Sometime last year I remember hearing a story on NPR by a writer at Slate who was feeling a tad hurt that the Wikipedia entry on him had been marked for deletion. As i listened to his very amusing thoughts on feeling "like a dead tree marked with orange spray paint for the city arborist to uproot," i couldn't help but think, "try being an old tree on a playground with half the bark stripped off, covered with carved initials and pruning paint."
I chuckled grimly to myself, then thought about it. Having established Wikipedia entries about yourself and your work is not something most people can claim, and i shouldn't knock it. They don't exist because officials from this shadowy 'Wikipedia' entity decided they should, they exist because a community of people have gone to a lot of trouble to create and maintain them. A community of people who have moderated numerous changes and updates, reasonably and fairly dealt with detractors and their opinions, and handled outright vandalism with measured reason. They are good articles, and should not be included in my normal self deprecating thought stream.
That said, i guess i don't have to worry too much about them being marked for deletion, at least not for a week or so. The article on Megatokyo is todays Featured Article on the Wikipedia Main Page.
This is quite an honor, and i feel rather humbled by it. Yet this recognition by the Wikipedia community is not about me or Megatokyo, but, and i shall quote: "Megatokyo is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community." That's some pretty serious props to the folks that made and maintained the article all these years. Seriously, congrats.
I myself have never personally added or changed anything on Wikipedia, at least not before today. I was asked if there was some way i could provide them with an image released under Creative Commons that could be used in the article. This was mainly so there could be an image included with the front page listing. This is not something that is easy to do when dealing with characters in copyrighted and trademarked material. After thinking about it i thought that a simple crowd scene, full of the kinds of people you might see in "megatokyo", but not necessarily megatokyo characters might work, so here is what i did for it. There is also a full size 600 DPI version available as well.
It's my way of saying thank you to the Wikipedia MT community. Just my little contribution and thanks.
If you have somehow found yourself here via the links from Wikipedia... welcome. :) If the current comic seems a little confusing, it... er... well, you could just start from the begining, or check out ray's recent blog which is full of links and information about Megatokyo or just pick some random spot and start reading... uh... Either way, i hope you find it amusing, and or entertaining. There's a lot to read.
