Profile of a Wikipedia Super Contributor

Profile of a Wikipedia Super Contributor

By Emily Hanson

Editor's Note: Work These Links In: http://zero.newassignment.net/filed/links_and_few_footnotes_about_joe_mable

Joe Mabel has one of the highest edit counts at Wikipedia. But he has cut back in the past year.

Mabel’s Wikipedia user page says that his break as a mainstay from Wikipedia “was precipitated (but not caused) by having a list of songs containing covert references to real musicians put up for possible deletion.

I had said a year ago that if Wikipedia became so tight-assed that we decided to delete that article, it would be time for me to leave the project.”

Mabel has been working on the online encyclopedia that nearly anyone can edit since October 2003, but he says it can fail if it becomes too stodgy.

“People don’t turn to … [Wikipedia] for another Britannica. Our criterion should be, ‘Is this important enough and do people want it?’ Our position shouldn’t be, ‘Is this valuable enough?’ If there are a significant number of people who want to know about a topic, it’s worth reporting on. I’m concerned that they might say, ‘Oh, this is just pop culture, it’s not important.' And that’s just not right because to some people it is important,” Mabel says.

Mabel’s user page says that although his stance about the song list was not a threat, it seemed to have kept Wikipedia from deleting the article.

After the incident, however, Mabel decided to play a less-active role.

“Well, I'm still fixing occasional vandalism, answering the occasional newbie question and adding the occasional ‘unsigned’ template, and even ‘cleaning up references … fixing people's English, and trying to keep articles NPOV [with a neutral point of view].’ But I'm not spending even half the time on Wikipedia that I used to, and I'm steering generally clear of seriously controversial areas. I'm certainly not playing mediator,” Mabel’s user page says.

He began his long list of contributions to Wikipedia by writing about Bucharest, Romania.

“I initially looked at Wikipedia because I was looking at wikis as a technology for a client,” said Mabel, a software contractor and consultant. “I thought I was going to write about stuff that was about the history of coffee-shop culture in Seattle. Then I found out that Wikipedia only writes about stuff that somebody has already written about.”

Mabel has walked out of the mainstream before.

He protested the Vietnam War and continued with PeaceWorks Park vigil, protesting the Gulf War in the early 1990s in Seattle, Wash. “I can’t think of a war that this country has been in during my life that I agreed with,” he said.

He says he has been politically active for most of his life, having grown up in a town that was very politically aware. Freeport, N.Y. was “a tough town; there were so-called high school fraternities which were basically street gangs with three letters.” Mabel also says there were race riots in the ‘60s.

As a college student in the 1970s, he hitchhiked across the country more times than he can count.

“As long as one doesn’t over-romanticize Kerouac; I had an experience like that; in terms of going places and meeting people,” when he hitchhiked across the country, said Mabel.

He worked putting up posters on college campuses until he was about 30. “It was a lot easier to get places to stay because there was lesser distrust back then.”

Travel has continued to be a part of Mabel’s life. In 2001, he went to Manchester to help figure out how to get events online, in real time, before the Commonwealth Games the next year.

Then he traveled to Romania in 2002, also for computer work. After three months, he was asked to stay on for another three months. “It was kind of wierd to be plunged into this very different culture and make connections to it.”

“It was just really interesting to explore a place that I knew nothing about and to learn a language that was very different,” Mabel says of his time in Romania. “Getting to the point that you could go to the theatre and understand what was being said on stage was great.”

Mabel says he seems to have a natural ability with language. “I read quite well in Spanish, German, and Romanian. I don’t speak German and Romanian all that well; the only foreign language I feel that I can really express myself in is Spanish.” The travel has helped: “There’s no better way to learn a language than immersion.”

Although Mabel has been to Canada and Mexico, to Spain and Romania, he says, “I will never rival my dad. I asked him once how many times he had traveled the globe and he said, ‘Oh, at least a half a dozen times.’ ”

There’s one place Mabel might like to stay – Barcelona, Spain. Mabel says with a chuckle that he would have stayed there, but couldn’t think of a way to make a living.