User:Kaguchi

   Why I'm here   

I never planned to be a Wikipedian. But Fate has a way of dragging people into spaces (including the Wikipedia user space) they never dreamed of occupying. A few years ago, I googled to check if there was any online article about my former hometown. I found a few in personal and "official" websites, and – you guessed it – in Wikipedia. When I read the Wikipedia article, I instantly discovered typos, grammatical errors, and rubbish in it, particularly in the list of names of the town's founding fathers. From my intimate personal knowledge about the town's early history, I know who the founders are; so when I saw three or four names that clearly didn't belong, I felt the urge to strike them out. Fortunately for me, there was an "Edit" link on the article page, and when I clicked it I landed on the editing page! There was just one problem, a warning about my IP address to be recorded if I didn't register a username. So I registered.

A few keystrokes later, I returned to the editing page and got rid of the offending names. Not only that, I succumbed to the temptation to rectify spelling here and there, overhaul sentence structure, and reorganize flow of thought in sentences and paragraphs. I saved the edit, and then the article became less unpleasant to my eyes.

Did that incident make me a Wikipedia editor? In a way, yes. But I had the funny feeling that there was a lot to learn about Wikipedia before I could summon the courage to tag myself a WP editor. The feeling was triggered when I saw strange pairs of square brackets, curly braces, and angle brackets (with embedded cryptic words) strewn all over the face of the text editor while I was busy editing.

I thought that it would somehow boost my ego to become a real editor, and the only way to make that possible was to embark on a learning journey. The journey happened, and still continues to happen.