Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20090204/Interview

Interview with User:David Fuchs

This issue we are trying a new type of newsletter feature: "Featured editor". This is a chance to learn more about the various editors who contribute to the Video games project as well as the roles they fill. If you enjoyed this new feature and would like to see similar interviews in future issues, please drop us a note at the VG newsletter talk page.

David Fuchs (also known as Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs), is a long time video games editor that has written a large number of the project's Featured articles. He has been ranked high on Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations, and has assisted in reviewing and editing more many. Recently David has begun to assist with image reviews for Featured article candidates, and branched out into other types of articles in addition to video games. He can normally been seen on the project's talk page offering advice and his input on the various discussion taking place there.

1. What drew you to Wikipedia, and what prompted you to begin editing?

   I got involved due in part to (I believe, my memory is fuzzy) finding the site while doing research for Advanced Placement Europen History during high school. My earliest contributions (in December 2005) were creating topics based on what I learned, as well as creating an article for my high school with another friend. I soon became involved with editing topics related to Halo video game franchise, specifically the article on the parasitic Flood. I became one of the earlier members of WikiProject Halo, and since then my edits have expanded to multiple video games and other topics of interest, such as dinosaurs, Star Trek, and history. Initially, I would say my edits were sort of narcissistic "I know this" sorts of changes, and in some cases I was swiftly reverted (and with good reason). From then, I just wanted to write about my interests and passions.

2. How did you become involved with the project ?

   I've always been a more "lone wolf" editor, and it's been only recently when I've undertaken bigger editing projects that I've actively searched for outside editor advice, input, or comments. However WikiProjects are always good at soliciting reviewers for content review or getting more eyes on a topic (especially the non-Halo articles I edit, which often tend to be obscure games).

3. What got you involved in writing Featured articles?

   I think for most editors it's a shiny accomplishment you are striving for, and natural for most editors to try and get an FA. I first nominated an article for FA in 2007, after about a year of inactivity onwiki; it didn't pass as it was poorly written and didn't follow our guidelines for writing about fiction; I also took a couple of tries to get my first video game FA (Halo 2). Looking back not only have Wikipedia's standards for FA-class drifted upwards, but so have my own; I've been going back to old FAs to improve or add to them as a point of personal pride.

4. What article(s) are you most proud of writing or exemplifies your best work?

   I suppose Myst is a sort of accomplishment I can point to; I started work on the article on May 2 2008, when it looked like this, and submitted it to Featured Article Candidates one day later. I think that's some kind of record, but I dunno. In terms of being a good read or something I'm very happy with, however, I'd have to look at my more recent (non-video game) work, specifically Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Bone Wars.

5. How do you pick the articles you work on?

   Whatever hits me. There's many articles I haven't gotten around to editing and improving as planned because another article has caught my fancy. My sudden inspiration to edit Myst lead to me cleaning up the sum of the video game series and condensing and polishing it into just ten articles, most of which are now featured (Riven, Exile, Revelation and End of Ages). Likewise my older brother had a Sony PlayStation and I really enjoyed Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon, so that's why I worked on it. Similar stories led to me working on Golden Sun, my favorite handheld game, and Populous: The Beginning, a game that I only played the demo of and have never beaten as I have a Mac and the title is PC-only.

6. What advice would you give to editors seeking to write quality articles?

   In the words of one of my favorite cartoon characters when I was a child, "We must do reeea-search!" Even in video games, online sources don't usually cut it; I'm fortunate to have access to LexisNexis and ProQuest via my college library to access newsprint and magazine archives, but sometimes going through the stacks or getting items via Inter-library loan is the only way to complete an article (I've spent an hour sifting through musty microform stacks to find a scholarly article once, but luckily no video game article I've worked on have required such dedication). Thankfully the trumvirate of advanced Google searching—Books, Scholar, and News—allows me to find 90% of the info out there online, or at least gives me bibliographic information so I can hunt it down. Even after getting an article to FA, make sure you continually trawl the internet and elsewhere for more information to add to the topic, and make sure you continue to monitor pages for well-meaning but badly written additions.

7. Anything else you would like our readers to know about you?

   I'm a diehard Macintosh user, and I actually don't get around to playing many of the games I write about—I helped promote Halo 3 to FA despite never having played its campaign or a single multiplayer match. I was finally able to rectify that recently, though. :)