Edit counts!

[lian]

Inofficial post is unofficial and curious.

I only very occasionally add stuff to Fanlore, but I used to be a heavy editer back in the day. So it idly occured to me to check my edit count: I've never done that before, but apparently it's right there under "My preferences".

Turns out my edit count is 1,208. Hmmm... honestly, I have no idea whatsoever whether that's meagre? average? creditable? (I thought it was more, tbh, seeing as I do tons of silly little typo edits etc.)


Indulge me -- what's your edit count? And how does it compare to your expectations? Any anecdotes you want to share?

Comments

[bridgetmkennitt]

I have 60 edits!

My edits have been on very few pages, mostly the ones I made, though I sometimes fix spelling errors that I see on other pages.

[facetofcathy]

1,423

We should bear in mind that talk pages count as edits, so anyone who's been involved in a lot of conversations about how to do things on talk pages will have lots. And in the early days, before my time, there were a lot of those conversations.

I want to know Mrs. Potato Head's number though, so we can all be in awe.

[sqbr]

50! Which is about what I was expecting, I only go through editing phases very rarely.

30,283

[morgandawn]

But I edit pages in small batches and then save due to a propensity for my browsers to crash. So a single page is counted multiple times.

Re: 30,283

[par_avion]

30,000+, you Rockstar!

[kylara]

932. Not really sure what I was expecting or what to think about that. My first edit was almost exactly two years ago, so it works out to just over two edits a day on average, which is kind of neat.

[hl]

60! Which makes sense since I made like only two or three pages and corrected mostly the same amount -- if that. I would do more, but I never know how to start.

The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[morgandawn]

goes to Mrs Potato Head at....115,878. But like me, she saves as she edits so that creates multiple counts for a single page.

[hermitsoul]

67 for me. Which makes sense, I'm usually there for research more than anything else.

[onceamy]

2,538

Which surprises me -- I thought I would have done more. Most of my edits are concentrated on single pages, though, so I guess I can't complain.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

42,286. Pretty much what I expected. *g*

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

There is no WAY to play that number down. ;)

[lian]

Happy edit anniversay, then! I admire your constancy.

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[lian]

But of course there are multpile counts for a single page ?_? does anyone edit differently? Probably not prudent. I always do lots of mid-edit-saves myself. That doesn't discount that sublime number at all! :D

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[kylara]

I totally avoid mid-save/multiple edits. It's just so nice having it perfect (not that there is such a thing on a wiki) in one go. Also, other than simple fact-checking, I'm generally nervous about editing so I'll work on and save edits in a notepad file for a few days to make sure it's accurate and to my liking before doing one massive edit. For instance, at the moment I have a few pages in notepad only; they're redlinked on Fanlore. One day I'll be happy enough with them to add them....

If I did mid-save edits, maybe my number would be triple? Haha!

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[lian]

Interesting! I edit as I go, basically -- if I don't get it onto the page right away,I never do. I only keep offline notes where I collect quotes etc. and other research, but it's pretty rare. I try to wean myself off perfectionism in wiki editing too -- the only thing I'm completely anal about is sources XD

[lian]

Whoa, massive! Hope you feel a glow of satisfcation:3

[kylara]

Thanks! Hardly been constant though; I'll go for weeks without doing an edit, and then suddenly Fanlore will consume me for a weekend or two. Well, maybe being consistently sporadic counts as constancy? XD

[lian]

I checked the work wiki where I'm an admin (well, sort of, non-tech admin) and I only had 8k edits there.

Wat. -_-;

I edit that wiki *every day*.

[lian]

But if you then feel compelled to edit a little while researching, that's even better :D

[lian]

I'd say so, yes! I only have an edit spree uhm...once a year or so. ^^;

[lian]

I always nab into recent changes and se eif there's anything interesting. I'm ...pretty sure most editors do it more systemtically, though ^^;

Re: 30,283

[lian]

Oho!

[lian]

Still a good measure of activity, then :)

[lian]

Ugh, at least you don't abandon pages midway through (-> my Dragon Age curse ;_;)

[lian]

That's a sweet number, though. And I like how low the threshold for typo-editing is on Fanlore...I don't do that on Wikipedia, I admit >_>;

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

I'm ...pretty sure most editors do it more systemtically, though ^^

Seems like you are right. Editing is easier if you have a plan. The most successful plan so far is "documenting ALL the zines!"

Other plans include: "everything Forever Knight", "everything Mary Renault" (which means that we have more pages about The Charioteer fanfiction than about Harry Potter fanfic. No, seriously. XD), and "documenting ALL Digimon doujinshi".

My personal plans include: "I ♥ Merlin/Arthur", "if it's good enough to rec, it's good enough to make a page", "Big Bangs FTW!" and of course "documenting ALL the fanfic/fanart/vid pages". ^^°

[lian]

Oh, I have plans alright ("o hai there video game cats!" "QUEST FOR SOURCES, BRB"), but editing is also easier if you're dedicated to actually keeping to the plan :P let's just say that's not exactly my personal strength...

So I absolutely commend your dedication to Plans With Cute Names! :D

[onceamy]

I'm terrible at plans. Though one plan that I feel has been successful is for me to document things as they happen in areas I care about or see a lot of. The lack of Tumblr sites is another area I'd like to have more brains to document.

Still working on getting Fanlore's name out though and every article helps with that.

And of course there's always my pro wrestling page filled with redlinks that I could fill in

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

but editing is also easier if you're dedicated to actually keeping to the plan :P let's just say that's not exactly my personal strength...

That's why I have more than one plan! I'm fickle and I need to switch between things. The trick is to break it down into small parts that make you feel accomplished (also, I have a notebook where I write down every page I make and then cross it out; that means I have pages upon pages with crossed out stuff and never more than one or two "to do" items) and relax with low energy edits when you don't feel up to more (adding the date cats does it for me XD).

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

Though one plan that I feel has been successful is for me to document things as they happen in areas I care about or see a lot of.

That's a good plan. :)

The lack of Tumblr sites is another area I'd like to have more brains to document.

Just making short pages with the name, link, general description and a screencap is usually enough. The more pages you make, the more stuff turns up that you can add to the other pages you've made.

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[(Anonymous)]

I look at my stat page every few months and shake my head. That's a pretty big number! But like Morgan, Lian, and others, I work as I go, which creates multiple edits. That process fits my work-style brain-wise.

When I edit, I have multiple windows open: the Fanlore page I'm editing, the Fanlore page I'm using to search the wiki to add to the edit, and/or the Fanlore page I have open to upload an image. In the reserve are my tabs: my word document cheat sheet with all my codes and templates and reminder hints, my personal mail account, my work mail account, the program for my scanner, and the site for my music (89.3/The Current!). I have a really tiny screen, maybe 7x10 inches (smaller than a 8x10 piece of paper anyway, it's the smallest Mac laptop) and keeping all this straight in that space is a challenge.

My to-do list on my user page is what keeps me going and organized. That, and red links where red links shouldn't still be. Like Doro, I have to switch off and on between types of work, or I get bored or overwhelmed. I make some meaty pages, mindlessly add dates to images, check sources, do general research, and then some systematic clean-up. I have to mix it up. And all with my to-do list in mind to keep me focused.

Recent Changes is a place I like to check often, because if someone's working on a page, I like to see what she or he is doing. It gives a certain energy to the work at hand. I also review the corrections that other folks make so that I can learn to do it better the next time. I find that very helpful.

When I stumbled upon Fanlore in July 2009, all I was planning to do was to add some zines to it in a single fandom. I swear! That's it! But as I did, I was reminded that those zines didn't exist in a vacuum, and that zines touched upon all sorts of other stuff -- cons, flyers, writing contests, awards, production techniques, glossary terms, and were the basis for all sorts of fannish things today. The whole world of pre-internet media fandom became something I wanted to help document. There are bits and pieces of fannish history here and there, but nothing that really ties things together. I thought the best place to do that was on a welcoming wiki where fans could pool their knowledge. And to get the ball rolling? Start writing about media zines, ALL media zines. Not only would this preserve the fanworks themselves, but it would branch out and show, in a much clearer way, how everything fit together, what fans talked about, what they expected from each other, how they viewed their "rights" as fans, the difficulties fans faced, and how they communicated and created in a world they really cared about. None of it any different that what fans have always been doing, of course, but in a different medium, one before computers.

I think it's been a marvelous journey so far.

MPH

[morgandawn]

My other projects(besides "Helping Mrs Potato Head 'Document ALL The Zines'" are:
*Document ALL The Conventions
*Document ALL The ALL The Vids (this plan is much more vague so it a bit harder to carry out)
*Document Virgule-L (the first slash mailing list) - which includes cherry picking interesting conversations and getting permission to summarize/quote with attribution

and my personal favorite....
*Document ALL the Supernatural Big Bangs.

But you're right....with so much to document and only one slightly battered editor, some of these projects will stretch over years

[sophinisba]

*applauds*

[meg_r]

781. But the vast majority of my edits are veeeery minor, fixing typos and adding wikilink brackets etc.

[lian]

The noble art of wiki gardening, that is! <3

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[lian]

That was fascinating -- thank you so much for sharing your journey into editing superstardom :D It think the kind of interconnectedness that you describe is exactly what attracts me the most about wikis -- interlinking, referencing, that's the stuff of my HEART. It's exactly what makes keeping on track hard though, I always get my priorities mixed up. The next red link always backons!!! Haha.

(Also, for a me as a firmly internet-era fan, these are rather invaluable historical lessons.)

I can't believe you're managing this on a tiny tiny monitor though! o_O

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[(Anonymous)]

I think of editing like knitting a very, very long scarf. The interconnectedness, pulling bits from here and there, is the key, and it is why I love it. Sometimes a bit of fannish info pops up, like a convention name, a theory, a reference, or a word, and I swear I hear the physical sound of another piece of the puzzle locking into place. Everything builds on everything else, and it's all related; it's then just a matter of creating paths that people can navigate.

That twenty-five year stretch of pre-internet media fandom is seminal, and what's on Fanlore is still just the tip of the iceberg -- but at least it's a start!

The tiny monitor? Sometimes it's hard to read stuff, and to be able to stack more open windows would be great, but so far it's working for me. :-)

It was a neat question you asked; I like hearing how other folks edit and all the different styles and plans.

MPH

[(Anonymous)]

I think that's an important thing to remember; EVERY article is important.

Here's three reasons:

1) it adds content to which fans can add, making the article that much more complete
2) it adds content to which fans can link, making existing articles that much richer
3) it adds content, which, and as awils1 comments, gets Fanlore's name out and encourages the first two

Never, never feel that a page or an edit is too small; I can't even begin to count how many times I've added the very barest mention of a fanwork, only to come back later with many more details, or hooked up information to pages that the original creator may have made thinking, 'Oh, this is so trivial or small..." They're all pieces of the puzzle, and every little bit helps tell the stories.

MPH

[onceamy]

I never even thought of screencapping -- I am going to own at documenting the Texts From Last Night stuff that I have bookmarked now :)

Yes, documenting the big events in your fandom -- even if it's just a stub of links that somebody can click on (however I notice Webcite is not working well, so this makes me worry for link rot) is definitely helpful.

Re: The Winner of the "Get A Life? I *Have* A Life! Now Let Me Get To It!" Award

[onceamy]

I had a vague feeling you wore pioneering on a tiny screen -- I really would like to implement a mobile skin that actually lets you edit (a lot of the ones I've seen around are focused on viewing). It's one of my priorities when my (mental) health gets a bit better.

[morgandawn]

I am hoping that WebCite will be back online soon (I'll give it a week after Labor Day). I've decided that I need to link to the actual page, with WebCite as a backup (I had been lazy and was only using WebCite for unstable pages - now I'll use both).

I am going to test Zotero today as a means of organizing snapshots of webpages.
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/lls/choose_citation_mgr.html

19,514

[aethel]

19,514 and a lot of those are from marathon editing sessions changing templates or categories on massive numbers of pages. I don't really have a plan for adding actual *content*, though when I started editing back in 2008, I worked on Due South and vid pages, and there was that GeoCities phase in 2009. When I write content, it takes fewer edits, but a lot more time. Mostly I check RecentChanges or look through the gardener to-do list and then five hours later remember I was going to eat or go for a walk or do my laundry or something.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

I want to know Mrs. Potato Head's number though, so we can all be in awe.

The answer to that question is here (http://fanlore.dreamwidth.org/47195.html?thread=455003#cmt455003). A very impressive number! :)

Re: 19,514

[lian]

That made me think of the Who Writes Wikipedia? essay, with the "gardener" edits contrasted to the "content" edits. I think Fanlore's editing culture is quite different, though. It would be interesting to find out, but probably too much effort.

then five hours later remember I was going to eat or go for a walk or do my laundry or something.

...this. >_>;