I have changed Wikipedia for the better!(In my own small way) I also added a falsehood (gasp!), but all is well in the end. Read on to learn more about my week as a Wikipedia editor...
First, I added some extra (but factual) information to the Oshkosh Public Museum page. I pulled it all from the museum's website. I also added an "Hours and Admissions" heading. Although most visitors to a museum will probably visit the actual museum website, the OPM's Wikipedia page was poorly written and was lacking information readily available on the website. If there's an existing Wikipedia page for an organization, it might as well be accurate and fleshed-out!
I did not think any of these changes would be contested, but I thought that maybe others would make the page more well-rounded after I made my additions. As of today, no other changes have been made and the previous changes had been made in June 2013. This is not a very active page.
After a few days, I decided I needed to make a small change (an erroneous one) on a more "high profile" page and see how long it would take for someone to change it. First, I was going to change something on the Anne Boleyn Wikipedia page. I quickly discovered that this page is not open to editing, at least no that I could access. "After 4 days and 10 edits" a registered user can edit semi-protected pages, according to Wikipedia's rules. The Anne Boleyn page was also "move-protected due to vandalism", which I think means that it is a protected page. So, I decided to leave Ms. Boleyn behind.
After scanning the subjects of my favorite history podcast, I settled on the man James Reavis. His Wikipedia pages is here. (There is also an interesting podcast about his life from Stuff You Missed in History Class).
Although this page hadn't been changed since January, it is edited more frequently than the Oshkosh Public Museum page. I decided to make a subtle change: I changed his birth year from 1843 to 1943. I'll admit, I felt pretty guilty about changing factual information into a falsehood and resolved to change it back within a week if another Wikipedia user hadn't done so already. But to my surprise...they did! User "Allen3" changed James Reavis' birth year back within 10 hours of my edit.
It was exciting to both make a change (for the better) and see something I changed (for the worse) corrected...and not to have gotten a scolding.
More on what I learned, later!
-B-
No comments:
Post a Comment