How far can one stretch the definition of everything, noders and noding until it would be respectable enough to put on a resume?

Pssst, Wesc! When I said stretch, I meant lie. But I'll change it if it'll make you happy.

"published content daily for an international audience of millions"
There are around 11,000 users on E1/E2. I'd guess under 20,000 unique hits per month. (I'm counting the same person on a different terminal/browser/ip as ununique.)

Once we get all the titles or different experience levels* you can put your title if it's something that would sound good. ("Everything God" is not something I'd put on my résumé. "Senior VP of Noding" would be good.)

* See Suggest Level Titles For Everythingians

Recently, I have been job-hunting. Included on my resume is a section entitled "Personal Interests," under which I included, among other things (Irish dancing, reading, book club, etc.), my administrator/editorship on Everything. Surprisingly, last week I was on an job interview in which the interviewer opened the discussion with a comment that mine was a singularly interesting resume, and having noted my inclusion of Everything, went to the site and found it engaging. We talked about Everything for probably five minutes before the interviewer brought the subject back around to the job.



BTW, I don't work in IT or anything - I'm a paralegal.
Sometimes we are out of a job. Sometimes, we don't have the previous experience we'd need. So we turn to everyone's favorite hobby, Everything2 for answers. Reasons why you would or would not want to list Everything2.com on your resume are many and varied, and there is a lot to take into account. A lot of this is how you would explain your part in all of this to non-E2 folk that would seem impressive. How do you tell your girlfriend that E2 is important, your parents? How do you impress the gravity and beauty of this place on others? You really can't (at least I have trouble with it), but if your contribution is above the norm, then you may be able to list it objectively on a resume.
  • If you are an e2 "editor"... Each of which shows some kind of responsibility on the site (as it in reality, does). Even if you don't do a lot, the title of editor for an "online publication" may go far in helping you out. Consider painting E2 from the online publication or moderated collaboration aspect. You could go so far as to say that it is a live encyclopedia, a knowledge archiving project, etc. All of these things are very true without a hint of bullshit.
  • Consider the use of the word administrator over "god". As funny as those titles sound, it makes people sound presumptuous. If someone asks you about it, just say it's an old joke that you don't get. Honestly, it's an old joke that _I_ personally just don't get, but I run with it. I thought long and hard about that before it made it on my resume in it's current form.
  • If you are on edev, list yourself as a "credited code contributor". Credited is very important, as a non-credited contributor sounds whiney and isn't productive. You may want to list other contributions elsewhere on our sister sites (AnimeFu not so much, but definitely on everydevel, and possibly on perlmonks). You could also consider yourself as a part of a QA/testing team, as that is a lot of what edev ends up doing; submitting and narrowing down bugs, and figuring out places where items could use work. If you've been an active edever (you know who you are), feel free to list it. This is a real-world site.
  • Be careful in listing yourself if you have a lot of potentially embarrassing writeups. Unless you are gunning for a position in sex counseling or some sort of adult operator, some of E2's content may go against you (as the freakiest of your stuff is what is going to stand out most in your User Search list). Objectively speaking, Don't have sex with horses, seriously don't would not endear me to a writer (no offense to Shanoyu). For myself, I only have a few deeply personal writeups, a couple about sex, etc. Do I want a potential employer doing a user search on me? I'm not so sure, because those titles are going to stick out in someone's head. It may paint you as a person who might think this is acceptable in the workplace. It's like knowing the dirty secrets of people you hardly know; you paint them in a different mental light. In many aspects, E2 does not translate to the real world.

    One of the everything FAQs wisely says something to the tune of "Be careful what you put here, as your children are going to look at this and make a snap judgment on you." Either an employer is going to think you're one really slick guy for knowing so much about X, Y, or Z topic, or they are going to think you're a complete and utter fuckwad. More likely than not, they'll think that this is just an obscure hobby, akin to glueing your fingers together and then trying to make toast.

  • If you don't do anything more than node here, you may want to just forget about it. Although I encourage people to do more than just node at this place, if that is all you do, you may want to forget about it. Would someone put USENETing on his or her resume? Probably not. IRC channel operation? Nahh. "I have a free account on a website"... not likely, but in the end, that is what it boils down to. Use your "other person" goggles here.

  • Play the numbers card. Here at E2 (as of Mid-October 2001), we have almost 40K users. If you want that to sound more realistic, we have about 12K active contributing users (with at least one node), but plenty other users that have been cleaned out since E1. We get a ton of hits every day (somewhere between 50K-100K), and I have no idea how many of those are unique. Keep in mind, one of our biggest sources of traffic are Guest Users and such, so a good amount of that is unique. For up to date numbers, we have a statistics nodelet. It is hard to judge the success of a website by raw hits alone, but it gives you some idea of the size of it.
  • Make sure to keep distance from BSI and EDC. No one will back you up if you say you work for Everything2.com or if blankly state that you are one of the developers, as none of the web page documentation points to your name. (This goes primarily for edev people). This happened to me the other day. I said to a friend that I helped to develop everything2.com, and he went to everydevel.com only to find out that my name wasn't there. We as E2, are a somewhat separate entity from EDC and you should try to allude to that if possible. We used to be a part of slashdot, but that name doesn't hold much realistic association anymore.




In the end, keep in mind that this place is just an overblown hobby. The concept of XP, writeups, noding, and all of our inner jokes will seem strange to someone who isn't a part of this community. Unless you absolutely have to, I'd really suggest against using E2 on anything as vital as a job application or resume, although it's up to you. If you do think you could list this as something for real, make sure you have a reference from someone here; someone important to validate and to give your claims some meaning in the real world. This place changes rapidly from day to day, but it doen't mean that some day it's going to be a mainstream thing anytime soon...

Remember always that these walls are clay and beauty and creativity to us, but merely mud to others.

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