Thank You/Benjamin Chen

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I first got to know Wikipedia when I was in secondary school. In the beginning, I only read Wikipedia. But one day, I noticed the button that says "Edit."
I tried it out. At first, I just corrected some typos. Then I started writing sentences… and paragraphs. Before long, contributing to Wikipedia became a habit.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. We all know it, we all use it. But what makes it special is that anybody can contribute to it. If you know something about a topic that isn't there yet, you can add it. If you see something that isn't correct, you can change it.

That's what makes Wikipedia different. It's not something written by a few individuals. It's something written by everybody.

Of course, Wikipedia is a big project &mdash; and there are a lot of ways to help.

Personally, I don't write much anymore. Instead, I do housekeeping. I clear away spam. When people get confused, I help them out. When they have questions about policy, I explain it to them. And when someone vandalizes an article &mdash; by intentionally adding nonsense or bad information &mdash; I revert their edits.

It's really amazing. Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website on the internet, but it's supported purely by donations. To me, that proves that people really care about knowledge.

Wikipedia is about all of these people coming together.

&mdash; Benjamin Chen

''Benjamin Chen is a 20-year-old computer science student at a university in Singapore. He speaks Mandarin and English, and along with his admin tasks on Wikipedia, he also translates articles from English to Chinese. In his spare time, he plays Magic: The Gathering.''

Image Attribution: by Karen Sayre, under [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported], from Wikimedia Commons.