It was five and a half years ago that I became a registered editor on the English Wikipedia. Through years of small edits to politicians’ post-nominals I gradually climbed through the user ranks, from Signator to Burba, then to Novato. It was in 2017 that I began adding heraldic illustrations, as well as looking for photographs of article subjects if the site did not already display them. It was also in that year that I built a user page for myself, complete with a smattering of userboxes.

Not all of my projects have gone well: Several template ideas, such as life peers or husbands of British princesses, were rejected by other editors. Others, such as British MPs by seniority, turned out to exist already.

Late last month I made my eight thousandth edit to the English Wikipedia, enabling me to claim the rank of a Veteran Editor, or Tutnum. It was at this point that I wondered about the statistics for edits by members, and in particular where I ranked in the grand scheme of things. Eventually I stumbled upon a list of registered members by number of edits made. I will not be breaking into the top ten any time soon, for their counts are in the millions. The article goes much further than that, though, showing the top ten thousand editors. To some that may seem excessive, equivalent to handing out participant medals to otherwise lacklustre child athletes. It must be borne in mind, however, that at present the number of registered users on the English Wikipedia is just shy of thirty-seven million, and so even a list as large as this one represents only the top 0.027% of the community. I was intrigued when I saw that the edit counts at the tail end of the leader board were only a few hundred above my own. The article includes links to archived versions of the list, showing who was where at roughly monthly intervals. From this I could see that while the goalposts were obviously shifting, it was doing so at a stately pace compared to my own edit count, which meant that I would eventually catch up. I decided to step up the pace of my contributions, setting a target of twenty-five edits per day, or 175 per week, in the hopes of making the grade before the summer was over. Last night I made by 8,539th edit, having seen that the most recent version of the list had the lowest member on 8,538. This morning the page was updated and shows that I have just scraped through to the 10k spot. I realise, of course, that this position is tenuous and that the editors immediately below me are likely to make up the difference fairly soon (whether or not they are actively trying to get on there), but the closeness of the counts for the next few hundred members above me suggests that I can easily advance a safe distance beyond the waterline even if I decelerate to my normal rate of activity.

One cannot foresee what the future holds. In a few years I might climb thousands of places, or I may be knocked out of the league altogether by a stampede of hyperactive newcomers. In any case, it will be a long time before I can say my work is done.