Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-12/Featured content

Wehwalt gives his fifty cents; spies, ambushes, sieges, and Entombment

Two sides of the Walking Liberty half dollar, the subject of a new featured article. The obverse (left) features a depiction of Lady Liberty walking towards the sun. The reverse (right) depicts a Bald Eagle, the National Bird of the United States, rising from a mountaintop perch. Wehwalt, who brought the article to FA, gives us an anecdote of his experiences below.

This week, the Signpost interviewed Wehwalt, who has made significant, often critical contributions to 60 featured articles and numerous good articles. Wehwalt, who began editing in 2005, shares some of his experiences on the encyclopedia.

Featured articles. I first edited Wikipedia in 2005, and I think, like most of us, they were minor edits at first; I remember it took me some time to get the hang of referencing. I got into FAs quite accidentally. I saw the Borat movie and not surprisingly looked it up on Wikipedia and did some editing work. Lenin and McCarthy at the time was pushing it forward and eventually got it through FA and TFA; I was along helping him out. I really didn't understand what FA was yet, but it was a good apprenticeship. Then I started working with AuburnPilot and Kww to push Natalee Holloway through FA, which was not easy. FA is famously not easy to break into and there were definitely some difficult moments, but it all worked out and I think the article has held up to time quite well. We keep it updated. I then did my first solo article, Jena Six, which perhaps has not held up as well due to relatively few articles that allow me to update it. I think the next one, Albert Speer was my first really good article on my own. It is very difficult to write neutrally about Hitler's best friend.

Ensuring the quality of older featured articles. The major problem I have with my oldest articles is deadlinks. I've never had a FAR, but if I see there's a high number of deadlinks, I go back and take care of them. I find the writing in my older articles a bit more stiff than I do today and I go back and modify where I can.

Important things for new editors to learn. The social aspect of Wikipedia is important—I don't see how it would work without it—but the tendency towards endless time-wasting drama is very unfortunate. That being said, it was probably inevitable that it would happen, as we build a social structure "backstage" at Wikipedia, and as that structure becomes increasingly important to editors.