"Increasingly, editors are finding their Wikipedia experience helpful for their careers. For example, people are putting it in their CVs, and the Wikimedia Foundation sometimes provides reference letters for editors who are job-hunting. Linking your on-wiki and off-wiki self is obviously easier if you use your own name"

So says Sue Gardner.

ORLY?

Yeah, it works great. I just claim to be whichever editor best fits the job. Applying for porn? "Sue, this is David Shankbone, I was wondering if ...". King of Legoland? Lar. Etc, etc.

Maybe this is a nice extra-curricular to pad your undergrad resume ("Over 1,000 edits to 'List of fictional ducks'? Welcome to Harvard, son!") but as for real jobs it would probably do you as much good as a reference letter from your World of Warcraft guild.

So, a good CV would be:

*2009-2011- Head of Finance IBM
*2007-2010 - Managing Director, Save the Children
*2005-2007 - MBA University of Harvard
*2002-2005 - PHD research in human cancer, University of Oxford
*2001-2011 16 DYK, 4 GA, and 1 RFA, Wikipedia (FA in [[Pokemon]] and [[Auto Asphyxiation]])

Referees:
*Professor Sir John Smith PHD, FRS, KBE
*Dr Albert Bigbrain, University of Oxford
*[[User:Bastique]], Wikimedia Foundation

Somey is going to love this part of Sue's message to the troops:

"That's an impressive resume, but we've got another candidate who has not one but two "Feline Leukemia Awareness" Barnstars, 20k edits, a talk page cookie from Slimvirgin and a glowing recommendation from the Runtshit vandal. Good luck in your future ventures."

I'm waiting to see something along the lines of "Did you know that using your editor name in bar room pickups improves your chances of getting lucky by 12.4%?".

I wonder if Frank Bednarz (Cool Hand Luke (T-C-L-K-R-D) ) will be including his Wikipedia service on his resume when he applies for the Illinois Bar?

Did you mean to overlap the top two jobs? This chap/chapess would really have to be a workaholic.

Frank's made his mistakes (who hasn't?) but I don't think he can be accused of the sort of wikicrimes that many are guilty of. I can think of lawyers with a lot less to brag about in their Wikipedia service than Frank. Why, for example, is a former ArbCom member and "retired" lawyer not using his status to help him resume his practice?

I'd strongly recommend against it. Anyone with an edit history that might be worth mentioning, to a propspective employer, wont also contain a fair amount of drama activity, keep votes on dubious articles, arguments for the retention of gossip in BLPs.

One suspects that a future employer with a 13yo daughter may be entirerly unimpressed with the keep votes in the Jessica Black article for example. Other employers might be concedrned about candidates that show a propensity to run to ANI every other week, or who get pissy over minor annoyances, or who seem to harbour grudges over months if not years.

Well, it's not like employers don't look up your online history anyways.

Quite.

But if you've edited anonymously as User:ZippotheBadger, rather than in your own name (as Aunt Sue suggests), the consequences are likely to be less serious.

Well of course, we'll put any email address into facebook, twitter, bebo, ... myspace, google, flickr ... and of courose we may also have accounts on sites that will do deep internet searches. On one occassion I had a candidate asking on a forum 'how to hack the bosses computer' cos he'd been banned from bittorrenting at work.

Don't look at me, I don't use any of that crap. (Except Twitter, and I only use it to criticize Twitter.)

I wish we had a like facility like of facebook...

In all seriousness, I suppose the problem for someone who's looking for a new job is that it's basically a crap-shoot as to whether or not the potential employer is going to be impressed by any WP activity at all, or for that matter, even understand what the person is referring to. There's still a fairly significant contingent of people, even in the USA, who have only the vaguest idea as to what "Wikipedia" even is.

Having said that, there are probably jobs out there, maybe even some that are paying, for which having a properly-worded reference to WP activity might help ever-so-slightly, or at least be no worse than some other form of resume-padding. I mean, if your job description includes "defend our company's Wikipedia article(s) against people who insert negative information about us or our products into it/them," then sure, why not? Can't hurt, unless of course your Wikipedia "career" includes provable attempts to do just that.

I'd be interested to know exactly how many "reference letters" the WMF folks have written for WP users who aren't already on the WMF staff, or aren't connected to them in some way beyond just "editing." I suspect the number is very, very small, probably fewer than three, and quite possibly just one. After all, how would they even know if the person requesting the reference letter is the WP user he says he is? They would have to research that, and then they'd be accused of "wikistalking," right?

Still, if the statement implies an offer to do that for anyone who asks, then that's not necessarily bad... Needless to say, I myself would write such a letter for any WR member who asked, though of course that would be silly.

We recently hired about 10 people to work on a .gov contract. I would not have been impressed if any of the candidates specified that they were Wikipedia editors. However, if they had mentioned they were familiar with Wiki markup, that may have been a plus, especially for those positions expected to provide a lot of documentation. Whether or not we will use a Wiki for doc is yet to be decided, but that experience indicates familiarity with writing doc.

Well, he passed the bar and he is already steadily employed: http://www.goodwinprocter.com/People/B/Bednarz-Frank.aspx

I know that Lt. Commander Richard Symonds of the Royal Navy cites Wikipedia on his LinkedIn profile.

In part once someone has relevant work experience all the rest of the crap on a CV is just that - crap.

If you don't have the work experience then you are pretty much one in a hundred, all having done much the same stuff at college, all with pretty much the same qualifications, and no company is going to interview a couple of hundred dweebs. What the recruiter is going to do is whittle those applications down to a handful, on pretty random criteria but its going to be on the basis of which amongst this lot seems interesting enough for me spend a couple of hours on? Your mensa membership aint going to count. So we are going to be looking at the dweebs outside interests, and we're going to use that as part of the interview, if you played trumpet in the Sally Ann we'll probably use that to investigate how you play in a team, and if wiki-edited hasn't turned us off, then we'll use that to investigate conflict resolution strategies, or research ability. In all cases we'll be looking for the passion or lack of it.

So basically she couldn't actually put it in a wikipedia article unless she was using herself as a source. I'm sure all the people I know who are too embarrassed to admit publicly that they are wikipedia admins will be reassured.

That's the thing about her constantly doing that - she does it even when she logically should not, as in this case. Not only doesn't she have to (when referring to people who refer to WP activity in job-search activities), but she actually shouldn't, because it would normally be seen as a positive thing for her, as the Chairperson of the WMF, to hold that opinion and to encourage the adoption of WMF practice(s) that would assist people in getting (real, as opposed to phony-baloney) jobs.

But I guess she's just so accustomed to doing it, she's now doing it without even thinking about it. She probably has the words "I'm not writing this in an official capacity" assigned to a function key on her laptop.

Admittedly, it's easy for me to say these things because Wikipedia Review does not operate under the umbrella of a formal corporate structure, the way Wikipedia does. I could always say something like, "it is this website's official policy that The Wikipedia Review is the last and greatest bastion of hope against the impending horror of the scourge of Wikipedia, which threatens to overwhelm and destroy Western culture and usher in a New Dark Age," but I guess it wouldn't really mean anything, since we wouldn't really be using statements like that in our (non-existent) fundraising campaigns.

You need a fundraiser. You should sell WR merch.

Linkedin has 180 Wikipedia "employees" listed, - didn't realise they employed that many people, 471 followers.

Yeah! I'd buy some--t-shirts with insulting pics of Jimbo, etc......
they'd make great birthday gifts for the clueless.......

Slap-bracelets that have printed on them: "Ow! Banned again!"

"The Wikipedia Review is the last best hope of Earth against the impending scourge and horror of Wikipedia, its infected and corroded fingers threatening even now to overwhelm and destroy Western culture, included all that we have known and cared for, and cause it to sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted computer science...."


There, I've fixed it up with the plagarised stuff from Lincoln and Churchill.

The keyword here is "increasingly" 1->2 is "increasingly"
It's a bullshit ambiguous term that has no meaning but is used in marketing speak to imply some huge number.

The only prospective employer likely to be impressed with a WP/WMF testimonial is one who doesn't understand that the WP fantasy-world description of "editor" has absolutely nothing to do with the real life meaning of the word. Still, a WP/WMF testimonial might be useful for someone like Nick-D (aka Dick-D) if ever he wants to work in the disinformation/subversive propaganda section of Intellipedia (assuming he doesn't already have a job there). Same applies to Nick-d's sidekick Edward321.

I was away so I missed this, but that is classic.

Doc <3