I never planned to be a Wikipedian. But Fate has a way of dragging people into spaces (including the Wikipedia user space) they never dreamed of occupying.
A few years ago, I googled to check if there was any online article about my former hometown. I found a few of them in personal and "official" websites, as well as – you guessed it – in Wikipedia. When I read the Wikipedia article, I instantly discovered typos, grammatical errors, and rubbish in it, particularly in the list of names of the town's founding fathers. From my intimate personal knowledge about the town's early history, I know who the founders are; so when I saw three or four names that clearly didn't belong, I felt the urge to strike them out. Fortunately for me, there was an "Edit" link on the article page, and when I clicked it I landed on the editing page! There was just one problem, a warning about my IP address to be recorded if I didn't register a username. Not wanting worldwide publicity for my IP address, I registered.
A few keystrokes later, I returned to the editing page and got rid of the offending names. Not only that, I succumbed to the temptation to rectify spelling here and there, overhaul sentence structure, and reorganize flow of thought in sentences and paragraphs. I saved the edit, and then the article became less unpleasant to my eyes.
Did that incident make me a Wikipedia editor? In a way, yes. But I had the funny feeling that there was a lot to learn about Wikipedia before I could summon the courage to tag myself a WP editor. The feeling was triggered when I saw strange pairs of square brackets [ ], curly braces { }, and angle brackets < > (with embedded cryptic words) strewn all over the face of the text editor while I was busy editing.
It crossed my mind that becoming a real editor might somehow boost my ego, and the only way to make that possible was to embark on a learning journey. The journey did happen – and still continues to happen to this day – in small steps, if I may add.
As of December 2014, I'm still struggling with basic things like Talk pages, Infobox, even wiki markup. But that's the price I have to pay for journeying at a turtle's pace, and I still can afford it.
