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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Many people pointed this out in the link but yeah, it's much harder to make edits / entries in wikipedia nowadays.
The rules are more strict and you have to respect an increasing number of rules, etc.
I remember when Wikipedia started to get some steam, it was basically a text editor with very basic hyperlink-style formatting.
Minor changes / typos are still easy to do, but frankly I wouldn't know how to start anymore if I wanted to create a new entry.
I've corrected a typo before and had it reversed by a bot. Why the fuck would I help them again?
What was the typo correction? Are you sure the article wasn’t e.g. written in British English while you use American English?
Yes, I'm sure. I don't remember because I left and never gave it a second thought.
I've tried editing a few articles years ago, only to have everything undone hours later with no explanation why and nothing in the way of constructive criticism for whatever invisible criteria the power users were looking for. I don't even bother anymore and avoid using the entire site if I can find what I need elsewhere.
Push away eager contributors and you're stuck with the old guard before you realize it.
That was my experience trying to clean up some obvious typos. I've never bothered trying to contribute again.
I fix dead links too. References to news websites are the worst.
What was the edit about? There’s a rule to never revert others with the default summary
Ah this was like 10 years ago when I was in undergrad. Possibly something video game or chemistry related.
Unfortunately as more and more people got online it became more and more ripe for abuse. I can't imagine Wikipedia not getting horrible defaced if its editorial standards were still in 2006. Old Wikipedia had some weird shit. Not every mid-level WW2 Nazi commander needed a page of thinly-veiled apologia, and thankfully many of those excesses are already dealt with. Also, the articles in general are of a higher quality than they used to be.
I hope they can work out a solution that allows trusted junior editors to become admins more easily.
It is funny looking back to the earliest articles and how little rules and regulations there were for making them. Including just how loose the reliable source rules were, since there was little oversight on using, say, someone's blog as a source of information.
Back in the early days, I noticed my town had a wikipedia entry, but no demonym (word for people who live there; e.g. New Yorker, San Franciscan). I thought of a slightly rude word whose first half happened to be my town's name (think if, say, Parisians were called "Parisites"), and added it as the demonym, totally unsourced, as a joke to show my buddy. It stayed. For a few years it stayed, never questioned. Then, the new Mayor used it in a speech; presumably, she'd looked it up on wikipedia. That speech was published in the local paper. The local paper was added to the page as a source, and not by me. A high-school gag between friends was now a sourced and cited fact.
So basically this XKCD comics happened in real life https://xkcd.com/978/
You really make me wanna go hunt it down.
Yea, I'm happy to make minor edits and do reverts on vandalism, but starting something? Man, I have no idea what the best practices are.
In general you can just do it. As long as it's not malicious it's probably fine.
One of their rules/motos is "be bold"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
Creating new articles seems hard though
I always work on new articles in my userspace before putting it out into the main article area. Since you're much more likely to run into conflict if you're putting out an article with a couple of sentences and one source, even if you're planning on expanding it, than if you move a more fully formed article into the mainspace all at once.
There’s a guide for that at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Your_first_article
Read about it in advance (from decent sources, as much as possible), find a few similar articles to see how they're usually formatted, map out how you want your article to look (while generally respecting the format of the other articles), and do it. The formatting is a bit trickier in the raw editor, but I think the visual editor is the default now. They also have help articles of all sorts, and a message board for new users looking for help.
And if you make some technical mistake, some bot or no-lifer who edits 50 articles a day will smooth it all out anyway.
And if you don't make a mistake, it'll probably get fast tracked for deletion anyway