As the article opines, there's something slightly sad about this milestone. I have roughly 100-120k edits on the English Wikipedia (
http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume ), so I think I can speak from first-hand experience here.
The problem with devoting this much effort to Wikipedia is not that your time is wasted. If you get this far, you've absorbed enough that you know how to make edits that will last and how to defend your material, and this guy in particular is making edits in areas particularly academic and safe from deletionists; and your articles will receives hundreds or thousands of visits a month (see stats.grok.se, I was a little shocked at how many page hits my articles collectively represent a month).
The problem is that the benefits are going entirely to all your readers. It's practically a case-study in positive externalities. You don't even get intangibles like reputation. When you make 10,000 edits to your personal wiki, you will probably have written some pretty decent stuff, you will have established a personal brand, etc. Maybe it'll turn out great, maybe it'll turn out to be worth nothing. But when you make 10,000 edits to Wikipedia, you are guaranteed to get nothing.
(Yes, I realize his user page lists a bunch of media coverage. That's great, but it's only because he's the first to pass 1m edits. What happens with the next editor to pass 1m, or heck, all the other editors on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_b... ?)
To again turn to myself; when I was pouring much of my free energy and research interest into improving Wikipedia, I got nothing back except satisfaction and being able to point people at better articles during discussions. I began writing things that didn't fit on Wikipedia and got a personal website because I didn't want to use some flaky free service, and the world didn't end. I now have an actual reputation among some people; on occasion, people even email me with job offers to write things (discussing a little ebook with O'Reilly, for example). I owe my current (very modest) job to my writings being clearly mine, and not 'stuff on Wikipedia'. I'm not saying any of this is very impressive, but I am saying that these are benefits I would not have received had I continued my editing on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is wonderful, but it's sad to see people sacrificing so much of themselves for it.
The problem with devoting this much effort to Wikipedia is not that your time is wasted. If you get this far, you've absorbed enough that you know how to make edits that will last and how to defend your material, and this guy in particular is making edits in areas particularly academic and safe from deletionists; and your articles will receives hundreds or thousands of visits a month (see stats.grok.se, I was a little shocked at how many page hits my articles collectively represent a month).
The problem is that the benefits are going entirely to all your readers. It's practically a case-study in positive externalities. You don't even get intangibles like reputation. When you make 10,000 edits to your personal wiki, you will probably have written some pretty decent stuff, you will have established a personal brand, etc. Maybe it'll turn out great, maybe it'll turn out to be worth nothing. But when you make 10,000 edits to Wikipedia, you are guaranteed to get nothing.
(Yes, I realize his user page lists a bunch of media coverage. That's great, but it's only because he's the first to pass 1m edits. What happens with the next editor to pass 1m, or heck, all the other editors on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_b... ?)
To again turn to myself; when I was pouring much of my free energy and research interest into improving Wikipedia, I got nothing back except satisfaction and being able to point people at better articles during discussions. I began writing things that didn't fit on Wikipedia and got a personal website because I didn't want to use some flaky free service, and the world didn't end. I now have an actual reputation among some people; on occasion, people even email me with job offers to write things (discussing a little ebook with O'Reilly, for example). I owe my current (very modest) job to my writings being clearly mine, and not 'stuff on Wikipedia'. I'm not saying any of this is very impressive, but I am saying that these are benefits I would not have received had I continued my editing on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is wonderful, but it's sad to see people sacrificing so much of themselves for it.