Tuesday, August 21, 2012

A day from the life of a typical Wikipedian

Warning : Highly autobiographical. Elements of fiction added at places to exaggerate poetic effect. 

1. Gets up late (You are not expected to wake up early if you sleep at 3 am)

2. Rubs her eyes and plants the spectacles on the nose. (The glasses are always in peril of falling down)

3. Hits the power button of the laptop.

4. Closes all update messages and virus alerts, and runs Firefox. (There can’t be a Wikipedian whose default browser isn’t Firefox)

5. Opens her Gmail account. (This is a kind of reflex response. You do it without applying your conscious mind. You will do it mechanically even if you are hypnotized)

6. Deletes all Facebook and Orkut mails without reading them.

7. Reads official mails and gets disappointed that the deadline for the submission of a project (at office/college) is preponed. Curses the boss/prof with the F-word for the umpteenth time.

8. Meanwhile, hits the Wikipedia main page listed under ‘bookmarks’.

9. Clicks on the ‘Recent Changes’ and spots an edit made by a someone called 117.314.56.223. Rolls back the change without even bothering to read the crap.

10. Puts the laptop to sleep and gets up to brush (Brushing teeth is one of the
hateful duties of a civilized man/woman), remembers that there is no Wikipedia article titled ‘brush’ and wonders how many disambiguations the word might have.

11. Finally, decides to start an article which goes hence – Brush (tooth) is an implement consisting of [[bristles]] set into a handle used for cleaning [[tooth|teeth]] by gentle up and down motion(The definition could put even Webster to shame).

12. Sits in front of the laptop (her mouth still full of toothpaste bubbles, and brush in hand) and hits ‘toothbrush’ on google search bar to find references for the article.

13. Screams at mom/sis who happened to wear a RED chudidar and asks her to wear a BLUE one. Now, the frothy toothpaste has made its way to the lungs.

14. Hastily finishes the breakfast and hammers stuff into the lap vigorously like a robot.

15. Pretends to listen to sis’s chatter without taking off the eyes from the screen and grunts occasionally. Continues to grunt at regular intervals even after she has left.

16. Three guys pop out of gtalk.
Guy 1 : hey wazzup?hw r u?long since. whats for breakfast? Gotta go.bye.
Guy 2 : hi, i deleted the recycle bin. Help!
Guy 3 : hi, u don’t care abt me, bt I cant stop thinkin’ abt u. plz,plz,plz, gimme ur cell no.i’m upset, im lonely, im terrible.i wanna talk 2 u or I will die. (Aha!)

17. Tells the next door neighbor over gtalk that her roses need pruning. Looks out through the window(not xp, not vista but the original window) and discovers that it is evening.

18. Slaps oneself on the head and eats whatever is left in the kitchen. Takes a spoonful of jam, slams the spoon onto the plate and learns that it was pickle and not jam she wanted.

19. Spends the evening in the garden and photographs every identifiable object hoping that one of them could be the ‘Selected picture of the day’. Grumbles random words like silhouette, bokeh, red-eye etc.

20. Roots herself in front of the laptop again and argues with another guy on the talk page that mangoes can be bought from malls in Antarctica.

21. Adds into her userpage the firsthand account of the glorious deeds she has done that Sunday.

22. A sarcastic grin appears on the face after she discovers that he/she has surpassed some random guy in terms of the number of wiki edits.

23. Realizes that a seminar is to be presented the next day at college/office and starts working on powerpoint.

24. Finishes the work by 2 am and sleeps in front of the laptop.

25. In her dreams, she has been voted in as a bureaucrat.

No comments:

Post a Comment