Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

17,558 edits since 2003.

I generally don't contribute, because the rules are incredibly complicated and I don't really care for them.

Recently I stumbled onto an article with a [citation needed] after watching a video that (I suppose) would have been the perfect citation for it (I mean a mustached retired high school teacher, speaking about the old times, that's the best source you can get!).

Hell broke loose, the doc for video citation is intractable, so I wanted to put the link on the talk page for someone with knowledge to do it, but youtube is banned in text. So my wikipedia career in on hold until my motivation crosses a certain threshold. It's not beginner friendly, and i don't really care about their editing procedure (it's mostly based on the scientific one which is bogus too).

If someone cares, it's on White Lead talk page.

Yes, but I've substantially reduced my editing over the last 3 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gwern / http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume / http://www.gwern.net/tags/Wikipedia

I only ever correct errors or add extra detail. I've never created an article or written anything substantial, mostly because the risk of having substantial work removed because I didn't "do it right" is extremely unappealing to me (and I could spend the time on my own business or content).

I think you have to be extremely intrinsically motivated or community minded (both good things, of course!) to contribute significantly there because the only reward seems to be happy about a job well done.

i used to contribute. But now I don't. Too many times my edits were changed back.

People want their stupid links on the site and they're plastered everywhere. In the future, the first thing you'll read about Leonardo da Vinci is that he came in 8th place in your Time Magazine Gold Special Genius Award with a link to the Time Magazine website. Of course in the fine print you'll find out that the award was decided by readers' votes.

You'll see this trend when you look at British people on wikipedia like Tim Berners Lee who was ranked number 1 in greatest living geniuses in 2007 by of course a british paper. A few years ago, this was mentioned in the first paragraph of the wikipedia article.

The future of wikipedia is the largest pile of spam on the internet.