The full record

In order

1. 2001Wesleyan University, College of Social Studies (to 2005)
2. 2005Founded 4.0 Tutoring, an academic support company (to 2010)
3. 2007First edit to Wikipedia, as an anonymous user, later User:Ocaasi
4. 2010Turned from editing to helping newcomers; wrote the Plain and Simple Guide for New Editors
5. 2011Founded The Wikipedia Library as a volunteer
6. 2012Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant for the Library (to 2014); first Wikimania, in Washington, D.C.
7. 2013Facilitated the first for-credit Wikipedia course at a medical school; Wikimania Hong Kong; Cochrane Colloquium
8. 2014Joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Senior Program Manager, Libraries (to 2019); Wikimania London; first Horizon Report for Libraries
9. 2015Negotiated the Turnitin collaboration; Wikimania Mexico City
10. 2016Launched #1Lib1Ref; founding member of the Open Scholarship Initiative
11. 2017Founded the Knowledge Integrity program (to 2018); OCLC partnership; Wikimania Montreal
12. 2018Internet Archive dead-link rescue; WikiCite report; Wikimania Cape Town
13. 2019Left the Foundation; started WikiBlueprint; published Welcome to the Circle
14. 2021Featured with Jimmy Wales on NPR's TED Radio Hour
15. 2023Published Welcome Back to the Circle
16. 2025Founded Project 2029
17. 2026Published A Gently Illustrated Guide to Utter Madness

WikiBlueprint, 2019 to now

Ethical Wikipedia consulting for companies, people, and institutions. The client list is on the WikiBlueprint site; these are the engagements I can name.

• Featured with Jimmy Wales on NPR's TED Radio Hour, The Public Commons
• Hosted the Whose Knowledge? podcast series on decolonizing the internet's languages
• Helped change Wikimedia's global bot policy so InternetArchiveBot could expand to more than 300 language editions
• Oversaw the Anti-Defamation League's Wikipedia Election Democracy Project
• Led the rebrand of Open Access Button into OA.Works
• Supervised two Wikipedians in Residence at Annual Reviews; recruited and trained the Wikipedian in Residence at the Pérez Art Museum Miami; taught the Wikipedian in Residence at Milton Public Library
• Advised Harvard University on its Wikipedia engagement; worked with the Linux Foundation on a key computer science article
• Led fundraising for Wiki Project Med Foundation; coordinated the Wikipedia Vaccine Safety Project for NewsQ and Hacks/Hackers
• Oversaw the Wikipedian in Residence for Latino culture and community at Equis
• Vice chair of the Smithsonian Biodiversity Heritage Library working group and overseer of its Wikipedian in Residence program
• Launched Internet-in-a-Box into the Wikimedia Foundation store; featured on BoingBoing
• Built the Citation Watchlist with James Hare (WP:WATCH CITE); member of the WikiConference North America program committee
• Appeared in Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online
• Founder of the Wikimedia Consultants Network
• Wrote three guides: The Guide to Successful Wikipedia Engagement for corporate professionals, Write Your First Wikipedia Article, and The Successful Wikipedian in Residence

Libraries and research literacy

The Wikipedia Library, 2011 to 2019, and everything it made possible.

• Founded and led The Wikipedia Library at the Wikimedia Foundation, managing a team of six on four continents with a half-million dollar budget
• Negotiated free access to 100,000 academic journals for 25,000 editors through the Library Card platform
• Built 25 national language branches of the Library
• Convened academic library leaders at the first Wikipedia and ARL Summit
• Released two white papers with IFLA on academic and public library collaboration
• Created the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar program; started the Wikimedia and Libraries User Group and the 2,000-member Wikimedia + Libraries group
• Wrote The Largest Encyclopedia Needs a Digital Library and We Are Building It for the ALA book Leveraging Wikipedia
• Wrote You're a Researcher Without a Library: What Do You Do? and Librarypedia: The Future of Libraries and Wikipedia
• Author on the New Media Consortium Horizon Report for Libraries in 2014, 2015, and 2017
• Interviewed by Publishers Weekly in Discovery Happens Here

Partnerships

Long-term relationships that changed what Wikipedia could cite.

• Built 70 long-term relationships with scholarly publishers
• Negotiated the Turnitin collaboration to fix copyright violations on Wikipedia
• Started the Internet Archive collaboration that has rescued millions of dead citation links
• Integrated OCLC ISBN data into Wikipedia's citation generator
• Wrote Wikimedia Foundation Partnership Reflections

Campaigns

One reference at a time, at scale.

• Created #1Lib1Ref, the library outreach and citation campaign
• Reached 25 million people on social media in collaboration with IFLA; added 20 million words to Wikipedia in 47 languages
• Built year-round #1Lib1Ref programming with a 50-member global ambassador team
• Led the report Building a Better #1Lib1Ref
• Ran the @WikiLibrary account

Open access and open science

Making the sources behind Wikipedia free to read.

• Developed the OAbot app for adding free-to-read links to Wikipedia citations
• Ran the #OAwiki campaign with SPARC
• Founding member of the Open Scholarship Initiative, 2016 to 2019; wrote its reports on information overload and institutional repositories
• Presented at OpenCon from 2015 to 2018
• Published Writing an open access encyclopedia in a closed access world
• Featured in the documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship

Citations and misinformation

How Wikipedia knows what it knows.

• Founded the Wikimedia Knowledge Integrity program for verifiability and citation research
• WikiCite participant 2016 to 2018, organizing committee member, and author of the 2018 report
• Released datasets of Wikipedia's most cited sources and its proportion of free-to-read sources
• Interviewed for Public Record Under Threat with Emily Bell of the Tow Center

Medicine

Wikipedia is where much of the world reads about medicine. It should be a good place to do it.

• Founding board member of Wiki Project Med Foundation
• Facilitated the first Wikipedia editing course for medical students
• Presented on Wikipedia in education at Stanford University School of Medicine
• Presented at the Cochrane Colloquium in 2013 and 2014; board member for Cochrane's Game Changer innovation grants
• Co-authored Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia in Academic Medicine

Wikipedia itself

Editing, administration, and the writing that grew out of both.

• 40,000 edits to Wikipedia as User:Ocaasi; English Wikipedia administrator
• Wrote the chapter How Wikipedia Drove Professors Crazy, Made Me Sane, and Almost Saved the Internet for Wikipedia @ 20, MIT Press
• Wrote the Plain and Simple Guide for New Editors and its conflict-of-interest counterpart
• Wrote Things My Professor Never Told Me About Wikipedia, The First 50 Mistakes of a Wikipedian, and The Crowdsourcing Fallacy
• Interviewed at CIIS for Inside Wikipedia
• Presented at Wikimania in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018, in Washington, D.C., Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Montreal, and Cape Town
• Also presented at Stanford, Internet Librarian, the American Library Association, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Forum, OpenCon, OCLC, and IFLA
• Two-time Wikimedia Foundation grantee; former Individual Engagement Grants committee member; Linked Data 4 Libraries program committee member

Learning and games

Teaching Wikipedia by letting people play it.

• Created The Wikipedia Adventure, the interactive onboarding game, and published its field evaluation
• Developed the newcomer Teahouse Badges program
• Built the Wikipedia Research Help portal
• Presented Gamestorming Wikipedia at GSummit

Equity and culture change

Whose knowledge counts, and who decides.

• Co-wrote Our Stories, Our Knowledges with Whose Knowledge?
• Interviewed on the Decolonizing the Internet podcast
• Founded the Ally Is a Verb group; wrote 17 Myths About Being a Good Ally

Well people and sane societies

Writing and organizing about mental illness, recovery, and the life after.

• Author of A Gently Illustrated Guide to Utter Madness (2026), Welcome Back to the Circle (2023), and Welcome to the Circle (2019)
• Editor of The J Curve on Medium
• Wrote the memoir essay Journey of a Wikipedian
• Wrote the series How to Save Someone's Life: part one, part two, and part three
• Wrote The Mountains Are Burning: My Fire Diary, linked in The New York Times
• Formed the Wikimedia Foundation mental health listening circle; runs story circles for teams and conferences

Skills

Archiving, citation, community organizing, community outreach, copyright, creative nonfiction, crowdsourcing, digital libraries, digital literacy, editing, entrepreneurship, gamification, information literacy, innovation, leadership, leadership development, libraries, media literacy, medical literacy, memoir, mental health, mentorship, misinformation, nonprofit management, open access, open knowledge, open science, program management, project management, product management, product marketing, public speaking, social media, strategic communications, strategic partnerships, research, team leadership, Wikidata, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, wikis, writing.

Selected writing and appearances

Essays, interviews, and appearances, in three shelves. The four Medium publications are on the home page.

External links

Every profile and account, public and checkable.