I live in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. I had read articles in Wikipedia over several years. I finally joined at the beginning of 2005, and started filling in some gaps in things I know something about. Most of the articles I created or added to in my early years were about South Australian geography - towns, highways, regions, rivers. Most of them were quite short and marked as stubs, in the hopes that someone else would add info I didn't know. I'm gradually expanding my interests. I have tried to assist with the historic Australian Politics articles and also a few other Australian topics, as well as edits for places I've been to or other articles I read and notice problems with. After a few years of very few edits, I am back with wider interests, but still generally South Australian and Australian.
WikiProject Australian places covers all places in Australia, especially if not under a more specific wikiproject. I have also added coordinates from Geoscience Australia to many of them. The results of early coordinate tagging in Wikipedia can be seen by Stefan Kühn having created a Google Earth dataset[1]. It is now much more obvious with the WikiMiniAtlas link at the top of pages with coordinates.
I revived the Australian collaboration of the fortnight which had become sadly neglected through the first part of 2005, however interest waned again a few years later.
WikiProject Geographical coordinates works to standardise representation of location in articles, and being able to do useful things with locations such as displaying locator maps, maps of places, and maps of areas highlighting links to all Wikipedia articles about things in that area. My main contribution has been to add coordinates to South Australian town articles, and working through other geographic features, and other states, but slower. m:WikiMiniAtlas is a handy way of checking that coordinates are roughly right, and finding other nearby articles.
I supported the Wikiproject Stub Sorting in helping to move stubs and short articles to the stub categories where they might be best noticed by experts. I encourage all Australians to review the Australia stubs category and its subcategories and see if you can expand a few articles.
The Red Link Recovery Project is an interesting way to read more of Wikipedia, and help the project, too.
Wikipedia milestones
I started this table when 1000 edits sounded like a lot. Of course, since then I've become more involved, and joined stub sorting and red link recovery wikiprojects which lead to much larger numbers of smaller edits. Whenever I find an article with no category, I try to add at least one relevant category to it.
Using AWB to fix links to articles that have moved also pushes up the edit count quite quickly.
Edits ( all namespaces) since 2 January2005 (there have also been a few anonymous ones):
I also had a list of most categories and articles I have created, but it is way out of date.
Some of the people for whom I have created articles were Governors of South Australia. I have ensured that the entire set have at least a stub. Most now have as much information as I could find on the internet.
The /plain town names list contains all the placenames from the Australian postcode lists, with their state name removed. I can use it to find mis-named new town articles.
Perform some of the tasks and redlinks listed in the templates below.
