I know many academics hate it (and I understand why) but I like it… But, it’s only good if people participate with honesty. A few years ago, some computer genius found out that a vast majority of edits are made by Big Corporations. They know how important information is.
If you do see a mistake (factual or actual), do you correct it? I do, but usually wait until I find good sources.
I tried to do it once, stepped on the toes of a hyper-possessive page “editor”, and decided fuck it, not worth my time.
I was updating the track listing of an early 80s album, adding in 2 bonus tracks that appeared only on the cassette version, not on the vinyl. My additions were almost immediately reversed. Put it in again, and it was reversed with a “needs citation”. My cite was I had the cassette in my hand, so I scanned the cassette insert and uploaded it to the talk page, and made the edit a third and final time. It was still backed out with a complaint about formatting. At that point I walked away. About a month later I saw the original page “owner”, who had been reversing my changes, had added the same information with no cites.
Occasionally I change something that looks blatantly wrong, but I just gave up my regular editing projects because there are too many a–hole rule enforcers out there who wreck your stuff.
For example, there are articles for each of the local commuter train stations near my city. One of the features was each article had a list of connecting bus lines. The lists had fallen out of date, so I went on a big project correcting them. The lists of bus lines were inserted using a macro. (I did not write the macro, it was there before me.) Then one day I looked and saw that all of the articles had become jumbled and unreadable. I tried to figure out why. Well, I found a year-long debate about the macro. Some idiot who contributed nothing to the articles ever had noticed the macro and decided it violated a rule. After a year of tedious argument, a group of editors agreed to change the macro. It totally broke all of the train station articles.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. No, I didn’t want to get involved in a year-long debate or take a graduate course in the epistemology of wiki standards. I just gave up. I never look at those articles again.
Not as much as I used to. It gets frustrating when you correct something that seems harmless, that you know is accurate, or is largely superficial, but it gets changed back by some weirdo with a petty agenda anyway.
I used to spend a lot more time editing wikipedia articles. I don’t have much time for it these days.
I wrote these articles, which have remained mostly intact:
I occasionally edit technical articles, but finding errors or omissions in those is much rarer for me. I did make some pretty heavy edits to this one, and it has remained mostly intact since then:
I also wrote these articles, which have been heavily edited since (and I’m happy with that, they are good edits):
On a completely unrelated subject, I also wrote an article about Tomahawk Rights, which ended up getting folded into the article about Cabin Rights.
I’ve also made close to a thousand edits on other articles. Many of them are minor edits, but quite a few were fairly substantial, especially articles about older firearms. In the past few years though, I have only made a handful of edits.
I don’t make grammar or spelling changes. You probably wouldn’t want me to anyway. I’m an engineer, and engineers are notorious for bad grammar and spelling.
Occasionally, but like the others, my interest has been sapped by asshats with much more time on their hands than knowledge of the subject. Topper for me was having an article reverted to flat-out wrongness because my citation of the actual court decision was considered “original research,” and thus not an allowed source.
Mostly do basic fixes - spelling/grammar fixes, vandalism fixes, removing redlinks, or links that redirect back to the same article, or moving links to the intended article rather than a similarly named one, or changing things from ‘upcoming’ after they’ve actually come out, that sort of thing.
My magnum opus of contributing to world knowledge, this sentence in the description of the cartoon character Vitalstatistix, about the real life origin of his “we have nothing to fear but the sky falling on our heads” catchline:
When I have spare time, yes, I edit on wikipedia a lot. I’ve never had the experience of constant reverts to my edits that others are commenting on. I think it depends a lot on the topics that you’re editing.
I’ve made a bunch of minor edits (broken links and such) here and there. The only significant contribution I’ve made is that I greatly expanded the article for Dr. Joseph D. Bryant (Joseph D. Bryant - Wikipedia). On most days I read the news from 100 years ago today, and when I saw his obituary a few years ago I was disappointed to find that his Wikipedia entry was just a single sentence and I thought he deserved better. The revised article even appeared in the “Did you know…” box on the main page at the time.
A few times, though not often. The one that I remember was discovering that some yahoo had edited the entry for Steve Watson (wide receiver for the Denver Broncos in the 1980s) to indicate that he was a video-game artist.
I just looked at the edit history for that article – good lord, that was 2007. :eek:
I did once for the ad&d pc stronghold game …I just added some stuff like …it did appear on cdroms and expanded what it was about
it was a cross between sim city and majesty …….
I think I had made three changes (adding a little information, adding cites) and two were reverted quickly before I said “Fuck it”. I think my third one is still alive though since 2008 (?)
Like the others: did some editing, got reverted too many times, got sick of the whole thing. I still try to fix up grammar and references occasionally, but I avoid subjects I know and understand.