Apart from the editing issue…what other cool things are there? (I stumbled onto a Current Events section a few days ago which made me go “Hmmmmmmmm” but lets leave that alone for now.)
A couple years ago I saw a sentence that seemed a bit vague and led to a reader making a certain assumption. I went to the effort of creating a user name and made a change that seemed to take. Within hours it was changed back. IIRC and made a certain effort to follow up but couldn’t figure out what to do… and I gave up.
People hit the “edit” links on sections of articles, and edit them.
Lots. Many are anonymous, others have registered accounts. Some pages on controversial topics may not be edited by anonymous users.
They don’t. Other editors may undo or modify changes later if they have reason to believe it’s wrong or badly written. Disputes are hashed out on separate topic pages or (in severe cases) by an arbitration process. It can be quite the source of amusing drama.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes–when using Wikipedia in English–I’ll come across an article that has obviously been translated from another language through automation, though there is no recognition of that fact on the article’s page. My assumption is that, in these cases, there’s no entry in English, so Wikipedia just finds one in another language and translates it for you automatically.
I would just add that in cases where someone has immediately changed back your change, you can ask an experienced contributor. There’s a link somewhere on Wikipedia on conflict resolution that has a list of names of experienced people who have offered their services to give a presumably unbiased look at the points of contention. I’ve had good luck getting that kind of assistance when some [del]bull-headed moron[/del] other contributor with an unfounded difference of opinion immediately reverted my changes.
I don’t think they have any auto-translation feature. What’s more likely is someone ran an article in another language through Google Translate or Babelfish, stuck it in the English Wikipedia, and since it’s an obscure topic nobody bothered to improve it.
Just to add that you don’t have to be a registered user to edit pages. (Wikipedia records your IP address, which will appear alongside the record of your edit.)
In my experience, most of the really bitter disputes I’ve seen have occurred when articles about historical events say something that some nation, ethnic group, or religion finds unflattering. I read a lot of history and use Wikipedia to cross-check my memory of what I’ve read, and hoo boy, those disputes (accusations of genocide or war crimes, for example) can really drag on and on.
You didn’t need to even bother making an account. You can make changes just by clicking the edit link to the right of a paragraph. After you make your change, be sure to add the reason for your edit. There is a little box on the submit screen where you briefly explain the reason for your edit. If you do not put anything in that box, then many times it will just revert back to the original text automatically, and your change will not take.
The worst I’ve seen are politics-related (e.g. Bill Clinton) and business-related (e.g. Wal-Mart), where the fans (or paid lackeys) and the detractors (or competitors) get in such vicious edit wars that the articles end up getting locked.
Though there are processes to prevent people who aren’t logged in (IP-address-only editors) from editing certain articles (and I believe those blocks may also apply to newly-created accounts and/or accounts with only a small number of edits to their credit), I don’t think there are any processes whereby edits will be automatically reverted if there’s no edit summary. There are robot accounts that use various algorithms to revert vandalism; unless your edit wiped out half the article, or used a lot of racial slurs, obscenities, or exclamation marks, it shouldn’t be reverted by a bot. On the off chance that a legitimate edit is reverted by a bot (say you added a mention of The Nigger of the Narcissus to an article on Joseph Conrad), I believe the bots are programmed not to get into edit wars–if you revert the bot, it won’t keep undoing what you’ve done. Note that in that case it’s best to actually revert the change (see below), not just make it again.
You can see the history of what happened to your change from the “Revision history” tab of the article. Here’s the current featured article, and here’s the revision history for that article. Note the little “undo” link next to each line, which you can use to revert that particular edit if some nitwit changed paragraph 17 to say “BILLY WUZ HERE!!! SENIERS RULE JUNIERS DROOL!!!”
You can also see the edit summaries other people provided if they bothered to do so–“Reverted obvious nonsense”; “Reverted more anti-Ruritanian propaganda! Lower Slobovia has been rightfully Ruritanian since the days of Rurik the Great!!!” This can give you an idea of what you did wrong (if anything) to cause your edit to be reverted. You can also check the article’s discussion page to see if there’s been any discussion of the issue, and add your own comments there to clarify why your changes keep getting un-made.
I recently edited an article with no account. The next time I opened a page there was message waiting for me. It explained that I needed to provide a reason for the edit and explained that it had been changed back but I was welcomedto try again and provide the reason this time. Maybe not a bot, but certainly a boilerplate rdsponse. Strange to have an inbox message and not even have an account.
User talk pages are created for IP addresses when there’s no account. For most people, this can result in getting a lot of irrelevant messages that are actually addressed to whatever fellow customer of your ISP had that IP address last month (or three years ago); or to fellow employees of your company or students at your school, because all of your posts will show up with that same IP address.
It is true that are ways for non-bot human beings to generate “boilerplate” messages. (“Hi, welcome to Wikipedia! I just reverted a recent edit of yours on the grounds that it was total nonsense. We appreciate your contributions, but if you keep posting this sort of thing, we’ll have to give you a stern talking-to! Or else send a killer cyborg back in time to assassinate your Mom before you’re even born! Thanks!”)
I’m not a real Wikipedia Rules Warrior myself; user edit messages aren’t really mandatory (the software will let you make edits without them). Depending on what sort of change was made, reverting on the grounds that you didn’t have an edit message could be totally understandable (if it was something really controversial and your edit was non-obvious) or totally dickish (if you just changed “teh” to “the”).
FWIW, a recent thread about military medals lead me to a page that mentioned something nonfactual. The cite given did not even support the claim. I erased the statement.
Next time I opened a wiki page I had the message waiting for me. So I we back again and instead of simply erasing the false statement, I reworded it and added something new, and then added the edit comment.
Then decided just to create an account in case I need to edit something in the future. I edited a couple things before without ever making an account or ever getting any messages.
I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, and have 72 pages in my “Watchlist”. This means I get notified every time anyone modifies any of these pages. Most rarely get edited, some get edited nearly every day.
Everyone has a particular approach to Wikipedia. I tend to create new pages, or take really weak pages and try to improve them, mostly by adding references (Google Books is my God). Another thing I enjoy doing is adding photographs when I meet musicians after concerts. I assign a Creative Commons Attribution copyright to them. One band said something disdainful about Wikipedia during the show and I got the whole band together after the show, posed them, got a good shot and said “OK, that fucker is going on Wikipedia!”
It has a weird culture, and you have to learn to work with it. My pet peeve is bots, especially deletionist image bots, deleting things because the phrasing of the copyright assignment doesn’t fit the exact phrasing the moron who wrote the bot prefers. I don’t mind arguing with humans, but bots should not be allowed to delete images.
There are also people who apparently live to delete new articles on the basis that the subject is not notable enough. I’ve since become positively paranoid about having several references in the article the very first time I submit it.
The best description I’ve come up with about Wikipedia is “volunteer bureaucrats”. It’s like what they say about academic politics being the most viscous kind because the stakes are so low. The stakes are even lower on Wikipedia.
IIRC, it was as a result of this (and several politico-ethnic type disputes as mentioned above) that Wikipedia instituted some controls on its edit process. Originally it was supposed to be open for all to modify.
Often, there are editors who claim certain articles, and end up controlling any changes attempted by others. Some can be rather territorial. Anyone can still edit the articles, but the de facto “owner” will revert every change. The only real way to make a lasting edit is to start (and win!) an edit war.
Sometimes this works out well, if the “owners” are legitimate experts on the topic. Even better if there’s a small group of true experts that can reach reasonable consensus.
But sometimes it’s just some random asshole who has little knowledge of the topic yet still decides to take a very personal stake in an article.
When I was on Wikipedia regularly, I had a watch list with about 100 articles that I had either written or contributed to. Every time someone edited one of those, I got notification. With all but the most obscure of them, if someone vandalized the article, the edit was typically reverted within a few minutes – sometimes within seconds.
One of the most-vandalized articles on Wikipedia was the one on cows (I contributed to that one). People liked to add “Becky is a cow” type comments or other stupid things to it. Someone did some calculations and found that the average vandalism on that page was reverted within 7 seconds.
Not having much succes though … I found two dif User Names that I often use and requested an email to reset the password.
I haven’t gotten the email and I’m positive I didn’tchange email accounts since then. It looks like I may have set up the User in 2006 if that clue helps anybody.