My first impression of Wikipedia was not a positive one; it was, in fact, rather negative. I do not remember the first time I saw Wikipedia; I surely recall having found it while searching Google for something or the other. However, the oldest instance I remember is a discussion I had with some Wikipedians who were also part of LiveJournal; namely Timwi and Mendel.

I believed it would be very hard to have an authentic encyclopedia when everybody is allowed to edit. With all the empowerment Wikipedia has allowed even non-registered users, I believed it would be Vandal Heaven.

Well; we stopped the discussion without an agreement, but I promised to have a look at some articles they gave me, that are supposed to refute my ideas; I do not remember the article names anymore.

As time passed; I never thought much of the discussion or Wikipedia, but their words about its usefulness sank into my mind. You'd find me, when looking for information about something, trying Wikipedia, and more often than not actually finding useful information.

I was bored that day, when I decided to try creating an account and learning about it all. I did, and I changed a few things, but I found little I could change because I did not know enough about the place; I surely did not want to cause trouble either. So I joined the IRC channel and simply became a lurker for a couple of months. Now that I have made myself familiar enough with the place; I hope to be a good Wikipedian.

There are many things I noticed I do frequently – and love doing – in Wikipedia, the most important among these are:

• Learning how little I know, and how much more there is to learn; looking at articles that talk about things I never heard of before.
• Making newly added pages look nicer and improving their style; possibly adding more content if I know about the subject or what I have just learned while cleaning things up.
• Trying to make things consistent; this sometimes proves as impossible.
• Reverting vandalism, detecting copyright violations, and marking nonsense articles as speedy delete-able.
• Adding content to computing related articles and those that relate to my language, my country or my religion.
• Talk a lot in my user page.

• Change anything in order to cause trouble; if you see me doing something wrong, then I either do not know it is wrong or did not mean to do it. I would be thankful if you tell me about it in my talk page.
• Fight over stuff I believe in; I am very opinionated, and I believe in my opinions. However, I do not think an encyclopedia is the place to argue this. I will revert an article when it is not in a neutral point of view even if the points raised are points I agree with. I believe in objectivity, and I see Wikipedia as a great place to train myself to be objective.
• Be your enemy or a part of your war; I think this is the ugliest thing about giving people control, the misunderstand the power and think they may abuse it (as if it was a right, not a privilege) and worse, use damage to enforce it. The only thing I find personal about Wikipedia is the enjoyment of being useful and spending my time in constructively; doing whatever you do with my edits will not make me upset.