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Has anyone ever made an edit on Wikipedia without someone trying to start an edit war? I think it's actually worse than StackOverflow.

kieckerjan 6y ago
I dread making changes to wikipedia for this reason. You invest time and energy to research something and write it up and then some semi anonymous bastard comes along and deletes it. Frustrating and a waste of effort. At least that was what I used to think until recently. I spotted such a glaring omission on the Dutch wikipedia that I felt morally compelled to remedy it myself. I did the edit and sure enough within five minutes I was alerted that someone else had edited my edit. Turns out he had just fixed a typo, sent me a thank you and added a new section of his own on something unrelated. For what it is worth, it was an uplifting little experience.
- andai 6y ago
  That's nice to hear. What did you add?
  - kieckerjan 6y ago
    To the item on woodpeckers: why the little buggers don't get headaches. The explanation is actually quite interesting, look it up!
- Jay2wu2u 6y ago
  I used to contribute a lot to wikipedia in its early days in the 2000' and faced the same frustrating experience. I think this just happens to everybody, from what I heard from other editors. I would expect it to be even worse now that wp is well established and editors do not have to make a common front against academics' denigration. Still, wp is in my view easily the biggest achievement of the web, and I still care for it. I would often fix small issues, like you mention, this does not trigger any hostile response. Something else I found to work quite well to contribute without risking annoying conflicts : to translate articles from en.wp to other languages if their pages don't exist yet on the localized one. And of course, there always need help to revert vandalisms. Also, I would recommend against having an account. Being IP based editor makes you more subject to scrutiny, but this prevents people deciding they don't like you based on your history. That's an advice I would give for any public discussion on the web, though (by always using fresh accounts).
  - ricardo81 6y ago
    While I used Wikipedia a lot and appreciate the generic layout which makes things easier to find, it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. The web lowered the barrier to entry and the Wikipedia editorial system somewhat raises it for anyone interested in creating something for the web.
    - LyndsySimon 6y ago
      > it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. I'm not trying to "call you out" on this; I'm genuinely curious - do you have anything to back up this assertion? I've had a couple of instances where I'd written something on a topic that Wikipedia had inadequately covered, and posted on the article's talk page. I included a link to my content, a note that it was my original research, and asked that other editors consider adding it as a source. In most instance - maybe every instance, as it's been a while and I'm not even sure if I could find all the places I'd done that - it was eventually cited and incorporated into the article.
      - ricardo81 6y ago
        Hi, no problem if you wish to call me out :-) I think you may have slightly misunderstood me, as you make examples of times where you've suggested edits to editors and they've been agreeable. I was talking more along the lines of the syndication of content at scale, perhaps a "death by a thousand papercuts (or citations)" scenario where Wikipedia gets the pageviews, the visitors, the links. For example, Wikipedia gets a lot of links as a 'credible' reference, and tends to rank well in search engines for the topic titles due to this. This pushes down all the other pages of course, including the pages that Wikipedia uses as citations. I feel that content has been homogenised and centralised too much, and could go into that more but I'm sure you get my general gist, without any data to back it up. On the flip side, there is additional added value from something like Wikipedia existing, like all the Natural Language Processor tools that get trained up on well-formed and structured text.
- OJFord 6y ago
  How do you get such notifications, or is it only if it's so quickly afterwards? This prompted me to check back on some of my own (few) (very minor) edits, and one in particular has been reverted by 'an IP' (as I believe is the lingo). Not that I spent long on it, but mildly annoying (and to have it dismissed as 'trivia') and if I'd noticed at the time I might have been interested/incensed enough to Talk about it. I don't really care, but of course I did add it for a reason, that it was missing and what I was looking for at the time when I found the page lacking.
jccalhoun 6y ago
I don't think any of my changes have been reverted because someone disagreed with my edit. However, most of my edits over the years have been finding better sources and correcting grammar on minor issues.
- LyndsySimon 6y ago
  This prompted me to go back and look at my own contributions. The few that I spot checked are still there - but like you, the majority of them are fixing small issues like grammar or moving citations around to better reflect the content of the sources. I've also added a few photographs that were my original works, which I released to the public domain and included on relevant pages. It's odd to go back after a couple of years and find one of my photos on a Wiki page that I have since completely forgotten that I'd added.

kieckerjan 6y ago

I dread making changes to wikipedia for this reason. You invest time and energy to research something and write it up and then some semi anonymous bastard comes along and deletes it. Frustrating and a waste of effort. At least that was what I used to think until recently. I spotted such a glaring omission on the Dutch wikipedia that I felt morally compelled to remedy it myself. I did the edit and sure enough within five minutes I was alerted that someone else had edited my edit. Turns out he had just fixed a typo, sent me a thank you and added a new section of his own on something unrelated. For what it is worth, it was an uplifting little experience.

andai 6y ago
That's nice to hear. What did you add?
- kieckerjan 6y ago
  To the item on woodpeckers: why the little buggers don't get headaches. The explanation is actually quite interesting, look it up!
Jay2wu2u 6y ago
I used to contribute a lot to wikipedia in its early days in the 2000' and faced the same frustrating experience. I think this just happens to everybody, from what I heard from other editors. I would expect it to be even worse now that wp is well established and editors do not have to make a common front against academics' denigration. Still, wp is in my view easily the biggest achievement of the web, and I still care for it. I would often fix small issues, like you mention, this does not trigger any hostile response. Something else I found to work quite well to contribute without risking annoying conflicts : to translate articles from en.wp to other languages if their pages don't exist yet on the localized one. And of course, there always need help to revert vandalisms. Also, I would recommend against having an account. Being IP based editor makes you more subject to scrutiny, but this prevents people deciding they don't like you based on your history. That's an advice I would give for any public discussion on the web, though (by always using fresh accounts).
- ricardo81 6y ago
  While I used Wikipedia a lot and appreciate the generic layout which makes things easier to find, it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. The web lowered the barrier to entry and the Wikipedia editorial system somewhat raises it for anyone interested in creating something for the web.
  - LyndsySimon 6y ago
    > it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. I'm not trying to "call you out" on this; I'm genuinely curious - do you have anything to back up this assertion? I've had a couple of instances where I'd written something on a topic that Wikipedia had inadequately covered, and posted on the article's talk page. I included a link to my content, a note that it was my original research, and asked that other editors consider adding it as a source. In most instance - maybe every instance, as it's been a while and I'm not even sure if I could find all the places I'd done that - it was eventually cited and incorporated into the article.
    - ricardo81 6y ago
      Hi, no problem if you wish to call me out :-) I think you may have slightly misunderstood me, as you make examples of times where you've suggested edits to editors and they've been agreeable. I was talking more along the lines of the syndication of content at scale, perhaps a "death by a thousand papercuts (or citations)" scenario where Wikipedia gets the pageviews, the visitors, the links. For example, Wikipedia gets a lot of links as a 'credible' reference, and tends to rank well in search engines for the topic titles due to this. This pushes down all the other pages of course, including the pages that Wikipedia uses as citations. I feel that content has been homogenised and centralised too much, and could go into that more but I'm sure you get my general gist, without any data to back it up. On the flip side, there is additional added value from something like Wikipedia existing, like all the Natural Language Processor tools that get trained up on well-formed and structured text.
OJFord 6y ago
How do you get such notifications, or is it only if it's so quickly afterwards? This prompted me to check back on some of my own (few) (very minor) edits, and one in particular has been reverted by 'an IP' (as I believe is the lingo). Not that I spent long on it, but mildly annoying (and to have it dismissed as 'trivia') and if I'd noticed at the time I might have been interested/incensed enough to Talk about it. I don't really care, but of course I did add it for a reason, that it was missing and what I was looking for at the time when I found the page lacking.

jccalhoun 6y ago

I don't think any of my changes have been reverted because someone disagreed with my edit. However, most of my edits over the years have been finding better sources and correcting grammar on minor issues.

LyndsySimon 6y ago
This prompted me to go back and look at my own contributions. The few that I spot checked are still there - but like you, the majority of them are fixing small issues like grammar or moving citations around to better reflect the content of the sources. I've also added a few photographs that were my original works, which I released to the public domain and included on relevant pages. It's odd to go back after a couple of years and find one of my photos on a Wiki page that I have since completely forgotten that I'd added.