While you are reading this I invite you to listen to Wikipedia.
If you are short on time you can skip right to the end
Almost everyone knows what Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, is. Not many know about the people who write and edit articles on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community is fascinating and diverse. Editors have no incentive to contribute to articles. The warm and fuzzy feelings it may inspire contributing to the largest online encyclopedia must be enough.
I'll begin on the shallow side of the pool, with the gateway through which most are introduced to the Wikipedia community, article Talk pages.
Consider this article on List of round barns. Think of the deliberate effort it takes to research, create and maintain an article about as niche a subject as round barns. This is not just an individual effort either. Once the article is written, others may edit its contents and improve its accuracy. This is the magic of online wikis. Note the "wiki" and not "Wikipedia" because Wikipedia:Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"!. Editors on Wikipedia coordinate with fellow editors on article Help:Talk pages. Talk pages are for serious discussion. Just look at Talk:Kombucha.
WikiFauna
While talk pages are always about the article most of the time they are rather boring. Real Wikipedians maintain a user page and write whatever they want there. Here is one I just found, User:AFirefoxUser, just clicking around. Like with this Personal Wiki you can find a lot of things just clicking around.
Wikipedians can be divided into categories of Wikipedia:WikiFauna and further categorized by Wikipedia:Seven Ages of Wikipedians. So, pick your favorite fauna, be it WikiBarbarian or WikiCat or even a WikiCryptid. A Wikipedia:WikiPuppy may find kindred spirits investigating the Wikipedia:Puppy Cabal; non-WikiPuppies may be interested in the regular, normal Wikipedia:List of cabals.
User Boxes
User pages need to have userboxes. Some do not, but most do, and those without are not nationally recognized by other Wikipedians, most importantly by those with userboxes. Userboxes look like this:
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My userboxes are at Me. WikiFauna can find their own userboxes of Wikipedia:Userboxes/Wikipedia/WikiFauna. Examples of user pages which make appropriate use of userboxes are:
For those who like userboxes there are Category:User templates about userboxes. A collation of userboxes can be found in Wikipedia:Userboxes/Galleries but userboxes can exist outside of galleries. The perfect one (or, perfect 100) is hiding out there, you just need to find it!
Userboxes are amazingly extensible things, derived from wikipedia templates, which can show things like User:Stage7/Japan adjacent railway stations.
Wikipe-tan
Yeah it's an article about Wikipedia of course it has to mention Wikipedia:Wikipe-tan the cutest mascot of The Free Encyclopedia!