Editing User:Piccadilly/Essay

I give permission for this essay to be shared with anyone who might benefit from it. I hope that maybe my experiences will help someone else have a productive wiki career, and if that means learning from my errors, then I'm glad to have helped them in that way.

I will be dividing this by the various wiki farms I have been a part of, and describing my experiences with each one.

===Wikimedia===
The first wiki farm I joined was Wikimedia, in 2018. I knew I wanted to add something to Wikipedia, I just wasn't sure what exactly. Unfortunately I think that indecision on my part led me to add random things to various pages instead of information that was actually useful. 

To be honest, my whole history on Wikimedia, and especially Wikipedia, is probably the most complicated out of all my wiki histories. And why I didn't stop my misbehavior after my first warning, or my first block...I honestly don't know why. I think maybe I figured that since I was already blocked, what further harm could come of my vandalizing and doing other silly things there. At the time, I definitely wasn't thinking ahead to the future, or that it might be possible for me to rejoin Wikipedia if I was welll-behaved for awhile. And now, I honestly don't think there's any way for me to successfully rejoin Wikimedia. I was granted an appeal of my global lock there in 2021, only to be relocked a mere week later because I foolishly thought that messing around just once wouldn't hurt. I was definitely wrong about that.

June 28, 2023: I managed to get my very first account (used to be Sierpnia but is now renamed Trafalgar Ann) unlocked on Wikimedia, which I am super happy about. I had sent in the appeal in January 2022, but I guess there was a huge backlog so my appeal went unanswered for a year and a half, until today when it was granted. I'll still stay away from the English Wikipedia since I am community banned there (yuck), but at least I can edit other Wikimedia projects.

===Fandom===
My time on Fandom was rather brief, but I do remember joining in 2018, editing some wikis, and having quite a bit of fun with other people. I have a few fond mwmories of funny conversations we had there. Sadly the wikis we hung out on slowly became inactive, and so my activity dwindled as a result. I did get in some trouble, like for spamming too much in a chatroom, but the trouble there seemed minor compared to the trouble I got into on other wikis. My account sadly was globally disabled (or locked) because I made a really bad decision to post a questionable picture on Community Central, which violated their terms of use. Why on earth I decided to do that, I'm not sure, I think I was thinking it would be funny for some reason. But I definitely won't post that kind of content on any wiki anywhere anymore.

===Miraheze===
I joined Miraheze in March 2020 and was unfortunately locked a few months later due to spamming and vandalism. In 2022 I was able to get that lock removed, but still continued to cause some trouble which led to the community globally banning me from Miraheze in June 2022. Looking back now, I should have remembered that I was fortunate to have been given a second chance on Miraheze, and I should have taken that very seriously. All I can do now is behave myself at the wikis where I'm still able to contribute, and maybe over time I'll be able to build a good name for myself in the wiki communities.

===Testwiki.wiki and For-Test Wiki===

I joined ForTest Wiki and testwiki.wiki because I wanted to test admin and bureaucrat powers after I was blocked from Public Test Wiki. That sounds like a perfectly straightforward and reasonable course of action for me, but unfortunately I decided to do some bad things on those two wikis. Those things included testing where I shouldn't have, posting bad words and random nonsense, and not heeding the warnings I was given.

I hope that going forward, I won't be tempted to cause any more trouble at either wiki, or if I am, to remember that I am here to improve the projects and have fun testing, not mess things up. And maybe once I have shown good behavior here for awhile, it might lead to me being able to become a positive editor at other places (like Wikipedia).

===WikiTide===
By joining WikiTide, I hoped to have a fresh start and a community where I could show that I had changed, without much of the history that was on other communities. Though I did realize that people would still remember my actions on other wiki farms, I hoped that I could start out new and not have anything questionable affect my time at WikiTide.

However, on June 21, I messed up. I created a talk page that at first started out with "Hi everyone", then I changed it to "Hi (not very nice word for people)" before blanking it. I'm not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to make that page to begin with, but I thought that as long as I didn't put any slurs on the page and it was only one page, no one would really notice anyways and it wouldn't do much harm. I know, I should really stop thinking so carelessly about my actions. And I do intend to do better in the future and show that I have truly changed from my earlier actions on other wikis. I know I have said this before, and thus people might be wary to believe it, but I plan to actually prove that with actions from now on. And a part of that is reminding myself that no matter how "harmless" I may think it is, I should not make any random talk pages on wikis unless I have an actual relevant topic to discuss.

June 28, 2023: My WikiTide account is now unlocked, after I agreed to not repeat any of my old behavior there. I am very grateful to have one last chance there.