earned at various points), by selling it to the New World Encyclopedia (a Moonie encyclopedia).↩︎