Dr Prue Ashgrove
Convenor. Wikipedia editor since 2006, 63,000 edits, one topic ban, and the person who decided this work was worth a course.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- p.ashgrove@slop.university
- Contact
- Email, or leave a message on my talk page — I answer that one faster, which tells you something about both of us.
Registered an account in 2006 to fix a date in an article about a closed railway line, and did not stop. Sixty-three thousand edits later: mostly gazetteer work on Australian rail infrastructure, a long stretch at Articles for Deletion, three years clerking at Requests for Adminship, and one topic ban from the Arbitration Committee in 2014 which I served, appealed, and lost.
I teach the appeal in week 8. Not as a cautionary tale — the sanction was correctly applied and I would apply it myself now — but because being on the receiving end of a process you believe in is the hardest thing this course asks of you, and it seemed unfair to ask it without having done it.
My research is on the demographics of who stays. Volunteer projects lose roughly nine of every ten newcomers inside a month, and the ten percent who remain look nothing like the population they document. That is the problem the course is really about.