Eine Redakteurin bat um ein Kurz-Interview für einen Vortrag auf einem Symposium eines Verlages. Die Antworten wollte Sie gerne als O-Töne auf Englisch haben. Auf meinen Einwand, dass mein Englisch nicht das beste sei, entgegnete Sie, dass dies die Antworten noch authentischer machen würde :-)

Frage: Seit wann sind Sie bei Wikipedia aktiv?

Hi. My name is Tim Bartel and I’m an information management student in Cologne. In Wikipedia I can be found under the user name “Avatar”. There is more information about me available at my Wikipedia user page.

I can’t remember my first contribution as an anonymous user, but my first contribution as a logged on user was at 6. July 2002 the start of the article “Köln” (about the city of Cologne) in the german language version of Wikipedia.

I was one of the first 30 to 40 users at de.wikipedia.org

Because the project was very small at this time and I had a lot of other things to do, I paid no attention to it after July 2002. In April 2004 I started working again on the project when I had a little bit more time and realized Wikipedia was still growing fast. Since the end of 2004 I had boosted my commitment to the project and I’m doing a lot of work in the administrative sector.

Frage: Was genau gefällt Ihnen an Wikipedia?

I think the most notable achievement of Wikipedia is, that the project offers an enourmous amount of free knowlegde in writing and in media. There are more than 3 million articles in almost every language of the world and more than half a million media files like images, sounds and videos which are all released under a free license.

Everyone who abides by the conditions can take this content and make use of it in every way he wants to. It’s impressive that in such a short ammount of time Wikipedia grew to its current size and got so extremly helpfull. Today I look up things in wikipedia more often than using Google.

Also the collaborative work of the wikipedians is fascinating. I’m happy about seeing an article I have started keeps growing when it’s edited by other helpfull persons. The community is never asleep. Every minute there are interesting edits and you can find a lot of interesting topics in which you can get involved.

Frage: Was bewegt Sie dazu, Inhalte ins Internet bzw. in Wikipedia zu stellen?

In school and in university I always found it awfull if the students do a lot of work and exert to create a great paper just to present it to a small audience which will forget the topic soon. At most the author will keep it at home in his documents. All the work and labor to collect the knowledge and compile it seems to be nearly for nothing.

Wikipedia offers the opportunity that everyone can bring in his knowledge and all others can benefit from it.

Frage: Welche Bedeutung hat Ihre Tätigkeit/ Ihr Schaffen auf Wikipedia für Sie persönlich?

I really like the project Wikipedia, because I think that the idea of a free encyclopedia is more than worth to support. It’s important to me to give people a better understanding of this project, because as a result of the fast growth there are often a lot of questions popping up which can’t be answered by oneselfs. This is also the reason why I’m working as a voluntary helper at the Wikimedia Support Team.