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Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

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Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

#1
The "Wikipedia for Sale" post on the front page made me wonder how many people on HN actually contribute to Wikipedia. I have never, but am interested in figuring out why. I love Wikipedia and would love to contribute by keeping spam away and stopping PR companies from being in control.

I'm a long time lurker, with a recently created account. This would have made more sense as a poll. Can any admin change this Ask HN into a poll with the following data points - everyday (daily contributer), once a week, once a month, few times, never

Re: Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

#3
Been an editor for quite a while---mostly to correct things. Could be typos, factual errors, errors of omission, normal editor kind of stuff for those categories I know well enough to do the job. I've rarely been involved in a disagreement and as I remember it all of those were resolved peaceably :) Funny that you should ask this as I just did an edit on the 4th Infantry page a few hours ago. You kind of have to be a little bit OCD for this kind of stuff, but as I am, no problem!

Re: Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

#8
I've tried on a three occasions to contribute to wikipedia - Two occasions where I've found articles with incorrect data based off of poor sources, and once to correct a minor grammatical issue, with all of the articles in question being small and non-political in nature. Every time I was promptly reverted. In the former's case I always provided sources for my updated info, which were completely ignored the first occasion, and on the second occasion the article was later edited to include both pieces of info, despite clear scientific consensus for the new. In the latter's case I was simply reverted without explanation.

I really didn't feel like fighting the reverts, and I suppose I probably won't edit any more pages. It really seems like a contributor-hostile environment.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

#9
I do fairly regularly, since about 2003. I used to be very involved in meta-Wikipedia stuff in the early days (policy, mailing lists, meetups, dispute-arbitration, etc.), but sort of drifted away from that once it got more professionalized, and had a Foundation set up and such.

Now I mostly write short (~2-10 paragraphs) articles on subjects that don't have articles. I usually start from a good source, like an encyclopedia of scientists, or a book on 18th-century Scandinavian art, and look at what it covers that Wikipedia doesn't yet. Then I pick one of those things, look on Google Books/Scholar for additional sources (it's ideal to have at least 2 sources for an article), and write a short summary of what I've found on the subject.

A different kind of editing, which I do mostly as a kind of "don't have to think too much" unwinding that I find enjoyable somehow, is various stuff from a long list of filing/curation/sorting tasks that always need to be done. For example, take something from the category listing the thousands of articles that could/should have lat/long coordinates added but don't yet [1], and see if I can find its coordinates (on OpenStreetMap, on official websites, etc.).

Another useful low-key thing to do is to pick some articles that you know something about or have an interest in, but which are less popular (not hugely popular articles like [[Barack Obama]] that already have many editors), and add them to your Watchlist. If you then check the Watchlist periodically for edits to those articles, you can be part of the distributed tiny communities curating the more obscure parts of Wikipedia. This can be sometimes just be noticing when someone makes a questionable edit (whether spam or otherwise). But it can also be positive attention, e.g. if another editor asks a question on the Talk page proposing a change to an article or questioning part of it or asking if something they added is ok, you'll see that on your Watchlist and might have something to weigh in with, which makes the parts of the encyclopedia you're paying attention to feel like less of a ghost town (it can be frustrating when you comment on a less-popular article and literally nobody answers for months... the opposite of the problem you get in really contentious parts of the encyclopedia).

A final really easy thing to do, and probably Wikipedia's most famous cultural export, is to add {{citation needed}} if you run across a sentence making a claim that seems like it really should be backed up, but doesn't seem to be cited anywhere in the vicinity. Even better to find a source and add Source, but tagging as citation-needed is still helpful. This is not only for claims that you think are dubious or wrong, since even likely correct claims should have a reference where readers can verify.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_missing_geoco...

Re: Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

#10
I don't make a hobby out of editing, but when I'm reading an article in a field I know a little about and I come across an egregious error, I usually edit it, or leave an edit request if the page is protected.

I do the same thing for articles outside my areas of knowledge if the error is particularly galling and unambiguously incorrect.

Because I use wikipedia quite a lot, I'd say I leave an edit about twice a month.

Having said that, much, much more often I encounter a minor error that I don't have the time to investigate. In this kind of case I think "boy, I bet the source doesn't actually back that up", but it doesn't seem important enough to break my workflow to look into.

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