Alfreido's Blog

I had a chat to a couple of former Wikipedia Administrators the other day, and I found out some startling similarities between all the Wikipedia Administrators that are currently “employed” to clean up Wikipedia these days. They did not want me to release names because apparently being banned from administrating Wikipedia is one step up from committing ritual suicide to a Celine Dion tune. They needed to keep their dignity, so I allowed them that. Anyways, forget Wikipedia’s ‘official’ guideline to becoming an administrator, I give you the unofficial 10 requirements to becoming a Wikipedia Administrator:

1. You must have reprogrammed your F1 key to automatically edit the article you are looking at. You must have also reprogrammed your F2 key to add ‘{{afd}}’ to any article, therefore setting it up for deletion.

2. You must have had straight A’s during Year 12 TEE. While intelligence is not a prerequisite for editing on Wikipedia (if it was, it would probably stop about 99% of the people visiting the site from editing), having straight A’s means that people cannot play the ‘I got better marks than you so I am right’ card when you edit or delete their article.

3. You must have skipped going to leavers in Year 12, with all the chicks and all the booze, to make sure that Wikipedia was as graffiti-free as possible.

4. Your parents must still be paying for your internet connection. And your food. And your frequent doctor trips due to radiation poisoning from your 20-year old monitor.

5. You are not allowed to have relationships of any kind. Girlfriends/boyfriends distract you from keeping spam on Wikipedia to a low, you have already learned this when you went out to see a movie with your partner, only to come back and find that your user-page has been overwritten by the 1,293,211 people whose articles you destroyed.

6. You must live no further than 100 metres from your nearest library. Since you’ve always gotta verify sources for all information on Wikipedia, you must make at least 20 trips to the library each day, constantly swapping the 12-book limit that is imposed on your account. You must always get furious at the staff when they ring the bell to signal the library’s closing time, since you still have another 250 books to hire out and review sources.

7. You must have your mobile phone set up so that when you must leave the house (which makes you shudder at the thought), you can easily view Wikipedia from your mobile. And make changes to Wikipedia. And destroy Wikipedia’s articles.

8. You must have a life-size poster of Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, on your wall. You must also remember to clean the white stains on his legs every week as well.

9. When your friends tell you some things which are happening in the world today, you must always immediately ask them to cite their sources.

10. You must have the ‘Recent changes’ page on auto-refresh every 20 seconds, so you can make sure to clean up any spam from users before someone else does and steals your job.