[Moderating]
Moved from CS to IMHO.
We have had threads like this before.
I also used to do it occasionally but I got sick of being reverted by people who didn’t know what they were talking about.
The “no original research” and other rules are applied in a way that produces ridiculous results.
The main type of changes that I (occasionally) make are typo fixes and links that point to the wrong disambiguation page; I find incorrect links particularly annoying. Less frequently, I’ll add a comment that “thing X” is referred to in “book Y”, or something like that.
I have corrected a few factual errors and updated a couple of things that were out of date.
I tried looking in might be here, but I had originally seen it on TV
I see others’ experiences have been very similar to mine. Sometimes zealous Wiki-insiders will, despite total ignorance of a topic, revert good changes that didn’t use “in with the in-crowd” formatting.
Have others noticed that the usefulness of Wikipedia has fallen sharply over the past several years? Many articles drone on and on in superfluous detail before getting to the “meat” which the Wiki searcher most likely wanted … and then another click is needed to find that “meat”! If there’s a link at all.
As just one example, long ago I Wiki’ed “World War II” and found a series of maps which elegantly told the story of the War, year by year. I don’t think anyone actually erased the maps, but if there’re pages still linking to them, they aren’t pages that show up after several clicks.
I’ve done the same thing; improved or even added an article for someone who I thought deserved better. I mostly concentrated on writers and authors whose work I enjoyed. In a couple of cases, I was surprised to find no article about someone I thought was reasonably well-known. In others, I found only a short stub. The one thing I have not done very often is to add photos to the articles, because it can be difficult to find ones that are clearly copyright-free or otherwise qualify.
I have only rarely been reverted.
One thing I notice though, with Wikipedia, is that often articles don’t flow well and have information repeated from one paragraph to another, because no one person has ever edited the article as a whole.
I can recall only one occasion. When my father passed away, I edited the date and location of death into his Dutch Wikipedia page (he had one because he was correspondence chess champion of the Netherlands one year).
I think Wikipedia is better than ever and a prodigious accomplishment of knowledge. I read and learn all the time and I never get tired of it. I’ve made thousands of edits from small to large. I used to run into problems with getting reverted when I was new there, but kept at it, learned my way around, and haven’t had a problem with that in many years.
I’ve written about eight or nine articles, but mostly I create articles by translating them from other language Wikipedias. I find greater purpose in it through the Gender Gap movement (encouraging more women to edit) and participation in Women in Red (creating more articles about women) to redress the balance. They have citation wizards now that do the formatting for you.
What drives me crazy is trying to edit Wiktionary. It runs on having to use obscure and gnarly coding that has constantly frustrated my efforts to learn it, and worse, it’s almost impossible to find good explanations of this coding in the help files. Still, I’ve created many articles there on foreign-language words and had them featured in Foreign Word of the Day. But I get much less done on Wiktionary because the coding is so hard to figure out. It’s gotten to where I just enter the data the best I can and then say OK, bots, come and fix this up.
Last time I checked, I was in the top 10,000 wiki-editors by number of edits. I have rarely been reverted. Don’t know why my experience is so different from others here.
I’ve re-written entire articles from Wipediaese to English, only to find it will eventually revert to gibberish over the next dozen edits.
After more than a thousand edits and a few articles created from scratch, I gave up when some Wiki big shot came through and deleted a list that had taken hundreds of hours of work to build. A non-asshole would have moved the list to a sub-article and linked to it, but this guy just wiped it out. Rather than get into an edit war, I left and never went back.
These days I only correct things like grammar, punctuation, and confusing wording. I used to go to a lot of trouble to make substantive changes, tracking down cites, etc., but got frustrated when my changes were usually deleted. A lot of editors have insanely proprietary attitudes toward “their” pages and will revert any substantial change you make, no matter how well documented. It’s just not worth the effort. I sometimes still make suggestions for changes on the talk pages, but no longer make the changes myself.
I mainly check Recent Changes from time to time, looking for anonymous vandalism.
That reminds me, I also created the article about the photographer Thomas Sutton. I noticed he didn’t have an entry when I was reading about the history of color photography and found that links to his name were to a different Thomas Sutton. Looking at the entry now, someone really did a number on the paragraph about experiments with color, maybe a fifth of my writing there remains. Outside that paragraph, what I wrote is still about 90% intact.
I also find that I’m rarely reverted, though the fact that the vast majority of my edits are minor may play a role in that.
Not usually, but I’ve done it a few times when the accumulation of errors was overwhelming, or when it was one of those that are taking a long time to be fought down. Stuff such as someone granting a nobiliary title which never existed (Lord of Xavier) to a person who wouldn’t have had it if it had existed (St. Francis Xavier, who had several healthy older brothers and whose father was the Seneschal of the Royal Castle of Xavier; in the case of the saint, that “Xavier” is not a lastname but a nickname).
Mostly only image related stuff, fixing them up, putting a new image in an article. Even that sometimes gets contentious.
I’ll fix grammar errors and markup errors if I see them. But nothing (besides images) that takes up any significant time.
I used to be fairly active in the early days too, until the revert and delete trolls took over.
It just rubbed me the wrong way, because erasure seems to me to be deeply antithetical to the whole concept of incremental improvement. If you really feel like you are a superior editor, you should be happy to fix or improve authentic effort rather than just dismissing it.
It isn’t all bad, of course. I can still easily get lost down the wiki rabbit hole. The citations and references are beefed up. And the annoying notability threshold has been somewhat mitigated by the Wikia offshoot.
I eventually found my talents better appreciated on the Lost wiki. Now that Lost is over, I haven’t really found a new outlet for my editing jonesing yet.
I think it has to do with what I said above—
There’s a third option instead of edit warring or just quitting: You go and talk to the other editors and reach an understanding. Which is how it’s actually supposed to work, if you read the help files. Being polite, reasonable, and informed can get you far.
But that gets you nowhere when you’re up against stubborn ignorance on a technical matter, where you have to understand the references to know that the references say you’re just wrong.
Yes, I could get others involved, get the page locked, but what am I going to do? Educate an entire new group about the meaning of technical words?
If that wasn’t unattractive enough, Wikipedia has already decided that certain words have a “correct” meaning completely different from their well known meaning. Am I going to create another of those wars too?
So now when I see a page that says …“almost all companies and textbooks get this wrong, as in these 15 separate references, but the correct polarity is the other way around to what all the suppliers show”… or “stop bits have a fixed length (usually 1, 1.5 or 2) in asynchronous communications” … I just walk away. That’s a person who is already polite, reasonable, and informed, and knows that they are the only soldier walking in step.
I have not even edited the Wikipedia entry on me, which was written and put up by someone else. Um, the real me, not the real Kropotkin