# Do You Edit on Wikipedia?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [February 13, 2019, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431 "2019-02-13T00:20:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 5
### Author:  [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2019, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/81 "2019-04-18T16:21:59Z")
> [@Skywatcher](#):
>
> This led me into a rather odd situation over the past few days. There’s this singer who was born in Iran and moved to the UK. One particular editor, evidently an agent for the singer or someone who works for an agent, insists that this singer has always been known by the singer’s current name. Never a name in Farsi. I’ve provided sources for the singer’s name in Farsi but the editor claims to not understand them.
>
> Guess who an administrator recently found to have edited the singer’s article on the Persian Wikipedia and had no problem with a Farsi name for the singer in October of 2014.
I made the mistake of looking up the article you’re referring to and then spent way too long chasing all of the arguing back and forth.
BTW, why is the agent trying so hard to hide that the singer was born in Iran?
---
### Author:  [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2019, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/82 "2019-04-18T17:11:59Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#):
>
> BTW, why is the agent trying so hard to hide that the singer was born in Iran?
The admin who last edited the article has been trying to figure that out, ever since I pointed out the October 2014 edit of the same article on the Persian Wikipedia.
I’m letting him and the other three admins involved in this handle the situation now.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2019, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/83 "2019-04-18T17:17:00Z")
Weird - I went to the Teahouse to ask my question, and the format changed to the normal display.
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### Author:  [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2019, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/84 "2019-04-18T17:18:21Z")
> [@gaffa](#):
>
> I’ve re-written entire articles from Wipediaese to English, only to find it will eventually revert to gibberish over the next dozen edits.
Yeah, I’ve done that a few times- taken a section and rewritten a few particularly tortured paragraphs to make actual _sense_, and not look like they were written in Farsi, Google-Translated to Chinese, and from there, Google-translated into English.
And what happens? Some illiterate dickbag reverts the changes because presumably, they met whatever grammatical standards some non-native speaker told him in his home country.
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### Author:  [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2019, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/85 "2019-04-18T17:24:59Z")
What I find is that a lot of Wikipedia articles are very choppy. Stuff gets repeated because of multiple editors. The article mentions an upcoming event in the future tense, even though by the time I’m reading it, the date has already past. And there are plenty of articles that refer to something as happening “currently” with no clue as to when that is. I’ve written and re-written many articles but a full rewrite is a project.
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### Author:  [@MortSahlFan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MortSahlFan)
#### Post date: [April 18, 2019, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/86 "2019-04-18T23:39:09Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#):
>
> What I find is that a lot of Wikipedia articles are very choppy. Stuff gets repeated because of multiple editors. The article mentions an upcoming event in the future tense, even though by the time I’m reading it, the date has already past. And there are plenty of articles that refer to something as happening “currently” with no clue as to when that is. I’ve written and re-written many articles but a full rewrite is a project.
Thats good - you’ve made change in a good way… I was surprised at the “citation needed” - they were either easy to find, or total fabrications…
If I had funds or manpower, I’d start a “non-profit” and get my agenda across via information, especially when its usually the first thing people “look-up”…
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### Author:  [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)
#### Post date: [April 19, 2019, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/87 "2019-04-19T13:45:52Z")
> [@MortSahlFan](#):
>
> Thats good - you’ve made change in a good way… I was surprised at the “citation needed” - they were either easy to find, or total fabrications…
I was surprised at a “citation needed” for something that’s common knowledge. From _The Doctor (Doctor Who)_: “[T]he longest-lasting incarnation is the Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker.”
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [April 19, 2019, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/88 "2019-04-19T13:55:46Z")
I know nothing about Doctor Who, so that’s not common knowledge to me. 😉
The point is that Wikipedia is meant to be a world-wide knowledge source. Nothing is “common knowledge” to everyone who will read the article.
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [April 19, 2019, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/89 "2019-04-19T14:02:24Z")
> [@Skywatcher](#):
>
> I was surprised at a “citation needed” for something that’s common knowledge. From _The Doctor (Doctor Who)_: “[T]he longest-lasting incarnation is the Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker.”
I’ve seen differences-between-the-book-and-the-movie-type statements being declared invalid as “original research.” I find this kind of thing baffling.
I find the whole deletion culture thing hostile and cliquish. Salon has an article on the battle to prevent deletion of the article about Katie Bouman, one of the researchers responsible for the black hole image – [The battle to save Katie Bouman’s Wikipedia page from deletion.](https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/katie-bouman-wikipedia-page-deletion-black-hole.html)
Of course in that specific instance, there is a lot of misogyny and links to toxic internet culture.
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### Author:  [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)
#### Post date: [April 19, 2019, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/90 "2019-04-19T18:43:50Z")
The “Original reseach” thing has become a sort of club to pound on articles that someone in the inner circle doesn’t like. For instance, one of them didn’t like one of the lists I’d compiled, and even though I’d referenced almost every entry, claimed it was OR!
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### Author:  [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)
#### Post date: [April 19, 2019, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/91 "2019-04-19T19:40:29Z")
I noticed that the article on [Marion Bell](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Bell) said she only grew up with two sisters, so I added my late mother-in-law to the list. Not sure how to go about correcting the 1997 obit from the NYT that they used for the citation, though.
Fortunately, no one has called me out on it. Yet.
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### Author:  [@Bullitt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bullitt)
#### Post date: [April 22, 2019, 9:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/92 "2019-04-22T09:36:33Z")
Wikipedia is a very good resource. I started making small corrections, typos and grammar fixes at first, to now more substantive edits. Wikipedia works pretty well.
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### Author:  [@Hermitian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hermitian)
#### Post date: [April 24, 2019, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/93 "2019-04-24T16:38:47Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#):
>
> No, John Elway can’t do that.
>
> Two rules of Wikipedia are “vérifiability” and “no original research”.
>
> “Verifiability” means that anyone using the 'pedia can verify the information contained in an article by checking the citations and confirming that a third party source supports the statement.
>
> “No original research” is related to it. You can’t do your own research and post it. You have to post a citation to a verifiable source.
>
> Together, those principles mean that it’s irrelevant if John Elway posts his complete life story. It has to be supported by citations to verifiable, reliable third party sources.
>
> Now if John Elway writes his own biography, and it gets published by a major publishing house, you could cite to that, because the publication by a third party meets the vérifiabilité test.
>
> In fact, this very issue came up with Jimbo Wales’ birthdate. Wales is one of the founders of Wikipedia and there’s a biography article, including his birthdate, supported by a citation to a third party source.
>
> But then Wales posted on the Talk page and said it was wrong - off by a couple of days, I think.
>
> But that didn’t meet the vérifiabilité test, nor the No Original Research test, so editors declined to make the change. For a while they tagged it with a [disputed] label. I don’t know if they ever found a third party source to support Wales’s comment.
There seems to be a lot of gray area here…
What if John Elway, in a live post-game TV interview said “Oh, and my birthday is June 28, 1960” and that interview made it to YouTube. Is that a reliable source? There was no journalistic fact checking.
What if Elway’s blogger friend (who has millions of followers) interviews him in Elway’s living room and uploads the video to YouTube. In the interview he said his birthday. Does that count?
What if he writes an autobiography this is “self published” by his wife (or a friend). Anyone can buy on Amazon. Can that be used?
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### Author:  [@Tired\_and\_Cranky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tired_and_Cranky)
#### Post date: [April 24, 2019, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/94 "2019-04-24T17:25:09Z")
I’ve made minor edits to articles for clarity.
Once, when I was working on a project that was very much in the news, I needed to get a sense of what the average person understood about the topic. I found that Wikipedia only had a stub. I decided to fill it out and improve public’s understanding. My content was good and I cited where I could but I struggled a lot with formatting. I had heard nightmare stories, like those above, about entire articles getting deleted for being original research and I figured that with too many citations, including to things not on the internet, and some unsupported but important statements that it would all be dismissed as “original research.” I gave up. The article is all filled out now and it seems pretty good. I don’t know how long it took to get there.
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### Author:  [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2019, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/95 "2019-06-23T00:11:05Z")
Oh, this is fun. In February of 2014, a Polish politician found himself in Dutch over some alleged remarks he made while allegedly drunk. Now an anonymous editor from Poland is claiming that entire incident never happened and has been demanding proof of the alleged drunkenness.
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### Author:  [@road\_lobo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/road_lobo)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2019, 8:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/96 "2019-06-23T08:36:07Z")
I don’t care to edit Wikipedia anymore, but the experience has revealed a great source of entertainment (and very occasional insight) to be had in reading Talk pages on culture war topics.
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### Author:  [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2019, 8:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/97 "2019-06-23T08:44:05Z")
I did once edit the the entry for an obscure British comedy act of the 1930s, because they were in some ancient movie I was listlessly watching on TV, looked them up on Wikipedia and saw that the original entry had got wrong the one thing that made them famous enough to get into the movie and its plotline (such as it was), which was that the BBC had banned them from the radio for an off-colour joke. But I can’t now remember who they were or what the movie was.
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### Author:  [@lisiate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lisiate)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2019, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/98 "2019-06-25T02:22:12Z")
I [used to](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hastings,_New_Zealand), a [long time ago](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_milestones). Hardly ever do these days.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2019, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/99 "2019-06-25T15:07:24Z")
Here’s an interesting article on the ongoing edit wars to the Trump page:
[Donald Trump’s Wikipedia Entry Is a War Zone](https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/donald-trump-wikipedia-page.html)
> [@](#):
>
> It’s one of the most popular pages on the internet. But behind the scenes, editors are fighting a brutal, petty battle over every word.
But at the end of the day, the article concludes that the petty infighting serves the purpose of getting an article that is reasonably balanced:
> [@](#):
>
> The dynamic on Trump’s page may be a relentless, exhausting tug of war. But in this context, disagreement—even heated, churlish, insult-hurling disagreement—is often not ultimately a bad thing. This might be the most surprising thing about the Wikipedia page for Donald Trump: The angriest squabbling usually ends in some form of grudging consensus. “When, on the same article, you’ve got a group of editors who say, ‘This is absolutely biased one way,’ and you have another bunch of editors who say, ‘This is absolutely biased the other way,’ ” JFG told me, “that’s when you’re correct.”
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### Author:  [@MacSpon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MacSpon)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2019, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-edit-on-wikipedia/829431/100 "2019-06-27T00:03:58Z")
Made a few changes, and created a few articles. Nothing recent, though; I can seldom work up the energy to care enough.
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