Interview with Jakob, one of Wikipedia's more prolific waterway contributors
- User:Jakec has been a Wikipedia editor for over two years and has been a writer of many recent Did you know articles on Wikipedia, including multiple articles on rivers and streams in the state of Pennsylvania.
Jakob, tell us a little about what brought you to edit on Wikipedia? When did you first start editing, and what were your first impressions of the site?
Back in 2012, when I joined, I was interested in exploring my local area via Google Maps. Naturally, I came to know something about local geography after a while. In August 2012, I was describing some details about a local mountain to someone, who suggested (sarcastically, I think) that I write a Wikipedia article on the mountain. I took the person literally and added a sentence about the mountain into the article on Columbia County, Pennsylvania. I registered an account a few days later and for a few months mostly did sporadic minor editing, such as replacing a few town articles' population data from the 2000 census with population data from the 2010 census. I began editing more actively in early 2013, but didn't become a very active content creator until later that year.
My first impression of Wikipedia was luckily very positive. The people I interacted with in my early days on the site were for the most part professional, civil, and willing to help newbies. The Teahouse also proved especially helpful in my first few days and weeks of editing.
What brought you to edit waterway articles in Pennsylvania, and what made you decide to nominate all of these articles for Did you know?
The first Pennsylvania stream article I edited was Fishing Creek (North Branch Susquehanna River), back in the fall of 2012, not long after I joined. I had visited the article out of curiosity and was somewhat disappointed to find that there were only two sentences. Over the next few months, I added a lot of info to it and in early 2013 it became one of my first Good Articles. Around that time, I also discovered the articles on the nearby Catawissa Creek and Nescopeck Creek via the navbox at the bottom of the Fishing Creek article. I began expanding those two articles as well and eventually began creating a few articles on some of the larger creeks in the area. I started creating more stream articles in early 2014. During the summer of 2014, I began to create them more systematically, starting articles on all or nearly all of the streams in a watershed, which is what I'm still doing. As for nominating articles for DYK, I basically do it because it's fun to share some interesting facts with a broad audience and have my work on the main page.
Have you had any conflicts with editors in the process of adding your work to the site, and how did you deal with them?
Actually, I haven't really run into to that many content-related conflicts. I'm pretty much the only person who's really actively creating articles on Pennsylvania streams these days (though there were a few other content creators in the field before my time), so there aren't many people to have content disputes with. I've gotten into a few disputes over trivial things such as article ratings and minor wording issues, though, and hashing it out on the other editor's talk page (or sometimes the article talk page) often results in something acceptable.
I see that you also edit other Wikimedia projects. How is the culture of those projects different from the English Wikipedia?
Besides the English Wikipedia, I mostly edit Wikidata and Commons. One thing that I've noticed about the culture on those projects is that they're much more inclusionist than the English Wikipedia. For instance, one of Wikidata's inclusion criteria is that a page (items, as they are called on that site) "refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity". On Commons, files just have to have "educational value" in order to be kept. More generally, the other projects are more freewheeling, expecting people to rely more on common sense than a lot of rules (though obviously there are some).
If someone wanted to get involved in local waterway articles for their own state or country, what advice would you give them?
Creating waterway articles is definitely something that is worth doing and it's also quite easy. There aren't very many existing articles (at least compared to the number of waterways out there), the bar for inclusion is pretty low, and sources are typically abundant. Maps show pretty much every named tributary and there are a few databases that have some basic information on every named stream. All of that information is useful, but definitely other information should be added if it can be found.
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