Tag Archives: Wikipedia

Here We Go Again

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As the minutes tick down until the end of December, I find myself once again resetting and archiving the talk page for my Wikipedia account, which I have already done on ten occasions before.

Some people think of time as a straight line, others as a circle. I have come to compromise by thinking of time as helical. The turn can be conceived of as lasting, hours, days, months, years or even centuries. Sitting at my computer desk now, ready to perform the same routine again, I find that the manoeuvre is ready in my muscle memory. It almost feels as if mere minutes have passed since I did this on 31 December 2023, or 2022, or 2021…

Conversely, events from earlier this year – such as the general election or the D-Day commemorations – feel a lifetime away. Perhaps the cycle of the seasons is to blame; by July it can be easy to forget the feeling of cold and darkness, and by January equally hard to remember the feeling of warmth and sunlight. Habits, timetables, wardrobes all change accordingly so that we almost inhabit two different selves with little knowledge of each other.

Christmas intensifies this effect, given the disappearance and reappearance of the same decorations each year, as well as the propensity of television and radio to endlessly rerun the same seasonal songs and specials. What’s more, Christmas is often a bit between, when work and school temporarily shut down. Once the rush of shopping for Christmas Day itself concludes, we find ourselves in the awkward denouement, the anticlimactic final week of the year when nothing much happens, which gives us time to reflect. It can all be a bit disorienting and existential, really.

What a strange phenomenon it is that memory and perception should vary in this way – over and over there will be weeks, days or even individual hours which feel excruciatingly long, yet somehow the year as a whole can go in no time at all.

Some Developments, Old and New

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My hobby as an amateur armorial artist has been going in earnest for six years now and is fast approaching 1,400 illustrations. Every now and again I go back to revisit one of my earlier works to see if it can be improved.

Today’s retrospective was Lord Walker of Aldringham, former Chief of the Defence Staff, whose arms I first did in January 2019. I found an old thread about it on r/heraldry and, predictably, they weren’t very impressed.

I set out to remake the shield from scratch, smoothing out the fracture of the orle, refining the colours and, crucially, making the acorns a little more recognisable. The main difficulty I had was fitting the four acorns above and below the chevrons, for this arrangement works more naturally with three. When reading the blazon on Walker’s page I saw that there was no source given for it, and set out to find one. Reading Debrett’s Peerage 2019 (page 4691) I discovered that there were indeed three acorns not four, and corrected the image accordingly. I must wonder how that error originated (since it was written as a word not a numeral, so a simple typo would be difficult) and how far it has proliferated.

With nine days to go until King Charles’s coronation, his cypher has started to be seen on the liveries of royal soldiers. The Yeoman Warders (or “Beefeaters”) at the Tower of London recently debuted their new blue undress uniforms, and the state trumpeters have updated theirs as well.

UPDATE (30th April)

I see that on the same day I uploaded my re-illustration the Prime Minister’s Flickr account published a photograph taken inside Westminster Abbey, with Walker’s banner hanging in the background. Sure enough, three acorns only.

10,000th Place

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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.