User:Phoebe

Hello! And welcome. My name is Phoebe Ayers. I am an academic engineering librarian, currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I work for MIT Libraries. I've been writing about, editing and using Wikipedia on and off since August 2003. There is always something else I want to do.

I work on Wikipedia, but I also talk and write about it a lot in various contexts, and as a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation was involved in our project-wide governance. I have also been involved in a variety of other projects, including lots of in-person outreach and event work, detailed below.

For why I work on Wikipedia -- why I started and why I continue -- see my essay Why work on Wikipedia?

You start talking about the long term — about being one of the first large information sources on the web that is truly free. You start talking about what will happen if this works; that because it's free, it's going to be the default resource for a whole lot of people, and you start to get a little bit awed by the responsibility to build it properly, and keep it open, and keep it sane, and most of all, to get the facts right, because this work is going to be a base on which many unforeseeable future projects will be built. -- user:CatherineMunro