I have decided to stop contributing to Wikipedia for a while to reflect on the experience. I have contributed to more than 700 articles (120 of them of my creation) through 4000 edit. When I started my vacation, I wanted to evaluate this experience. Here are my findings although I haven't reached decisions about yet:
1- It kills time. Literally. Contributing to it makes time goes so quickly that you feel your life is passing by without noticing. I do not know if this is something good or bad.
2- Working with Wikipedia requires different type of mindset: unownership. You must contribute elegantly and professionally, however, you should not have a feeling that you own your work. You continuously defend the accuracy of your work. You do it, to ensure factual reality and not because it is your work. It is a new thinking that will require more understanding and research!
3- The Arab wikipedians are still in their infancy. They are not able to comprehend this new paradigm. Most articles contributed are useless. Still focuses on TV programs and football or nationalistic knowledge. While serious knowledge articles are ignored and many cases opposed. This is an interesting phenomena that is worth analyzing.
4- The Arab contributors to the Wikipedia feel proud by proofing others wrong. They just delete articles for the silliest reasons because they lack the maturity to investigate if there is validity and because, I believe, they feel proud with the number of cases they prove others are wrong! In my case, 20 articles were deleted and reinstated. THis shows that the decision of deleting them was wrong in the first place.
5- I have decided to limit my contribution to Wikipedia to 2-hours idle time (i.e. the collective minutes between actual work.) In addition, I want to make an effort to create a larger arab team to cotribute to the Arabic wikipedia.
more to come...
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