Actually, I don’t.
My topic title is a Weird Al reference. But I’m sure some of you do. How active are you? What articles are “your babies?”
I have no “babies”. I typically fix spelling and punctuation, only occasionally adding something or changing the page if the omission/inclusion is egregious.
From what I have seen the usual activity by Wikipedia “editors” is reversing any entry by anyone who isn’t a editor.:rolleyes:
When I make a entry and am not logged in, so far there is a 100% chance that a "editor’ will remove it.
If logged in, it’s about 50%.
Seriously, if you find a mistake in a Wikipedia article is there any point in trying to fix it, and if so how?
I used to edit a lot, back in the early to mid 2000s. Since then a culture of possessive deletionism has taken over and it’s a pain to contribute anything and I just don’t bother much anymore.
I rewrote much of the rock climbing article about a decade ago, and despite its shoddy organization and poor technical details, it’s stuck around mostly intact since then.
A couple of obnoxious experiences have stood out since. One, I spent a few hours researching and writing a well-cited article on a US citizen who was illegally deported to Mexico, the subject of significant media coverage, and party to a constitutional lawsuit from the ACLU upon his return. The MINUTE after it went up, some admin casually nominated it for “Speedy Deletion” because the topic “wasn’t notable”. Ugh.
That was the last time I would try to contribute anything significant. Even minor edits since then been painful. After one of the X-Men movies came out, I added a short sentence to a character’s page to clarify some plot element. Within minutes this guy reverted the change saying it wasn’t cited. So I found some cites about it, re-added it, and then he reverted it again. He said it wasn’t canon. Then I found some other cite about what defines canon in the X-Men universe, re-added it, and he deleted it again, saying “the movie just isn’t part of the actual X-Men universe. Only the comics count.” I just rolled my eyes – not about to fight some silly battle over an X-Men character.
I’ve made some 1000 contributions across Wikipedia, but that has decreased to 4 or 5 a year since the late 2000s. It’s just a hostile environment now, and unless you’re really dedicated to spending 4x the time defending anything you add rather than adding content, it’s not worth it anymore.
You can try. It’s actually pretty easy; just click the “Edit” link on the top of each page. For most pages you don’t even have to be logged in.
The hard part is getting your edits to stick and not be randomly reverted. It helps if you include a citation to whatever you’re adding, but even that’s not a guarantee…
Is it worth it? Well, if you have the time, sure. Wikipedia is an invaluable resource and it got that way through the sheer determination of thousands of contributors. Despite its popular misconception as a worthless hellhole of lies, many of its significant articles are really well researched and quite thoroughly sourced. Various studies praise its accuracy. But really, it’s not like Wikipedia has much competition. The old-world encyclopedias just can’t keep up with the pace of human knowledge gain. Expert-certified encyclopedias like Citizendium, built on the Wikipedia model but with more weight given to industry/field experts, never really got the traction. Wikipedia’s model is basically “throw a thousand idiots at a topic and hope that three of them are knowledgeable enough and one of them can write”. Multiply that by its millions of visitors and Wikipedia has such a critical mass, such a network effect, it’s hard to imagine any other site taking over what it does.
And even if you don’t feel like adding factoids, you can contribute in other ways: tagging things as incorrect, or needing citation, or outdated, etc. You can add pictures, photographs, illustrations, sounds, if that’s your thing. I think in recent years they even added friendly messages and blurbs that you can send to editors whose work you appreciate (seems silly, but they are human after all…). And so on.
No “babies” but I have noticed that certain pages are vandal magnets and will stop by them from time to time and report any particuarly active vandals.
If it’s a recent mistake: go to the history, find where it was added, and hit “undo”. Also the best way to deal with vandalism.
I have edited over 100 articles in the past few years. Most are minor typo, spelling, punctuation, or grammar fixes; a few expand on what is being said and add references or links. None have been rejected AFAIK.
If you are the kind of person who cringes at an obvious (to you) mistake, you are just the kind of person to fix it. That’s what the Wiki concept is all about.
Do you get notification of changes to your submission? Or do you only know if you visit the article?
I’ve edited a few pages here and there, mostly to remove an external reference that no longer was valid.
There is a “watch this page” option, yes.
I used to edit articles (and occasionally create new ones) but I haven’t had time for it lately. A lot of the articles on muskets and flintlocks weren’t very good, so I did a major re-write of most of the articles on American muskets and reworked some of the French and other foreign musket articles as well. I did the same to a lot of the older firearm articles, mostly older revolvers and a few odd rifles here and there. I also created a few articles on some lesser known weapons like the Agar gun and the Confederate revolving cannon.
Most of the electrical and engineering articles were pretty decent already, so I haven’t done much with those. I created pages for rat race couplers and magic tees, which are two types of RF couplers, and re-wrote most of the article on Ufer grounds and created an article for ring grounds and halo grounds after it came up for discussion here on the SDMB and I noticed there wasn’t a wikipedia article for it.
I don’t have the patience to do spelling and grammar fixes. I only edit for content.
I don’t know of any way to get notification of changes to your articles. You can put articles on your watch list, and then when you look at your watch list you can see any recent changes to them.
I’ve edited some existing articles and created others. Some of the ones I edited were for people (mostly journalists and other writers) whose writing I liked and felt deserved better articles.
One flaw I’ve noticed with Wikipedia articles is that because they are written by mulitple people, they can seem like a disjointed collection of facts, often repeated. If a single person were writing or editing an article, it might flow better.
And the rules about citations can be a problem. If Albert Einstein were alive today and he edited the article on special relativity, someone would revert the changes for lack of a cite. But if I write something and cite some source, no matter how obscure or unverifiable, it will stand.
Then you must be the author that I often fix. 
Yeah. Goes hand in hand with their “No original research” policy. Kinda makes sense, sort of, given that most Wikipedia editors wouldn’t be able to peer-review original content. But then again they don’t do a very good job of validating external citations either, so… it’s all for appearances’ sake, I guess.
I’m also an engineer. We’re not exactly known for good spelling and grammar, so I probably made all kinds of extra work for you. 
Old engineering joke: I usta culdnt spel enjineer, now i r one.
The policy makes sense, because otherwise what’s to stop someone from creating a page with completely unverifiable stuff throughout?
It’s the application that’s the problem. Now you can cite someone else’s unverifiable nonsense and use that as verification. Somewhere along the line it breaks down.
Quoted for truth.
Yeah, I understand the intent. In practice it just means a lot of citations and very little verification. There are a lot of cites out there that don’t say what was quoted, that don’t even talk about the same topic, or that are just dead links from 1999.
I don’t really think there’s an easy solution to that issue, and maybe the Wikipedia method ain’t the best, but it’s what we got.
If nothing else, it remains supremely useful as a place to get overviews of issues and then a bunch of primary docs that other people have already skimmed through and marked as relevant. That alone makes it research gold.
The culture of wikipedia has changed sadly. You used to be able to post about experimental or new treatments for medical conditions so long as you labeled them as preliminary or experimental, and had valid sources to back up your claims. Now if you do that (even if you post several studies and other cites) they get deleted. I don’t bother with it anymore.