Annie Rauwerda at Asterisk:
Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the site, and how has your involvement changed over time?
Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.
Then I started the account — even though I felt a little like a phony. But I remember the first time I felt really excited about the Wikipedia community was when I got on a call with the president of Wikimedia, New York City, back in 2020. And she had told me about a guy named Jim who retired from working at the phone company. He worked in that big AT&T building that doesn’t have windows. I don’t know exactly what he did in there — but cables and stuff. Anyway, he’s retired now, and he spends all day biking around New York City and taking photos of infrastructure for Wikipedia, because Google Maps photos — and so many other photos — aren’t freely licensed. And I was like, that’s amazing.
More here.
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