Looking Back
Looking Back...
Times have come and gone. We grew up, we learned, we have lived with wiki in our lives, not only wiki alone, but the AboutUs community, ever changing, evolving, and growing up before our eyes...lets take a moment to look back into our history with wiki and AboutUs. Feel free to add your own story!
NickBurrus
I first started updating the page HopeForAnotherDay.org; I only knew the edit button. Kristina soon gave me a personal welcome message on my page with helpful links, I had nothing better to do, clicked them started talking to Kristina and before I knew it I was hooked! Yes, Kristina takes the blame for spreading the WikiFlu. I soon joined the AboutUs community on Live Chat and found out I loved the community more then I did before. By the way, did you know my first time spelling my real name I spelled it wrong?!
Two days after I joined Kristina granted me ActiveCommunityMember status; I absolutely had no idea what that meant at the time, it did not take long for me to piece it together. I started looking at other pages besides my own website; I begun editing minor things to the pages. I soon ran into Vartan Simonian and realized we had a lot of common interests. I continued learning about the wiki, reading guides where I found them, looking at source of pages like AboutUs.org, Google.com and so on, learning the code of the wiki.
Ted Ernst asked if I mind testing out the new permission group Peer Review; I had no idea what it meant, he explained it and promoted me. This was on 19 November, 2007! I soon got addicted to Peer Review and edited several pages and marking several patrolled, I started learning what good edits were, this was a positive thing in my learning experience of wiki. I was just in the 'right place' at the 'right time'. As November was drawing to a close, fourteen days after I joined AboutUs (two weeks!) I was promoted to Sysop due to an excellent job of not abusing my powers (or what ever the real reason was =P) as Peer Review as the Peer Review group powers were downgraded, I guess it was preferred for me to keep my current permissions (edit, delete, lock, etc).
I look back now, I was so excited to figure out my edit saved successfully when I first joined, now look at me, I was helping with CompostUs, editing pages to an advance state, people come to me for advice! It has changed, really it has. The AboutUs community gave me something to look forward to, I applaud that, this was an amazing learning experience for me and the technological world.
A half a year ago I really had no idea what a wiki was. Now, today, a half a year later, I am one of the world's premier wiki editors and wiki experts! Thank you AboutUs!
