User:Star651: Difference between revisions

Well, what do you know? Star651 is back! I got my account all the way back in July 2010 and created a lot of articles from August to December 2010, did a little bit in 2011 and 2012, and one new article at the beginning of 2014, but I was a middle school student in 2010 and a high school student in 2014, so my life got kind of busy, but I still wrote occasional articles for [[Encyc (MediaWiki)|Encyc]] every now and then, and even fixing the occasional grammatical error or adding to a disambiguation page on [[English Wikipedia]], but I just couldn't picture myself having more to say about wikis, and I started to wonder if I knew everything about wikis, so I wouldn't be surprised if I went several years without even visiting WikiIndex, let alone logging in. Maybe I questioned if wikis were even used anymore with modern social media. Well, I don't know what hit me, maybe because I started picking up some [[New World Encyclopedia|paid writing gigs]] in 2023, and the writing assignments are submitted via an invite-only MediaWiki wiki, maybe it reminded me to tap into my own wiki knowledge again. So in July I did some more English Wikipedia disambiguation, and discography updating on lesser-known artists who recently put out albums but nobody on Wikipedia had mentioned them yet. In 2018 to 2021 or so, I wrote a few articles for two still unlisted cryptocurrency wikis, one of which still exists and I will probably be listing it soon, so my wiki editing never truly stopped, and I'm trying to think if there was a year that I didn't edit wikis; I was going to say 2020, but I made that one edit to [[RationalWiki]] that year. As far as reading wikis, I have definitely never missed a year; I'm always reading something on Wikipedia, and as a music researcher, music for film and television comes up in my research a lot and I frequently end up on some [[Wikia]] Fandom wiki. Speaking of which, Wikia is where I got my wiki start in late 2009; back then, even well-known wikis like my favorite at the time, [[Uncyclopedia]], were hosted there. Starting in 2023, I made sure to read something on [[Googology Wiki]] every month or so; it was almost every day in 2013 and 2014. It is funny that I really got into this wiki in 2013, because I had actually heard of it in passing in 2010, and I knew enough about it to create its WikiIndex listing all the way back then, but I didn't know any more than that. But then some of my mathematical acquaintances started linking to it in 2013, I remembered the name, and I felt like I had added it to WikiIndex, but finally I decided to truly explore the site; turned out it was the best wiki ever! The numbers just got larger and larger in ways that a math class would never do; I never really liked math classes, but I do admit that some mathematical concepts are entertaining, including all of the ones found on Googology Wiki. So, as promised on the previous revisions of this page, when I said I would remain part of the wikisphere for probably the rest of my life, well, I definitely haven't left after all these years, though I am definitely part of more Facebook groups than wikis now. I would say that, for the most part, the most entertaining wiki has been [[Esolang]], as I have some coding curiosities. My biggest coding curiosity is language comparison, which I get to do very quickly when I read [[Rosetta Code]]. I'm not sure how many other people are like this, but as far as learning about wikis, I actually started with Wikipedia and learned about [[WikiWikiWeb]] a few years later; I mean, I know a lot of people whose first time hearing about wikis was Wikipedia, but as far as finding WikiWikiWeb after that, I don't know, but that was actually one of the first wikis I contributed to back in 2010. I would say that for most of my life, I had a MediaWiki bias, and wikis with CamelCase linking didn't fully feel like wikis to me, but that started to change; though MediaWiki is the most popular, in some ways, wikis based on the WikiWikiWeb system can be simpler and more accessible, though other non-open-source wikis can get overly complicated; being a person with a visual disability, I guess I like the nonvisual editing option, while also being aware of why some people might like a visual editor, so I guess wikis that have both are pretty awesome, but if all you have is a WYSIWYG with no markup, it's just hard for me to get into that groove, but again, I see the appeal, so wikis with both options are the best. For the most part, MediaWiki is the only wiki engine I know well, but due to my love of notetaking, I am making sure that August 2023 is my month to give [[TiddlyWiki]] a few good spins. So I guess my love of wikis is coming back to life, stronger than it was in 2010, and this time a little more open to wikis in general, not just MediaWiki and WikiWikiWeb, but still finding MediaWiki the most fascinating, and I'm finding creative ways to search for wikis online. But those creative ways can be difficult; maybe [[WikiApiary]] will save me some time in the MediaWiki department, can't wait to try it. For a while I was afraid that that site would replace WikiIndex, but if I remember correctly, WikiApiary might have a lot of automation, and WikiIndex is a community of people, and nothing can replace a community of people, so here I am again.