User:Graham87/Personal Wikipedia timeline

This is a history of my major activities and interesting milestones on Wikipedia and occasionally other Wikimedia projects, from vandal-fighting to wiki-archaeology and everything in between, as well as a brief summary of my early experiences related to blindness that shaped me as a Wikipedian. Most of my major Wikipedia experiences have been positive, many have only come about due to bizarre coincidences, and some have been shaped by vandals and malcontents. This is not a comprehensive list of everything I've done here and as far as possible I'll try to stick to the positives (I won't explicitly mention vandals who were reverted after 2008, for instance), but some vandals have had quite a major effect on my editing patterns (many of the pages on my watchlist are there due to unreverted vandalism) and deny recognition is only an essay, after all. I have done various interviews in the past but I wanted to tell my story on my own terms here ... and sometimes it's easier for me to recall things by writing them down this way. This page has a lot of links for people interested in Wikipedia's history but hopefully other people will get at least something out of it.

Apart from the first two sections, I'm formatting the list as a chronological timeline because I think that makes the most sense and keeps the list focused and easier to read. All dates are in UTC, Wikipedia's time zone, as compared to mine in Western Australia, which has almost always been UTC+08:00 since Wikipedia was founded. I welcome any constructive edits to this page, particularly for formatting.

Early technology access and encyclopedic experiences

As alluded to on my user page, I was born fifteen weeks early in 1987 in the Western Australian capital city of Perth and became blind due to retinopathy of prematurity. I had a fraternal twin brother, Craig, but he died 13 hours after being born; being a twin greatly increases the risk of preterm birth. Here's a summary of the specialised accessible technology that I had access to as a child, much of which shaped me as a Wikipedian:

• Braille, especially the Perkins Brailler, a mechanical Braille writer. My mother, a primary school teacher, taught me to read and write Braille at the age of 3–4, against the advice of blindness educational authorities, who felt I was too young for this. At the age of eight or nine I started making up languages based on removing and sometimes adding dots to Braille cells, inspired by broken keys on the Perkins Brailler. I occasionally used the electronic Mountbatten Brailler during my schooling (but that was more often used by people transcribing Braille for me to read), but I haven't had much experience with Braille displays.
• The Speak & Spell toy, which my mother first gave me at the age of three. I went through several versions of this toy, one of which was the Super Speak & Spell, my first regular exposure to a QWERTY keyboard. (My mother also put a Braille overlay on the keyboard so I could use it, especially handy for versions with a membrane keyboard, but text on the screen that wasn't spoken (on applicable models) was obviously still inaccessible to me)
• The Eureka A4, a portable Braille note-taker made by the Australian company Robotron Group that I received aged four in 1992, through the efforts of my mother, also with much resistance from blindness educational authorities. It used old technology even for the time, running MS-DOS's predecessor, CP/M, on a MicroBee computer whose only permanent storage method was a floppy drive. This stands in stark contrast to the mainstream computing world, in which 1992 saw the release of Windows 3.1, almost all computers had hard drives, and CD-ROMs were becoming more common. The Eureka had features that were and are not normally built in to computers, such as a music composer and a thermometer, both of which I became obsessed with. As for games, apart from some custom-designed for the machine, I mostly played adaptations of text-based games from the 1970s and 1980s, such as interactive fiction by Infocom and many programs from the BASIC Computer Games series and other related collections (especially Super Star Trek). I taught myself to tinker with programs in BASIC at the age of seven, using the Eureka's manual. The Eureka was my primary computing device until 1999, when I was aged eleven, and was still working until 2004.
• The Language Master, a talking dictionary manufactured by Franklin Electronic Publishers, which also contained among other things a thesaurus, a Classmates system (like basic Wikipedia categories), a grammar guide, and word games. I mostly used it from 1996 to 2001.
• JAWS, a Windows screen reader that I learnt to use in 1997 at what was then the Association for the Blind, where I had my first long-term exposure to personal computers running both Windows and MS-DOS. When I obtained a copy of JAWS for home use on the family desktop computer in 1999, through a grant from Rotary International, I began to use the basic training casette tapes to teach myself much more about the software than I had learnt at the Association. For various reasons, up until 2012, I often only had access to out-dated versions of JAWS.
• The Braille Companion, a braille note-taker made by what was then Pulse Data that I received in 2000 and used for most of my schoolwork (until 2006). It ran MS-DOS 5.0 (released in 1991) and had an NEC V30 processor (released in 1984). Along with its own suite of productivity software called Keysoft (like a highly minimalistic Microsoft Office for the blind), Only very old text-based programs, such as the BASIC games I mentioned above (via the GW-BASIC interpreter), would work with it. I was probably one of the last people to receive a Braille Companion; it was the predecessor to the BrailleNote, a Windows CE-based machine released in 2000.

Blindness technology like this is generally not well-documented beyond the very basics. Therefore, to learn more about these technologies (especially the older machines), I later trawled through resources such as Usenet FAQ's and old software archives, so reading FAQs and documentation came naturally to me when I began editing Wikipedia.

I've always been fond of correcting people; Wikipedia's one of the few places where this trait is generally appreciated! As a kid I took great delight in pointing out Braille mistakes in class-work I'd been given. Braille books were relatively scarce due to the time and expense it takes to make them, and I wasn't generally a big fan of talking books, so I had to make do with what reading material was around at the time. I only liked a limited variety of fiction as a child but, apart from exploring the Language Master (see above), messing around with numbers and mental calculation, phases of obsessive listening to my local radio reading service for the blind, 6RPH, along with ABC News Radio, listening to music, and playing the piano (see below), I most enjoyed reading such things as joke-books, a brief medical encyclopedia, the Tactual Atlas of Australia, Braille and talking book catalogues, an Australian children's encyclopedia, random school textbooks, and Read, Sing and Play, an introduction to Braille music. I'd had brief encounters with encyclopedias on CD but they weren't very accessible.

After I obtained home Internet access in 2000, I developed these (relatively unusual) interests that influenced my Wikipedia editing:

• Interactive fiction (from 2000 until 2002), though I was never good at playing it and basically collected it for its own sake. Browsing the Interactive Fiction Archive was fun though.
• 1970s BASIC games, which I rediscovered on the Internet in 2001. I used to frequently delete/clean out old files (there was only so much that could fit on a Eureka's floppy disk!),but after I rediscovered these old games I became more of a digital hoarder ... which led towards my wiki-archaeology later.
• The weather, especially Australian weather forecasts and observations, which were the subjects of some of my early major edits (see below). My weather obsession developed in late 2003, just over a year before I started editing Wikipedia.

I wish this didn't need to be explicitly pointed out, but my childhood and life in general has been very much unlike that of most blind people; as a group we have a variety of interests and levels of ability. I was much later diagnosed with autism and that along with my prematurity has caused several other challenges that most blind people don't face.

First contacts with Wikipedia (early 2000s – 2004)

I believe I first encountered the word "Wikipedia" in about 2001 or 2002, shortly after the site was established, through the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC), which I think I'd previously encountered at the Association for the Blind. FOLDOC listed Wikipedia as an alternative place to search for information when a result couldn't be found. I was very cautious about visiting/trusting unfamiliar sites back then, so I rarely if ever followed the link to Wikipedia. I vaguely remember looking up something there some time later (perhaps GW-BASIC), and thinking that MediaWiki was the most ridiculous name for a piece of software I'd ever heard!

In October 2004, inspired by a conversation at a Braille Music Camp I attended, I searched Google for information about Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 and found a fairly comprehensive entry about it on The Free Dictionary, which turned out to be a Wikipedia mirror. (The fact that I extensively read Wikipedia first through a mirror later led me to try to strongly enforce the guideline about avoiding self-references). I finally had a relatively comprehensive source of information at my fingertips with a consistent user interface! I avidly began reading entries there, not aware that it was possible for anyone to edit them via their original source. I preferred the interface of The Free Dictionary to that of Wikipedia so I continued to use the former site for a while ... until I tried to use its site at school, and noticed that its interface was different over the computers there for some reason. At school I preferred Wikipedia's interface and that's how I discovered that it was user-editable ... and the real fun began!

2005: the beginning

• 17 February: I finally discovered that Wikipedia could in fact be edited by anyone, created an account, and made my first edit to what was then the List of interesting or unusual place names article. The fact that these edits are still around is something of a minor miracle, though I don't have any strong opinions about whether the page should stay now. I initially edited under the username Pianoman87; Pianoman was my old nickname on chat rooms for the blind because I used to like playing the piano, while 87 represents my birth year but the username Pianoman was still free then. Many of my initial edits (including the very first ones) were based on things I'd noticed while reading TheFreeDictionary mirror.
• 18 February: I made my first edit in the Wikipedia namespace to the super-obscure page Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) (now a redirect), which I probably found from an FAQ. The page didn't get another edit for nearly nine months. Also on that day I made my first referenced content addition (by early-2005 standards) at Marble Bar, Western Australia, naturally about the weather. I remember using the 2005 equivalent of the cheatsheet to help me out with this and other early edits.
• March: by this stage I had become a perennial lurker on Wikipedia and to some extent I still am; I regularly skim-read admins' noticeboards, requests for adminship (RFA), etc. The first ongoing RFA I remember reading was Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Tony Sidaway. Later that month, I got my first talk page message, a welcome ... better than a warning!
• 1 April: I made my first edit to a talk page to create Talk:Dionne Warwick. Back then most WikiProjects did not routinely tag talk pages so Nonexistent talk pages were common.
• 27 April: I created my first article about the Australian government Bureau of Meteorology. I can't remember precisely why I started it (besides my weather obsession), but it either had something to do with this edit to Cyclone Ingrid or this one to Darwin, Northern Territory, which I remember being the Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight at the time.
• 14 May: I reverted vandalism for the first time; I obviously didn't check my watchlist daily then!
• 17 May: I first revealed my blindness in this featured article candidates discussion, where I had been accused of vandalism for incorrectly changing the spelling "Wear and tear" because my speech synthesiser didn't speak that phrase properly, and later that date created my user page. By then I had started lurking on the featured article candidates page, which I enjoyed for a few more months until discussions became more heated and standards became ever higher.
• 27 May: I made my first post even tangentially related to accessibility about hard-coded spaces as number separators, which are not read correctly by my screen reader. I didn't get much traction then, nor did I expect to, but I made more progress with this issue in October 2014.
• 30 May: I made my first edit to an article in Wikipedia's magazine the Signpost. I still enjoy reading and occasionally contributing to it to this day.
• 3 June: I discovered the administrators' noticeboard and made my first post there to report a typo on the Main Page. This was just under a year before the standard place to report such errors now, Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors, was established.
• 10 June: I began fixing typos semi-systematically like this edit, probably inspired by this edit to the whistle register page. My speech synthesiser makes some (but not all) typos incredibly obvious; for example it says "offical" with the stress on the first syllable but it stresses the second syllable in "official", as it should. Typo-fixing helped expose me to many types of articles and increased my edit count, though I haven't done it regularly for many years now.. I didn't officially sign up to what is now the typo team until 9 July!
• Mid-June: I remember finding out about the 2005 board elections and being a bit disappointed that I couldn't vote because I didn't have enough edits. I barely knew anything about the candidates though.
• 21 June: For the first time I was blocked from editing as part of collateral damage. Back in those days, contrary to the current practice, all blocks of unregistered users affected every user on the intended IP address or range, even admins! In other words, all IP address blocks were what are now known as hardblocks and there was no way to stop this. The bug report about this, then known as bug 550, was legendary. See the Signpost story about the eventual fix of that bug and Wikipedia:Blocking policy proposal. The IP addresses that were affected in my case were my school IP's at 203.14.53.45 and 203.14.53.46 (which seemed to cover many public schools in Western Australia); this unblock was at my request.
• 27–28 June: Wikipedia was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.5, causing much downtime as noted in the link above. (I remember a prominently linked explanation page during the downtime being user-editable (via a page on Meta), and people changing it to say the site could be up in a couple of millennia!) (The usual Wikipedia status site back then was OpenFacts.) The most interesting changes for me around that time were the addition of a direct link to the oldest revisions on history/contributions pages (making wiki-archaeology much easier) and the removal of the "urlexpansion" class, which didn't work properly with my screen reader (it caused URL's to be incorrectly spoken alongside external links). The upgrade also forced the English Wikipedia to switch its encoding from Windows-1252, which only directly supports Western European languages, to UTF-8, the web standard for character encoding which supports many more languages; this would come back to bite me later.
• 1 July: I made my first relatively significant changes to a page containing information about Wikipedia history, with these edits to Wikipedia:Successful requests for adminship.
• 24 July: I'd made enough edits by that date to be mentioned in the List of Wikipedians by number of edits for the first time. As the above link shows, the list wasn't updated as regularly as it is now because the database didn't even have an edit count field.
• August: I was involved in a discussion to create what eventually became the language reference desk. That month, I also began checking my watchlist more carefully after this incident at the Asperger syndrome talk page, which was dragged out because I missed a text addition (also see this thread).
• September: I made my highest number of edits in a month up to this point, recorded as 1,658 around that time (though some were later deleted) at the list of Wikipedians by number of recent edits, while making hundreds of typo fixes. My monthly record would not be beaten until March 2008.
• 16 October: I made my first of many posts to the technical village pump, this one about new navigation/search links designed for screen reader users that were just clutter to me. I've since made peace with these links.
• November: I cleaned up and expanded the article about the Western Australian former Aboriginal community of Oombulgurri, because the page was in a particularly sorry state, as noted in this discussion. This led me to create an article about the closest town to the community, Wyndham. I also received my first barnstar in this month.
• 5 December: Article creation was disabled for anonymous users in response to the Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident. I had previously dabbled in new-page patrolling but reduced this activity afterwards because there were fewer low-hanging fruit, at least in the short term. The restriction was a good decision in the long run, though.
• Late December: I discovered that I could view diffs by checking a page's HTML source code and searching for diffch ... much easier than trying to check them manually as I had previously!

2006

• 1 January: I removed long-term vandalism for the first time on the Crocodile article (see this talk page thread and note that it was long before the sudden death of Steve Irwin ... I, like many Aussies, was never a big fan of his). Back then I would put anything I found that vaguely interested me on my watchlist (I've since learnt that that's not the best idea). The crocodile vandalism also led to my first edits on non-English Wikipedias, such as this edit to the Vietnamese Wikipedia, which I made without an account (I didn't think I'd ever edit those Wikipedia additions again at the time ... how wrong I was!)
• 21 January: I first complained about major accessibility problems relating to HiddenStructure, an old method for hiding text when certain conditions were met (e.g hiding the "s" in the word "articles" when only one article name is given to a template). My message led to this thread and these conversations about the issue. Some of my comments about accessibility were later copied to the accessibility page, which was then still in development. The perceived need for HiddenStructure was eliminated when the ParserFunctions extension was enabled in April 2006.
• 13 March: I changed my username from "Pianoman87" to "Graham87". I was tired of the "Pianoman" moniker by then largely because I was also no longer as interested in playing the piano. I'd been wanting to change my username for some time before then but I had too many edits. When the edit limit was changed from 6,800 to 20,000, I could comfortably get my username changed with 8,027 edits.
• 18 March: A new design for the Main Page (which is still in place to this day) went live, with one thing missing ... proper headings! I brought this up and it was fixed.
• 13 April: I created the first archive of my talk page, albeit at the wrong title (archive name standardisation was not as strongly enforced back then). The article size guidelines were quite different in 2006 and, as it says in the above link, a warning message would appear in the edit window when a page exceeded 30KB. I thought about 40KB was enough and, to this day, most of my talk page archives have been created when there's about that much text or when JAWS says there are at least 1,000 lines on a page (it counts each link as a line).
• 18 April: I reconnected the village pump with an archive that then went up to 2004 (before it was split into various pages as it is now).
• 3 August: I made my first edit to the article about the South African singer Miriam Makeba, three days after being introduced to her album Sangoma by a friend of mine, via a chain of events involving that year's Braille Music Camp. I also made some relevant edits to the Culture of South Africa article around that time (see my notes on its talk page). I later expanded Makeba's article but it was subsequently worked on by many others, particularly Vanamonde93, who brought it to featured article status in 2017.
• 6 August: I made 427 edits, my highest number of edits in a day to this point and almost two-thirds of my total for August, largely to convert day pages to the newer {{SelectedAnniversary}} template, as I explained on the WikiProject Days of the Year talk page. Some of the links on the day talk pages still referred to what we would now call templates in the MediaWiki namespace; I knew about that use of this namespace as early as October 2005.
• 16 August: I changed my signature to be about the same as the one I currently use after this conversation. I'd always liked having my signature differ from my username to make it easier to find when I'm mentioned in a discussion, but the later introduction of the notifications feature has somewhat reduced that need. I later made some changes to my signature to fix linter HTML errors and automated fixes of my old signature subsequently blew up my watchlist. I later changed it to the default signature in 2023.
• October: Section editing links were first placed inside headings rather than outside them, as they had been previously. This was more of a problem for me then than it would be now because the edit links were before the section title in the HTML (which was fixed for me via a script in August 2007 and for everyone in April 2013), and my screen reader JAWS would stop saying a section title when it encountered a link. I started a thread about this on Wikitech and the problem was later filed as a bug. This problem inspired me to install my own instance of MediaWiki and monitor the MediaWiki Subversion repository (which was in use then).
• November: I made my first bug report, about grammatical errors in interface messages.
• December: After finding a broken link at Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy/Archive 1 to a talk page in the Wikipedia namespace that had been deleted because it had no corresponding non-talk page, I found a list of such pages (more explanation here) and requested and obtained undeletion of these pages. These lists helped me to perform some of my first major talk page archive cleanup ever, something I would do more often in later years. I also did spam-fighting on Christmas Day ... in real-time!

2007

• 14 January: A new user preference to not show page content below diffs was added. I turned it on as soon as I learnt about it and I still use it to this day; I commented about its usefulness in October 2014.
• 23 January: I added my first unsigned notice outside my own talk page, to which I'd first done this in March 2006. Unsigned/improperly signed comments are a pet peeve of mine; not only do they make attribution more difficult, they also interfere with the work of one of the major archiving bots, lowercase sigmabot III.
• 10 February: I created the article about the philosopher Cesare Cremonini from an articles for creation submission after a very unusual technical village pump message. This later led me to start an article about Theophilos Corydalleus, a Greek philosopher, after this talk page message.
• 22 February – 28 March: I had a couple of forced wiki-breaks during this time due to technical issues while switching my home Internet connection from the Optus phone network to the Telstra network. I therefore mostly missed out on the Essjay controversy, the Daniel Brandt deletion wheel war, and the introduction of CAPTCHA images for account creation, the latter issue making it more difficult for blind people to create accounts on Wikipedia as making a more accessible alternative is not an easy task at all.
• 7 April: I made what I believe is my first request for a history merge.
• 29 April: After listening online to the week's episode of Graham Abbott's ABC Classic FM program Keys to Music, this one featuring chamber music ensembles of various sizes, due to the highlighting of a piece by Louis Spohr, I discovered Pandora Records and their library of freely licensed sound files, many of which had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and by extension Wikipedia in August 2006 by Magnus Manske. This began my interest in sound files of classical music on Wikimedia commons and adding them/fixing their presentation on various Wikipedia articles, which was a thread I'd take up for the next couple of years.
• 12 May: I began a discussion about the history of vandalism in progress and got its early edits restored to an archive page; I later history-merged it into its current title, Wikipedia:Requests for investigation.
• 29 May: I made my first upload to Wikimedia Commons to fix a mixup between the musical theatre composer Sigmund Romberg and the classical composer and cellist Bernhard Romberg (whose article I later expanded). File moving wasn't possible until 2009, so the only way to rename a file was to upload a copy under the new name and delete the old version. To this end I incorrectly created this deletion discussion on Commons.
• 14 August: I became an admin! The length of time between my first edits to Wikipedia and my admin nomination was fairly long for 2007. As noted in the nomination statement, I had indeed declined two adminship nominations in 2006. As noted in this talk page section, my admin nominator found me because of this edit I'd made to the old list of non-admins with high edit counts. The most difficult thing to get used to about adminship was all the extra links, as my screen reader puts all links on their own line by default. I did my first admin actions the next day and my first history merge a day later.
• 19 August: I attended my first Wikimedia meetup, the third one in Perth. (I didn't know about the inaugural Perth meetup until it had taken place and the second one sounded too full-on to me.
• 31 August: Using the recently added deleted contributions feature on Jimbo Wales, I found and recovered the page now at Wikipedia:Village pump/Wikipedia chat. (Jimbo's edit to the page is here.)
• 15 September: I uploaded some images of white canes to Wikimedia Commons. I noticed there was a relevant image request so I asked my orientation and mobility instructor to take some photos of canes and added them to the Wikipedia article. I didn't feel like asking for help formatting the images because I thought that help would quickly come, which it did.
• 19 September: I expanded the article about John Balaban, an American poet and expert on Vietnamese literature, inspired by playing with Vietnamese sounds in the eSpeak speech synthesiser.
• 30 September – 1 October: I created what is now Wikipedia:Historical archive/Sandbox, consisting of previously deleted sandbox edits from June to November 2004 that had been lost due to page move accidents, again with the help of the deleted contributions page. The relevant sandbox history was in two parts, one at the title "Sandbox2" containing 8,644 edits and the other at the title "Full cat litter box" containing 11,785 edits. The latter page took quite a bit of trial and error to restore successfully. I later combined the two, a feat that soon became impossible.
• 23 October: The Wikimedia Foundation tried using a marquee on its fundraising banner which froze my screen reader, until I managed to get rid of it ... it was removed in short order though and I wasn't the only one who had problems with it!
• 30 October – 1 November: Due to the high level of activity in the accessibility space (see the relevant page histories) and my mental state at the time, I almost completely cleared my watchlist and took a wikibreak ... which only lasted 30 hours! The day after ending my very short wikibreak, I found two instances of unhelpful edits to articles about classical music, which didn't help matters either.
• 8 December: I voted in an Arbitration Committee election for the first time. From the first election when I was an active editor in January 2006 until the 2008 election, votes were public (e.g. the 2007 vote for Newyorkbrad). I can't put my finger on why I didn't vote before the 2007 election but I certainly remember when the earlier ones were going on and back in September 2005 I made this relevant edit.
• 11 December: I ended up with List of French people on my watchlist due to a bizarre form of vandalism that I posted about on the technical village pump that made section editing links edit the wrong part of the page. Such vandalism would now have the effect of disabling editing of a particular section rather than destroying section editing altogether due to the migration to the new preprocessor that occurred in January 2008.

2008

• January: I found out about what is now the free music taskforce from a story in the Signpost and used its talk page to make notes on my uploads and other work in this area.
• 14 March: My history-merging journey began in earnest. I was checking weather data and noticed that the warmest weather station in the state of South Australia at the time was an airport, which somehow inspired me to make sure that all Australian towns/cities had a link to their airport article in them somewhere. While checking which pages linked to the Brisbane Airport article, I was surprised how far down the city of Brisbane was, it being a major city and the state capital of Queensland! (Even then, it would have been below the article about what was then the Gateway Bridge (now the Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges). This meant that the Brisbane article needed a history merge; in fact I ended up doing quite a few operations on it over the years to put all its edits in one place. Because the article had so many edits, I didn't want to use the original method of history merging, so I had to use my own which I eventually wrote down (see below). This experience made me curious about the early edit history of other places in Australia and eventually almost all topics generally.
• 20 March: While preparing to add music by the Soni Ventorum Wind Quintet to Wikipedia, I found that the article about one of its former members, oboist Alex Klein, had a New York Times link that went to a log-in page (this was before it had introduced a metered paywall). I had previously read in the Signpost that these articles had become freely accessible, so I found a working link by Googling the article's title and added it to the Alex Klein page. I spent the next few weeks fixing many more similar links. That March I finally beat my long-standing record for the highest number of edits in a calendar month so far, which I would exceed later due to history-merging work. At the article about Jim Thorpe (whose story I found fascinating), I couldn't fix any of the New York Times links but the article had quite a bit of long-standing vandalism needing removal, which led me to put the page on my watchlist and would lead me to take care of the "Missing Wikipedians" page later. I didn't end up adding the Soni Ventorum Wind Quintet music and others from Pandora Records to Wikipedia until April 2009.
• 13 April: After commenting at this miscellany for deletion debate, I discovered that the modern community portal used to be at the title Wikipedia:Main Page. However, the edits that showed the actual page move were almost inaccessible even to admins because they were moved to a badly encoded title in this vandalism in October 2004. I filed a bug to get the deleted edits moved to a better title, which was resolved in December 2009.
• 29 April: I made a proposal to noindex user talk pages that was implemented in September which led to a much more vigorous discussion.
• 2 May: While checking my deleted edits, I created my first of many accounts for a Wikipedian who had registered their username in 2001 but whose account was not in the current Wikipedia database because they had never re-registered it. In this case, I gave the account back to its original owner who made edits with it. There were many problems with these old accounts. The most notable one here is that user pages of nonexistent users are subject to deletion under criterion for speedy deletion U2, which was exploited by automated scripts. I'd history-merged the user page in January 2008 and it had been deleted in April, so I went and undeleted it. These early accounts were also trivial to compromise and their contributions would later fail to appear in the regular contributions list for some time due to T36873.
• 21 July: My interest in history-merging went up another gear. I started off with systematically history-merging US places and went from there.
• 6 August: I created my list of page history observations (though this is a better early version). I'd accumulated the relevant information in my head for a while but I thought it was time to write it down publicly ... sorta like how this page started. I also initiated a technical village pump discussion about it, which inspired me to note my usual history-merging method (see above).
• 13 August: My avid reading of The Signpost came in handy when I put a swift end to a discussion about disallowing requests from adminship from search engines (which had already been done nearly a year before). I'd noticed the discussion previously but was too busy to comment and thought someone would surely come along to put it right soon ... it turns out that I had to be that person!
• September: By this time my interest in history merges had morphed to an obsession; after hearing about random topics I'd often wonder if they needed a history merge ... and sometimes they did! I was doing many history merges of often common topics, particularly relating to cut-and-paste moves done before August 2002 by Mav, an early enforcer of the naming conventions policy (as it was known then), before the page-move function became more widely used and reliable. This culminated in one of my most challenging history merges ever. The history of the old village pump (before it was split into separate pages) was mostly found at Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26 but its history before August 2003 was at Wikipedia talk:Village pump because of an attempt to exploit the then-new "new section" feature (the "__newsectionlink__" magic word wasn't a thing until May 2006). I wanted to history-merge the two pages but this was complicated by the fact that pages with more than 5,000 edits weren't supposed to be deletable (see above), though this could sometimes be circumvented by moving them (but this is not the case now). See my logs at Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26 and Wikipedia talk:Village pump].

2009

• 2 February: I found two interesting page history artefacts on the same day, as follows:
  • I uncovered the page now at Wikipedia talk:List of Wikipedians in order of arrival/Archive 1 and started a village pump discussion about it. It's a good thing that this relevant deletion discussion went my way.
  • By this stage I had become very interested in retrieving old user pages, createing accounts for them if necessary, and history-merging them with their equivalent pages in the article namespace. (Before Wikipedia was upgraded to Phase II software in January 2002, it had no namespaces, so user pages were not separated in any way from the rest of Wikipedia.) While doing this work I noticed that there was a user whose name was listed in the database as "Little_guru" (with an underline) whose contributions were inaccessible, so I wrote a village pump post about this. About two months later, I found out this was T2323 (see below).
• 10 February: I began to rewrite the page Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles, among many other edits to it, after history-merging pages that exceeded the record for the oldest unbroken page history.
• March: I did a rather complicated history merge and archive renumbering at Talk:Christopher Columbus, inspired by a link fix in an old user signature.
• April: As an example of the wiki rabbit holes I've fallen into over the years, I learnt about the nationally infamous and horrific Australian group The Family, known for its forced adoption and abuse of children, through an unusual maze of links, described below. The first person to record all of Bach's Cello Suites, Pablo Casals, once performed at Osborne House, Queen Victoria's summer home. Jack Llewelyn Davies studied there while it was a naval college. His guardian, J. M. Barrie, the author of the Peter Pan series, was suspected to have had psychogenic dwarfism, which Casandra (one of the children adopted by the group) had from years of abuse. My first edit to the article about The Family was to revert some changes made by Sarah Moore, a survivor of the group who is sadly no longer with us, which were personal comments that were not at all in Wikipedia's style (understandably so). I've had the article on my watchlist ever since, but I haven't written much of the text there.
• June: The page that eventually became WikiProject History Merge was created and once I discovered it I became one of its most avid users for a while (see its talk page) and this barnstar).
• July: As a continuation of the above item, I came up with the idea of checking the deleted contributions of Conversion script to find old edits from 2001 and 2002 to restore. Among other things, I found an ironic history-merge situation at "Fifteen puzzle", with fifteen edits to restore and one remaining, along with a bug involving the display of old deleted revisions. All that history-merging meant that this was my most prolific month of editing ever!
• August: I tripped my first edit filter (the test one) by writing "fuck" on a talk page. Anyone who knows me personally will be extremely amused by this, because it's very much not like me. I was only combining archives at Stephen Fry's talk page ... honest!
• October: I made my first edit to Wikitravel, which was later migrated to Wikivoyage. I find copy-editing entries there inordinately fun for some reason.
• November: Dinoguy1000 created a userbox for wiki-archaeologists which I promptly added to my user page (see the talk page of User:Dinoguy1000/notepad).
• December: It became possible for admins to import pages from the Nostalgia Wikipedia, a copy of the Wikipedia database from 20 December 2001, along with Meta and some non-English Wikipedias, after a discussion I started on the village pump. I became an avid importer of edits from the Nostalgia Wikipedia and I wrote some notes about it at User:Graham87/Import. I later got the importer right, which allowed me to import text from any arbitrary wiki, and made it easier to import text from the Nostalgia Wikipedia.

2010

• March: I undertook a project to make sure all usernames in the Nostalgia Wikipedia were registered in the English Wikipedia and that they had at least one edit in the modern Wikipedia database. Highlights included this response to my message about a 2001 edit I found and the discovery of a few users such as this one, whose edits were not in the English Wikipedia database at all before my operation. To undertake this project, I used xml2sql to extract a list of usernames attached to each edit along with a GW-BASIC program I wrote to filter out duplicates; not the most elegant method (even in 2010!), but it worked.
• July: I was granted filemover rights on Commons, which I still occasionally use. My screen reader reads out image filenames when they have no alt text so I occasionally find files to move for that reason.
• 18–19 August: User:Nemo bis/Bug 323 revisions, a series of pages listing edits by editors whose usernames would not be valid in the current database (because they contain underlines, initial lower-case letters, or more than one space in a row) and are affected by T2323 (then known as bug 323), was created after Nemo bis and I had a conversation about this topic. (Also see above).
• 27 August: I brought up an accessibility problem at the missing Wikipedians page, with the use of {{mop}} instead of a regular "*" to create a bulleted list; I subsequently edited it often until October 2016. I found out about the accessibility problem because I noticed AaronY (then known as Quadzilla99) return to edit the Jim Thorpe article after a long absence (see above), so I went to remove him from the missing Wikipedians list.

2011

• 23 February: I first heard about the History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia (HOPAU) project by email and edited its tender on Wikiversity on that day. I didn't fancy myself as much of an article writer at the time and I was much more interested in the project in terms of disability than the actual sport, so once HOPAU got off the ground later in the year, I initially restricted myself to general copyediting of the project's newly expanded articles, such as Priya Cooper and Frank Ponta, rather than article creation.
• 3 April: After a Skype conversation with Tony1, I created scripts for my screen reader JAWS that would insert em and en dashes (which are strongly encouraged here) with one keystroke. I had previously used JAWS's in-built symbol insertion feature, which brings up a list of symbols, much like the Character Map program but in a list rather than a grid.
• 11 April: Inspired by this edit, I finally made a proper user page for User 0, mentioning an interesting database anomaly from July 2002, which I only understood fully because of this technical village pump thread.
• July: I made my first use of a mass-rollback script. I think mass-rollbacks are much more fun when done with Listen to Wikipedia in the background.
• August–September: Before this time, almost all village pump archives from before October 2007 were not searchable because they were archived in page histories. Jarry1250, using his bot LivingBot, went and fixed this by using lettered archives like Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive A, rather than the numbered archives that are usually used. I suggested that he perform a similar operation on the pre-October-2004 archives, which he duly did. This newfangled form of archiving inspired me to do something similar at Jimbo Wales's talk page. I returned to the village pump archives later in 2022.
• 18 September: I was an instructor at a workshop in Perth about Wikipedia and the Australian Paralympic movement. The day beforehand, I did an interview with Peter Greco of 5RPH, Adelaide's radio reading sservice.
• October: I was elected to the board (known here as the committee) of Wikimedia Australia, my local chapter. I had very limited Internet access at the time due to being on holiday without my regular computer (in Italy, shortly after the Italian Wikipedia blackout), so I came back to 610 emails mostly from various Wikimedia-related mailing lists (after cleaning out whatever spam I could while I was away). I had some good times on the committee but overall I learnt that this kind of work doesn't really suit me.
• 23–24 December: I had just gotten in to the music of Joni Mitchell and was listening to her album Court and Spark, which contains her cover of "Twisted ... whose article I created. I also expanded the article about the writer of the song, Annie Ross, among other things noting that she had an affair and a child with the jazz drummer Kenny Clarke. I added a reciprocal mention of the situation to Clarke's article but decided not to look in to his page any deeper ... what a fateful decision that was!
• 28 December: An interesting edit came up on my watchlist which roped me into contributing much more to articles about the Australian Paralympics: this one to the Evan O'Hanlon article, which noted that he'd received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM). I knew that Wikipedia was generally obsessed with honours like this, and the HOPAU group had an active mailing list by then, so I posted a thread asking about other Paralympians who had received an OAM. I found out that all Paralympic gold medallists since 1992 had automatically received one, so I went to work adding the relevant details where necessary and cleaning up the relevant articles along the way (with help from mailing list participants). I didn't expect it to turn in to a multi-month cleanup project that would eventually burn me out. Almost all the articles were created by a single user and had incomplete medal listings and misinterpretations of references, among other things. One of my favourite articles I rescued about a Paralympic gold medallist who received an OAM had one of the very worst starts: the page on Julie Higgins, an equestrian rider, which was like this before I got to it.

2012

• 18 January: I spent the time of the English Wikipedia blackout working on expanding the article about the visually impaired cyclist Kieran Modra.
• 5 February: I began a project to go through all Australian Paralympic medal winners in the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) database alphabetically by medal (i.e. athletes whose highest medal was gold, those whose highest medal was silver, etc.), compare them to the category for Paralympic medalists for Australia, and clean up their articles or create them if possible. The first cab off the rank was my creation of the article about the 1984 gold medallist Terry Biggs. By the time of the London Paralympics, by which time I was almost completely sick of the cleanup work and the Games themselves, I'd finished working on the article about the all-round athlete and silver medallist John Maclean, which was like this before I got there ... at least it had his medal this time!) When the results of the London Games were officially added to the IPC database, I cleaned up a few of the relevant articles (created by the same person mentioned above) but I flamed out around October and only made sporadic contributions to Paralympic articles after that. At least this experience taught me a lot about navigating online libraries, research, and writing ... which I would put to good use later on! (The project to check/create all the articles about all medallists was eventually completed by other people, for which I'm very thankful).
• July: I went on a trip with my mother (in large part paid for by Wikimedia Australia as a committee/board member) to Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC, along with other side-trips that we added on. I wrote a report about the conference on the Wikimedia Australia wiki.
• 31 August: I got to experience the craziness of having edits from a Google Doodle suddenly appear on my watchlist! That was the first time, but unfortunately not the last ...
• October: I began my frequent participation at the talk page for the archiving instructions with this discussion about archive methods.
• November: While I was copy-editing the day's featured article, I failed to notice malware link vandalism that would have been obvious to sighted users but was difficult to detect with my screen reader. I started an admins' incidents noticeboard discussion about this issue.
• December: I restored an explanation of an old bug that affects contribution histories to the guidance on moving a page (also see my first edit summary there).

2013

• May: I brought up an accessibility issue with the then-new notifications feature, regarding their position in the HTML for desktop screen readers (which I'm well used-to by now). It was fixed in Vector 2022 but I still prefer the MonoBook skin as an editor.
• June: I obtained access to early Wikipedia databases along with the importer right, which allowed me to finally import some old missing edits on to Wikipedia, on topics such as Glasgow, New York City, and bongs! I began making a local working copy of the 2003 database dumps that were released in January 2012, so I could import missing history from them. (I had been hesitating for a while and started an earlier discussion about getting help to work with the early databases. However, I'd gotten more into computing again and I wanted something different to do on-wiki due to a bit of wiki-stress, so I decided to take the plunge and try to get the databases going myself, despite having very little experience in this area). Once I thought I had the database dumps working, I requested the importer right. I'm glad the participants in that discussion made me wait a week and start another village pump discussion, because I ended up spending that time fixing character set issues so characters like "é" could display properly! I later wrote queries on the local database to try to find more edits to import, such as one that searched for redirects with more than one edit. The importer right also made it much easier for me to import text from the Nostalgia Wikipedia.
• 1 August: I posted this technical village pump query about accidentally overwriting sections of articles. I don't think I've done anything like that since, though occasional blankings, duplications, and bad cut-and-pastes happen, but I try to catch them quickly when I can.
• 7–17 August: I went to Hong Kong for Wikimania 2013 because it was close to Perth. I was there for Typhoon Utor, which did not have much affect on Hong Kong itself, but government buildings were closed due to typhoon warnings, meaning that I couldn't visit the Hong Kong Museum of History as planned.
• September: I contributed to a Signpost piece about accessibility, where I mentioned that my biggest accessibility problems were with gaps in HTML lists and incorrectly positioned table of contents (in the wiki-markup). This led to this bot request and, eventually, some amazing work by Bgwhite on these issues (see this bot approval request and our talk page archives).
• September–December: I spent much of this time cleaning up after edits by JumpMM, who added inappropriate mentions of the Sport Australia Hall of Fame at the start of articles. I expanded several articles along the way, including those about the softball player Joyce Lester, the squash player Michelle Martin, the sports administrator and water-polo player Peter Montgomery, and the equestrian riders Bill and Wayne Roycroft (who were father and son, although this relationship wasn't noted until I got there).
• November: With a little steward assistance, this time from Snowolf, I reattributed some old edits that were assigned to the user Blake (see this discussion on my talk page and my side of the conversation).

2014

• April: I began my current stint of maintaining the former administrators pages after their main maintainer before that time, Moe Epsilon, stopped editing them. They'd been on my watchlist for a while, probably since my first edit to the former admins page in December 2010.
• May: I was informed that I had made the 32nd-highest number of edits to medical topics in the English Wikipedia in 2013! Medicine has always been a minor obsession for me, probably because of my premature birth and the resulting complications. I have many medical articles on my watchlist to guard against vandalism; I don't add medical content to articles though.

2015

• April: I began editing the desysoppings by month list after this request.
• June: I re-created a page at potions in Harry Potter to fix many broken links; see this discussion. As I said at the last deletion nomination which resulted in a merge of the article, I would have done things differently if I'd had my time again ... but I'm OK with the final outcome as there are no broken links!
• 9 July: I was granted access to the service now known as Toolforge, which let me carry out database queries relevant to some of the items mentioned below.
• 24 July: I implemented a new way to find missing page history, described at User:Graham87/SHA-1. Earlier in the year I had been going through an introductory tutorial for the programming language Python, Think Python, with my friend Codeofdusk, as the only programming languages I knew well before then were BASIC and the JAWS Scripting Language. In this tutorial I learnt about sets in programming (having already known about mathematical sets from school) and realised that if I treated each database as a set, I could find edits that were in one database but not another. At the time I just compared edits between the January and May 2003 database dumps The immediate results were amazing.
• 31 July: I created a database query for the redirects with the highest number of edits, derived from the pages with the most revisions database report. It was inspired by an earlier history merge of the modern British TV series Top Gear (assisted by the steward DerHexer, who helped me with several of these history merges over the years) which involved a redirect with 3,818 edits. Highlights were history merges of Jon Jones which involved 4,320 edits and the list of Coronation Street characters with a total over two pages of 5,782 edits!
• December: While trying to clean up after these edits I found on my watchlist to the Texas oil boom article, I discovered that a previous bot run (which I'd forgotten about by then) to fix links to the Handbook of Texas hadn't properly completed the task. I remember trying to search for information about fixing these links in places like the WikiProject Texas talk page, but with no luck. I fixed some manually before finding out about the original bot run and messaging the bot owner, who re-ran the bot task. I then went and manually fixed Handbook of Texas links in many other Wikimedia projects, contributing to my edit count in the Japanese Wikipedia, among many other places.

2016

• September–October: I finally used my Wikipedia database comparison method on the live database and had to reconstruct my copies of the old databases accordingly. This led me to find a database glitch in the Massachusetts article in which the text of many early edits is missing (see Phab T147146).
• November: I brought back the early deletion logs from August 2002 to December 2004, before the modern logging system using special pages was implemented; I also fixed some gaps in the logs along the way. (I had previously plucked the July 2002 deletion log out of the database). From June 2003 until late 2008, if no deletion summary was filled, MediaWiki would autofill it with the initial text of the deleted page (and this practice was encouraged and common before then). This caused many problems with libelous or abusive text even on the special pages (which are not indexed by search engines; revision deletion of log actions wasn't available for admins until May 2010) but was especially acute on the 2002–2004 deletion logs, which were straight text pages that search engines could easily access. Therefore, in September 2006, Ral315 deleted the deletion logs and replaced them with a message (example). Naturally for my wiki-archaeology work I relied often on those deletion logs; I made a copy of them on my computer and used the Wayback Machine to link to them when necessary. However, while doing database traipsing, I discovered that Talk:Making a webpage was deleted but was not in the current Wikipedia database because it had been deleted too long ago (see here in footnote C). However, the page history at Making a webpage survived because it was undeleted and from this edit, I could infer that it was deleted some time in September 2003. It turns out that there was quite a significant gap in the deletion log that I was able to fill ... which finally answered the question of what happened to the early page history of the Glasgow article, among other things! There was a 2009 deletion review of the deletion logs, whose result was basically "Trust MBisanz, so I emailed him and got permission to restore the logs and noindex them. I then wrote a quick program in Python using the Dateutil library (for processing the dates) to tally the number of entries for each day in all the old logs, and I found among other things a big gap in the deletion log in June 2004.

2017

• January: My Signpost interview with Tony1 went live; it was later republished in the Wikimedia Blog.
• July–August: I attended the Montreal Wikimania during a US/Canada trip. I had a great time but for the purposes of this timeline the most important parts were meeting Codeofdusk and Derek Ross in person ... and breaking my daily edit streak because of major weather-related flight disruptions in New York and WiFi problems at Los Angeles International Airport!
• October: Despite not knowing much about the subject for obvious reasons, I created an article about the Indigenous Australian visual artist Julie Dowling. It was the easiest way to disambiguate her from the Paralympic athlete with this name whose article I had also created after this series of edits to create the disambiguation page (also see this discussion).

2018

• 1 June: I was unexpectedly affected by the introduction of the responsive MonoBook skin and strongly advocated for the ability to turn it off (which was granted).
• June–July: I had had the article about the jazz drummer Kenny Clarke on my watchlist for a while due to a situation mentioned above. This edit on 16 June and my resultant quick expansion led me to realise that the article needed a thorough rewrite due to many long-standing inaccuracies and other problems that had plagued the article since before I began editing it in 2011, but weren't immediately obvious to me as I didn't know much about jazz. My work on the article took me about two weeks and taught me some interesting things about PDF accessibility, among other things. The expansion of Clarke's article led me to work on many other jazz pages, including the one about the Modern Jazz Quartet, of which he was a founding member, which became one of my favourite artists/groups in the genre, as well as one of their most famous pieces, "Django".
• July: While in the process of expanding Clarke's article I'd found an archive with a non-standard name, so once I'd finished the article expansion I took on a new project: archive standardisation and finding old text that hadn't yet been properly archived. I exceeded 3,000 live edits in a month for only the second time ever up to that point. Since then, along with obsessively checking whether a page needs a history merge, I have also tried to check its archiving situation as well and intervene when necessary. Sometimes I can retrieve very large amounts of text, like at Adolf Hitler.
• 6 July: My friend Codeofdusk had written an extended essay for the IB Diploma Programme about talk pages created before articles, with my encouragement, as I'd been thinking about these sorts of cases for a while. As 6 July was results day, he was able to release it. There are certainly lots of interesting talk pages in there! Some had interesting history like Talk:European classical music but others didn't add up to much ...
• 10 August: I discovered that a version of the August 2001 database dump was available in XML format, so it could be imported to the modern Wikipedia database. The most notable things I've done with this database dump include importing the early Main Page, as documented in the Signpost, along with my retrieval of long-lost old text at the sanity talk page.

2019

• April: I got my first message about what became the WikiBlind User Group. I'm more in a supportive role there than anything.
• June–October: Just before I moved to the small seaside city of Busselton, I started expanding its Wikipedia article and other related pages, as described in these talk page messages. I wrote articles about most of its suburbs, including the one I live in; by this time all established suburbs in Australian capital cities had Wikipedia articles for many years, but this was not true in country areas. (the Perth suburb where I previously lived, Carlisle, didn't have an article either before I started editing Wikipedia, but that was relatively normal at the time.

2020–present

• February–April 2020: My editing activity picked up as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, though not deliberately so. I don't know whether the increase in long-term vandalism on my watchlist at the time had anything to do with the pandemic or I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time; either way it wasn't fun.
• May 2020: While checking the inactive admins for that month, I found out that Ronhjones had died in a house fire the previous year. I was suspicious that both Ronhjones and his bot, RonBot, had both stopped editing on the same day. (the fact that RonBot was also an admin was the only reason I had thought to make the connection).
• December 2020: I reattributed some edits that were incorrectly assigned to Scott; see this talk page thread.
• January 2021: I was featured in a Wikimedia Foundation profile as part of Wikipedia's 20th birthday celebrations.
• August 2021: MalnadachBot, which fixes linter HTML errors in signatures among other things,began fixing instances of the custom signature I used until 2023 (see this user subpage and my conversation with the bot owner). This caused my watchlist to explode because I was still watching many of the pages it had edited; one day there were about 600 items, as opposed to a normal day with about 30 to 40!
• January–April 2022: I spent a couple of months (with a break to fix external links) cleaning up after Raindrop73, a user who added extreme amounts of detail to articles about Pennsylvania school districts, but I was probably too aggressive blocking them and users who disagreed with my cleanups. See their talk page and this subsequent admins' incidents noticeboard discussion.
• 25 February 2022: I discovered a new accessibility problem relating to a change in the presentation of history entries and contribution pages so that hidden date headers could be added for mobile users. However, these headers separated what used to be a list of, say, 50 items on a history page into multiple smaller lists for each date. I raised it on the technical village pump and on Phabricator. The headings were later shown to screen readers by default and other more minor bugs were fixed. Having used them for a while now, sometimes I like the date headings but sometimes they get in my way, particularly when there are many dates with just one item listed.
• 31 May 2022: A segment about me and my Wikipedia activities, derived from an interview with Ninah Kopel, aired on the TV series The Feed, featuring a sample of my speech synthesiser. The segment's scope was supposed to be somewhat broader.
• May–July 2022: I cleaned up some of the old village pump archives (see above) and restored some long-lost discussions; see these tweaks to the main archive and my Wikipedia-namespace edits at the time. I had participated in a discussion about missing village pump policy archives about ten years beforehand.
• 13 September – 10 October 2022: I was one of the screeners in the initial stage of the Wikimedia sound logo contest, for which I was featured in a Wikimedia blog post.
• November 2022: The University of Sydney paid me to go with my mother to two conferences in Sydney, the Worlds of Wikimedia event (which they ran) and the ESEAP 2022 conference. At the former event I gave a keynote presentation in the form of a conversation with University of Sydney professor Gerard Goggin and at the latter event I had a cameo appearance in the short talk about the Wikimedia sound logo with Mehrdad Pourzaki.
• 21 January – 11 February 2023: I began writing this timeline. It was certainly quite the experience and this page became much longer than I intended. If you've read this far, congratulations!
• September 2023: I changed my signature to the default one after this conversation on my talk page (and other messages linked from there).