As long as I’ve had NaNoWriMo in my life, I’ve collected NaNo, Script Frenzy, and all-around Office of Letters and Light trivia. This collection was a casual one until the idea for Wikiwrimo started to form in my head. Around that time I started to devour trivia like I would never get to learn another OLL-related fact again, and at some point I realized that all the reading on Mediawiki documentation would do me no good in the world if I didn’t just go ahead and build the site.
So I registered the wikiwrimo.org domain in early June, set aside that weekend to install Mediawiki, and got to work on tweaking the site and writing articles. Writing the articles, of course, meant doing research. Doing research meant discovering that as much as I already know about NaNoWriMo and related events, there’s still so much that I don’t know. I find myself waist-deep in Goodsearch and Google and the Wayback Machine on a regular basis while reseraching articles and cursing the nonexistence of certain archives that are vital to putting the rest of the pieces together.
But boy, have I learned a lot about NaNo during those Internet trawls, among them that I’ve been spelling Jennifer Arzt’s last name wrong all these years. Sorry! All I have to tell myself to justify these long Internet sessions is that it’s all for research. Right?