I created my Wikipedia account back in March 2012, but it wasn't until April 2016 that I started actively editing. Being irritated at the poor quality of the article of my then-favorite television series, I began editing Wikipedia to fix it for accuracy and proper information. I thought it was fun to edit, and wanted to do more. Having noticed a surprisingly poor quality of articles related to technology, I began editing articles related to Google, Apple, Facebook, and other tech subjects a few months later. Eventually I was editing and maintaining 80+ pages, covering some of the largest topics in society. That was fine for a while, until I started feeling too much stress and took a break in July 2017 to get away for a while and see what needed to be done differently.

Upon returning a few days later, I had a better perspective of what caused me stress. One thing is doing the "maintenance" work of fixing information already present on a page, but every morning (and the different hours of the day) consisted of checking edits made by other users and adding new information. Feeling responsible for maintaining so many articles became too stressful, and I could easily find myself delaying or dropping non-necessary real-world tasks in order to fix a highly-viewed article. There was also the element of following Wikipedia's policies and style guidelines. I love to write, and my focus on Wikipedia was to write the actual content, including making sure it's properly written, correctly sourced, and up-to-date. That's a major task all on its own. But Wikipedia also has a literal style manual covering everything from punctuation to titles in extreme detail, and having to follow that guide for every single page I edited was a major burden for me. I originally thought I was alone in thinking that, but I quickly found out I wasn't, as noted in articles by Slate (The total word count for all guidelines and essays can easily be in the magnitude of millions. It is safe to assume that no one in the world knows them all, and that Wikipedians really wallow in creating norms and regulations. ... But this is madness!) and USA Today (Wikipedia has changed from the encyclopedia that anyone can edit to the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes himself or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection, and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit")

I'm a very fact-based person, and I believe that knowledge is powerful, especially when it's easily accessible. Wikipedia is arguably the most easily accessible knowledge center for the entire world, but sadly, it's often far from accurate or up-to-date. I was one of the people who wanted to help fix that, because I use Wikipedia myself (though often less nowadays) and appreciate reading factually correct and decent articles. During my active days, I found it interesting to edit articles, as I learned about the topics myself while editing. My true motivation, however, came from the end results. Seeing an article go from lackluster to excellent was a personal reward, as was seeing the statistics for how many people viewed the pages. But it became troublesome after a while. I got very proud of my edits on articles, having sort of an emotional attachment to the work I was presenting to the world, but there were often moments when more rule-experienced users would change something based entirely on style guidelines I had never heard of, nor agreed to, when I was presented with it. And those guidelines were often relatively obscure, one particular example being a guideline for how many paragraphs a lead section of an article should be based on its character count. That's the seventh point in the lengthy style guidelines page specific to the lead section page, which is itself in the second list in the first point in the layout guidelines, itself described in the second list in the first point in the overall style guidelines page. Anyway, that one, quick reversion removed my content, shattered my pride, quickly changed content I had spent dedicated time to write, discouraged me from editing that page, and usually only left me with a potentially useful edit summary. Discussion would only sometimes result in a decent outcome. Oh, and this might all happen while I am asleep, unable to do anything about it for hours.

Now, I know I'm giving a lot of harsh criticism here. I have barely scratched the surface of the overall criticism Wikipedia receives. These are my personal objections to policies and procedures preventing me from having a good time editing; there is a dedicated article about the shortcomings of this platform. I do want to repeat the statement above that I have loved contributing. There are several pages I can still look back at, beaming with pride, though most articles have changed in key ways in the months following my absence. The criticism I write here is not because I hate Wikipedia. Quite on the contrary, I would still like to edit. But the previous way of doing things, in which I had to abide by countless rules and procedures made by people without the same time commitment or emotional attachment, became too troublesome. "First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one". Call me when things have changed? :)