When I contributed a little in the early days I think it was driven by desire to promote the things I was interested in (mostly video games this case). I’d guess the same goes for historians etc writing the more serious articles. It helped that standards for things like NPOV and citations were a lot lower back then—I don’t think the project would have gotten far if everything had to be cited up the wazoo like it is now. (Now that Wikipedia is established as being important people are willing to put a bit more work in).
Although I’m not autistic as such I do suspect there’s a connection between the above and the stereotypical autistic desire to excessively talk about one’s topic of obsessive interest.
When I contributed a little in the early days I think it was driven by desire to promote the things I was interested in (mostly video games this case). I’d guess the same goes for historians etc writing the more serious articles. It helped that standards for things like NPOV and citations were a lot lower back then—I don’t think the project would have gotten far if everything had to be cited up the wazoo like it is now. (Now that Wikipedia is established as being important people are willing to put a bit more work in).
Although I’m not autistic as such I do suspect there’s a connection between the above and the stereotypical autistic desire to excessively talk about one’s topic of obsessive interest.