How to Edit Wikipedia and Join in the Greatest Human Collab Project Ever.
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The Beauty of Wikipedia
Attempting to comprehend the incredible value Wikipedia offers to the world can almost bring tears to my eyes. Everyone, from anywhere in the world, can partake in adding their knowledge of the world into Wikipedia, for all to learn from.
We’ve all used Wikipedia at some point in our lives. You probably even used it today. Whether a Google search provided a sidebar using Wikipedia’s data on a search result, or you needed to look something up for class, or to learn something new. Wikipedia has had your back all these years. But the database that is the Wikipedia doesn’t merely exist “just because”. It is due to the millions of people who have contributed their valuable time to make Wikipedia a larger database of human knowledge.
Yes, that’s right. Everyone, including you, can edit Wikipedia. From fixing a typing error, to writing your own series of articles, anyone has the ability to write about notable topic in Wikipedia, for free, and for all to read.
The Collab
Wikipedia is a collaborative effort. Let’s say for instance you write a starter article about something that hasn’t been written about yet. Anyone else can come and edit your article to improve it, add citations, fix any typos and other grammatical errors, and more. Anyone can jump in and make changes at anytime.
Now I know what you might be thinking: “I’m going to go wreck a bunch of articles!” and trust me, you aren’t the first person to think trolling would be a fun time. However, the magic of Wikipedia is the record-keeping of each article; every single article’s history is stored, and can be restored at any time. So if you make a change others catch, someone will end up reverting it back to the old, normal version.
The next piece of magic is the collaborative effort of people who look for such changes, in an effort to maintain Wikipedia’s articles properly. Isn’t that, just, beautiful?
“But why not just have dedicated writers do this, rather than keeping it open to the public?” Well, It was tried. It was called the Encyclopedia. It failed. Terribly. Every year, before the internet, they released a series of books known as Encyclopedia Britannica. That was pretty much the “Google” of information. Sort of like a dictionary, you would look up whatever facts you needed to reference.
But eventually, the internet came around, and Encyclopedia was “so last year”. By unlocking knowledge to the public, people came together to write our world’s knowledge collaboratively. And that is what made Wikipedia what it is today, and what it is to come.
How to Edit Wikipedia
Yay! We finally made it to the fun part! OK so you’d like to edit Wikipedia, how do you start? Well, first off, go to Wikipedia and create an account. They don’t need much info, just an account name and email/password will do. I recommend you don’t skip this step of creating an account, because all edits are either saved under your account name, forever, or under your personal IP address, forever… You know which you’d prefer.
Next, go find an article about something random. Need help finding one? No worries! On the left of the screen there should be a button called Random article. Click it to jump to, well, a random article! Once in the article, you’ll find on the top right of the article a button that says Edit. Click it to go into the Edit system.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to what you should be editing. I’ll leave you to browse Wikipedia’s help articles for the more specific ones, and some more references below. But let me give you some of the major ones:
Look for typos. By simply looking for some typos in an article, and trust me, there’s plenty out there for you to find, you’ll passively be learning something new about the world you haven’t known before! Movies, people, concepts, history, art, music, and, well, the millions of more things that there is to learn on Wikipedia! Just read through an article and look for typos!
Become a Vandal Patrol Officer! No, unfortunately you don’t get handcuffs and badge number, but you do get the satisfaction of sticking it to those meddlin’ vandals! Here’s a great video that goes over vandalism patrol. Here’s also a quick rundown on how to do it:
Click Recent Changes from the sidebar.
Turn on Live Updates
Hit the Filter changes button to set some basic filters for the types of changes you want to be looking out for, such as:
Very likely have problems
Likely have problems
Very likely bad faith
Likely bad faith
Unregistered
Newcomers
Now before you close the filter menu, click the Highlight results button. This button will allow you to add color dots to the articles that pop up in the live feed. It will easily tell you if something is Very likely bad faith, or something like that.
Start opening up any new articles that pop up by using the middle mouse button (click in your mouse wheel as you hover over the link) on the word diff, and review the changes in the new tab that opened.
Does it look like vandalism? Or does it look like an innocent change? If
it’s vandalism, click the restore this version button on the left side
it’s not vandalism, skip it and move to the next one
Don’t know what’s vandalism and what isn’t? For the most part you can use your own judgement. Many times it will be blatant, like someone adding racist or bad language to an article. But sometimes, since you’re opening a totally-random article, you may not be familiar with the topic, and as such won’t know for sure if it’s vandalism or not. As a beginner, leave those for the fellow vandal patrol officers 👮♂️👮♀️ to take care of for now.
Add citations! Do you remember reading a book about something you’re reading about in the article, but you don’t see the little number next to a sentence in brackets, like this?
That’s a citation! Add one by following the instructions in this video here. There are many kinds of citations, such as from a book, a newsletter article, and others, but please note that your source must be reputable. You can’t just use a YouTube video link, or someone’s personal blog. You’d need to find a newspaper article from a trusted publisher, or from a trusted publisher of a book, etc. More on this here.
Don’t worry though, it’s easier than you think to quickly look up something online and find a newsletter article to add as a citation. But I can assure you, adding a citation from a book feels absolutely amazing. I did it once!Rewrite portions of an article with the proper format. Although there is a specific format to writing a Wikipedia article, sometimes others forget to write them in that format. For instance they ramble too much, or it’s super fact based, without any flavor text whatsoever. Try to fix this by rewriting the same information, but formatted in Wikipedia’s matter-of-fact, formal, format. Here’s a Wikipedia article that explains how to do just that.
In Closing
Wikipedia is an incredible place to be on the internet. It is one of the most popular all-time sites in terms of traffic, and with good reason. It offers invaluable knowledge to the world, for free.
But, it’s not free to operate and maintain. If you have found value in Wikipedia in the past, consider donating.
Being able to browse Wikipedia, and learn something new isn’t something many people before us have been able to do. Libraries were limited, education was limited, and the globalization of information never existed. We live in a time where Wikipedia exists. So go and enjoy it, and also partake in it’s collaborative effort to keep it a clean source of invaluable knowledge.
References
I highly recommend taking a look at The Wiki Show, a great YouTube channel with a great host who covers many topics about Wikipedia, and how to edit Wikipedia properly. He also made videos of him patrolling for vandals, I highly recommend watching that so you see how a pro does it. Watch it here!
If you ever need help with learning something on Wikipedia, then just search for it on Wikipedia! Use the search bar at the top, or use Google search, or find it in the Wikipedia Help index!
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