Following our Skype interview, this editor joined my weekly email list, and we corresponded infrequently about several aspects of my published work. In early July, two months after our Skype interview, I was sitting at my partner’s parents’ computer, aimlessly browsing Wikipedia. A memory emerged in sharp focus: oh, yeah—I’m the subject of an article on this site. How’s my page doing? It had been months since I’d checked.

I typed my name into the search box in the top right corner and pressed ‘enter.’ As the page loaded and the vertical scrollbar extended, my eyebrows shot skyward. That editor, the Australian music enthusiast, had expanded my page significantly, far beyond the initial stub created by ‘JHunterJ’ in April. This new version of the page contained a table of contents with six headings, including my ‘early life and education’ as well as my ‘charity work,’ which mentioned the occasion in 2012 when I had shaved off my seven-year-old dreadlocks while fundraising for cancer research.

Scrolling down the page and reading this editor’s words, I felt a peculiar mix of astonishment and pride. He had clearly spent hours researching my work, as the reference list had expanded to 17 different sources, including comments I’d made in a lengthy podcast interview that was released in May.

At this point, I had been a freelance journalist for over five years. My writing had been published hundreds of times across dozens of magazines, newspapers and websites. Yet scrolling through that article was among the most thrilling experiences of my life. It gave me a buzz to see my career laid out in the familiar, neutral white-and-black of Wikipedia, and phrased in dry, encyclopedic tones such as, “McMillen grew up in the southern Queensland, Australia city of Bundaberg with a father who remains a librarian-teacher in May 2014.”

I sat there grinning to myself as my heart rate rose several beats above baseline. A flush of embarrassment hit me when I realized that this article was now likely to be among the most comprehensive of the 660-odd Australian journalists listed on the site, although the names of dozens of more experienced and deserving writers came to mind immediately. I wondered whether any colleagues or commissioning editors stumbling across the article would assume that I’d written it myself, or hired someone to do so. I worried whether such an assumption might paint a target on my back: ‘I’m an egomaniac — don’t hire me.’ There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and becoming the subject of an overly comprehensive Wikipedia article might tip the scales toward the latter.

I also realized that my well-sourced biography can be attributed, in part, to the fact that every word I’ve published is available online, and thus easily cited as a reference. In the eyes of Wikipedia editors, my being a digital native appears to be a distinct advantage: it’s much easier to link to existing online sources than to visit libraries and dig through decades-old physical media, such as books and newspapers.

One could argue that an article’s length is a misleading measure of noteworthiness. Consider, for example, the case of the German actress Sibel Kekilli, best known for her role as Shae in the HBO series Game Of Thrones. Kekilli’s entry is 599 words long, and it includes brief mention of her past work in adult films. I bring that up because her article’s ‘Talk’ page contains 7,402 words of passionate bickering between dozens of editors, dating back to 2010, regarding how extensively her background in pornography should be documented.

In 2012, after a Wikipedian with administrator privileges had once again stripped Kekilli’s page of any porn-related content, a contributor named Tullius2 conceded that “right now the issue is probably a lost cause.”

“Every attempt [to revert the changes] would require massively more effort than it is worth,” Tullius2 added. “Wikipedia is an opaque thicket of power structures, nearly unnavigable for the occasional Wikipedian like you and me.”

It’s well known that around 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are male, so the edits and discussions skew toward male interests. Many contributors are working to expand the encyclopedia’s scope in positive directions: rather than creating yet another article devoted to trivial aspects of Pokémon or The X-Files, groups of contributors work together on ‘WikiProjects’ to improve the coverage of, say, ‘LGBT studies’ or ‘women’s history’. (It has to be said, though, that on the most recent list of WikiProjects ranked by popularity, these two subject areas rank well below such primarily male-driven subjects as ‘military history’ and ‘professional wrestling’).

Given that Wikipedia is a project driven by the hyper-specific interests of thousands of human volunteers, it is far from a meritocracy. It is a venture driven by human interest, intrinsically linked to the individual quirks of its editors. Through sheer dumb luck, I had found something unique and unexpected: a person who became a generous champion for my cause, as it were. Someone who enjoyed spending his free time improving the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and who had taken enough interest in my journalistic work to channel that curiosity into a well-written article. In his mind, it seemed, I had passed Wikipedia’s notability test with flying colors, and none of his volunteer peers had yet challenged this assessment. (That may change after the publication of this story, of course. And I’m okay with that.)

I emailed him immediately after I’d finished basking in the monitor’s white glow. “Holy shit, dude, I just saw what you did to my Wiki page,” I wrote. “You’re a madman! I am ridiculously flattered that you took the time. Thank you.”

The pedant in me couldn’t help pointing out one inaccuracy, the claim that Bad Brains was one of my favorite bands, the result of a comment made by a writer who had interviewed me in 2011. “I will correct the mistake tonight,” he replied.

Earlier I’d told him that I was thinking of doing a story on the notability test. In this conversation he impressed on me that his edits had nothing to do with the article. “Please don’t think I have any expectations—I just saw your page and thought, ‘This needs work,’ so I did it.”

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