Sometime in 2004 or 2005, I first head of Wikipedia. It was this online encyclopedia with a lot of interesting articles. And the links! Oh the links; they transport you quickly to topics you’ve never even heard about. I soon learned that this marvelous resource was editable by people just like you an I. I was already familiar with free software, so the crowd-sourcing aspect was a concept I was already familiar with.

Becoming more involved, I joined the ranks of the editors and then administrators seeking to organize, revert and discuss the ever-growing content that formed the encyclopedia. My use of e-mail skyrocketed, as I found myself participating in long-winded mailing-list discussions about the intricacies of fair-use media and whether or not joke articles should be preserved. I also tried poking at the software, since it too was open source and asking for contributions.

Somewhere around this time, I became disenchanted with Wikipedia. Perhaps the administrative processes had taken their toll, or maybe I was just tired of arguing. I had never been a good writer (on or offline) so I couldn’t “get back to writing articles” or something of that nature. Facing a void, I turned to Veropedia.

Veropedia was a now-defunt venture by Danny Wool, myself and a few others to showcase the very best of what Wikipedia had to offer. Scraping (yuck) static versions that had been proofread and then using those for display to the end user. Vero was looking for a new developer, so I stepped up. I spent about a year or so working on the project and actually made some decent milestones. I managed to get a Lucene-based search going as well as ported our entire article validation script to PHP from Perl. Our technology was a hodgepodge of scripts, mostly because the original developer thought MediaWiki had too much overhead for our needs. Planning out a MediaWiki-based phase 2 of our software became the new goal.

So I started getting more involved with MediaWiki development. I got commit access, and started working on various bugs that were hindering Veropedia development–sidebar: I originally discovered the libxml2 entity bug while working on some customizations for Special:Import. And so Veropedia kind of just stayed the same while I chugged away at MediaWiki. Somewhere along the line I stopped really caring about Veropedia. I was busy with work, school and now I’d taken up MediaWiki development in my spare time.

Veropedia is dead. At least Veropedia as I’ve known it is dead. Actually, the server I had it living on just got shut down today. I’ve still got the leftover backups lying around, but the site itself is down. Danny still has the domain names if he ever wants to use them again, but I’m done with it. It’s not a wiki.

And that’s really what it’s all about to me at this point. Some point while working on MediaWiki, I realized that that was what I really wanted to do. Work on wikis. Veropedia wasn’t a wiki. Arguments on mailing lists and talkpages aren’t wikis. Collaboratively editing text is what MediaWiki does and what I’m proud to help support. I’ve started working with the Foundation on a contract to support FlaggedRevs/Pending Changes and it’s exciting to make the move from being a volunteer.

I really think that workflow systems like the one I’m helping to support really improve the wiki model. They help pages be as open as possible to editing while still allowing editorial control. And producing free, high-quality content is really what MediaWiki is designed to do. I think it’s pretty cool that I can help make that happen.

Sorry to see Domas leave the board, he was among my more favorite candidates. Overall I’m pretty happy with the results though.

I’ve voted against the change, even though I know I’m in the minority here.

Had a friend of mine over, and we got to talking about reading and literature in general. She began talking about this classic lit course she was taking this semester, and how they had just finished reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. Pulling my copy off the shelf (which I can’t even find on Amazon…), I mentioned that she could’ve borrowed it.

She mentions how she couldn’t find a good copy online to read, so she had to check the book out of the library (the horrors!). To be honest, I’m not sure she looked very hard….a quick Google search returns a lot of results. In any case, I pointed her to the Wikisource version of Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso. Amazed, she said that this not only would’ve helped with Dante’s work, but several other of the authors she read over the semester as well.

On a similar note, I actually came across one of the library issue cards like these the other day. I wonder if kids born since the late 90′s even know what those things are.