Lots of Red Dots (Wikipedia)

Seth Anthony was one of your typical Wikipedians, a student living in North Carolina, with a passion for sharing information and time to exercise it.

He was surfing through Wikipedia one day in March 2004, when he stumbled on a Rambot-created page for his hometown. When he pulled up [[Apex, North Carolina]], he saw the top of the rather dry entry:

Apex is a town located in Wake County, North Carolina. As of the 2000 census, the town had a total population of 20,212.

GEOGRAPHY

Apex is located at 35°43’55" North, 78°51’10" West (35731952, -78.852878).

Typical of Rambot’s creations, it had no additional info other than the raw statistics on population. Someone had added the exact coordinates of the town. The article was pretty accurate, but not terribly useful for a human being.

Seth logged into Wikipedia as his online persona User:SethIlys, and added a few paragraphs about the history of his small town—how it was incorporated in 1873, had been consumed by fire but was rebuilt, and how Keith Weatherly was the current mayor.

He left it at that. It was a nice enhancement for a Rambot article that had been sitting there for over a year largely untouched. But a few months later, after spending more time adding prose to articles, Seth had an idea.

Keen to showcase his hometown, he started up his computer graphics program that could pinpoint longitude and latitude, and grabbed the geographic information system (GIS) data for North Carolina. He put a red dot on the map where Apex was located, saved the picture file, and uploaded it to Wikipedia.


tmp4-12_thumb

A few keystrokes later, and he had added his own handmade map to the article. Now anyone in the world who looked up Apex in Wikipedia would see his visual creation and know where he lived. Who would be looking up Apex? Probably no one anytime soon, but if only one other person saw it, it would be worth it. After all, if Seth had visited the page on a whim, surely someone else might.

Without having to create an entire Web site, without having to advertise his new addition, he was able to contribute his knowledge of his corner of the world for everyone to see.

For Seth, it was empowering. And he found himself strangely addicted:

Then I decided, what the heck, since I’ve done that and have the graphics program open, why don’t I make maps for every town in the county? That afternoon, I did about a third of the state and it didn’t make any sense to stop there, so, like Forrest Gump, I just kept on running. Eerily enough, other people started running, too, and before long nearly all of the User:Rambot U.S. census location articles will have maps.38

There’s a famous saying in the tech world: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If there was ever a project that had unhammered nails, thousands and thousands of them, it was Wikipedia.

And best of all, Wikipedia welcomed anyone with Internet access to start hammering.

When non-Wikipedians hear of folks like Ram-man and SethIlys, they often ask, "Who would choose to do such things on their own time?"

If they’re not paid for what they are doing, what is the motivation? Why would so many folks converge on this strange project to do what they do?

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