User:Kudpung/UP Wikitivity

I began in 2005 by just looking stuff up and making occasional very minor corrections as an IP user. Some of the userboxes describe best what I did here. In early 2011 I was asked by many editors to consider being an admin. I thought I'd give it a go and was elected by what was in those days a very respectable majority. I worked solidly as an admin for 9 years, but it's not a job I would recommend for casual editors or the faint hearted; RfA is a walk in the park for a popular candidate, for anyone else it's still the most toxic venue on Wikipedia. It comes with a Sword of Damocles that can strike at any moment, and when it does, all the work you did for Wikipedia is trashed in an instant.

Off-Wiki

I attended several Wikimanias and other meetups. I was member of the WMUK Chapter and ran its booth at Wikimania 2014. Here in Thailand I occasionally used to give talks in schools and colleges about Wikipedia. Wikimania 2020 in Bangkok was cancelled due to COVID-19. The WMF, despite boasting about its grants systems, does very little to support or encourage it outreach workers or attendance at major events. At the end of the day, one asks oneself why the volunteers are helping to boost the celebrity salaries and life styles of those at the top.

Helping others

I made around 1,500 edits to the Editor Help Desk which ended when the Teahouse was created and finally took over. My talk page, at times one of the busiest on Wikipedia, was also always open to anyone wanting some direct help; I didn't know the answers to everything, but I did my best.
I was an Volunteer Response Team agent for a while until I was kicked off it for lack of activity, ironically when I was in the middle of resolving a high profile biographical issue which turned out to be one of the biggest in VRT history.

Other stuff

I still vote on almost all RfA and on all other elections. I have launched or instigated several major RfC on policy changes such as ACPERM and closed many minor ones. For obvious reasons I still write a voter guides for the Arbcom elections.

The ANI noticeboard is really ruled by what is often referred to the 'peanut gallery', a semi regular cohort of wannabe admins who never will be. It's is little more than kettles and pots yelling at each other like the dead common characters across the cobbled street of Corrie. Occasionally some undesirable users do end up getting blocked and banned, but the BOOMERANG is a very common phenomenon.

The Signpost: In 2018 I saved Wikipedia's newspaper from ceasing publication completely and remained as its Editor-in-Chief for several months. It's still being published on a monthly basis, usually on time, but no longer with the same enthusiasm or rich content. With the contributors of interesting and/or entertaining content having been intimidated and driven away or given up, it's now less of a magazine and what's left is mainly a newsletter of facts of the month and yet another platform for WMF propaganda. I consider The Signpost (or at least a magazine) to be a hugely important source of information and opinion for the average (and not so average) active Wikipedia editor, and it's a shame that so few are interested in being regular contributors to it, and it's recent 'editorial board' has collapsed again already by December 2022.

Wikimedia Foundation, the 'owners' of the volunteer Wikipedia projects, has always been a thorn in Wikipedia's side. That bloated, partly extremely highly salaried and privileged group of people that has gone from 7 to over 700 employees in my time, spends more of the funds our work generates on its own high-flying existence, while the volunteers are frequently called upon to clean up the mess it creates and its gross professional errors and ambitious drafts of its plans for the future. I have been fortunate enough to have been able to stimulate its involvement in some necessary development, but today's WMF is still its own worst enemy and it lacks the trust of the volunteer communities. The WMF is no longer so enthusiastic of the main role of creating good encyclopedias in many languages; instead, it sees itself as becoming an important, global socio-political movement. It's not what the volunteers editors signed up for.

Wikipedia is not a social network

No, it's not, but Wikipedia is like a large office. There are clear sociograms that crystallize out of the work here, and for those of us who work voluntarily day-in, day-out on WP, there used to be something nice about it. Unfortunately there are some regulars who do their best to piss people off - but you get them in every office. Some of them will be responsible for the ultimate demise of the English Wikipedia. Since mid 2019, the Arbitration Committee (and some of its former members), the ultimate internal judge and jury over user behaviour, has been largely instrumental for turning the project almost into a police state; George Orwell's novel 1984 has been described by the encyclopedia of police science as "the definitive fictional treatment of a police state, which has also influenced contemporary usage of the term".

Retirement

Too old for the Wikipedia drama, some health issues I was lucky to survive after a long hospitalisation, I decided to call it a day and deleted my watchlist, stopped my work in most areas and retired. Apart from making minor corrections on the fly while reading articles and perhaps voting or commenting on issues I still think are important enough to spend a few minutes on, I am no longer actively engaged in content, Wikiprojects, or outreach work. I've frankly had enough of this circus and its poor excuse for a collaborative project. I do make an occasional effort to maintain and update the many articles I wrote, but I don't own them.

Next?

Trump, Taliban, Biden, Brexit, Afghanistan, North Korea, Global warming - floods, famine, drought, wildfire; COVID-19, Ukraine, UK politics - what a year 2022 was.
Wikipedia's own back office environment is now one of the most unpleasant volunteer collaborative spaces on the Internet; its Arbitration Committee, Paid Editing, and pompous wannabe admins are well on track to turn Jimbo Wales' original idea into an (un)natural catastrophe that will ultimately destroy this project. My grandchildren are currently cleaning up the WMF's mess and of course doing it for free.
2023? Probably like other disenchanted users, I've already moved on to make myself useful on other collaborative web projects where experienced, industrious users do not have to work alongside governance obsessive careerists.