4th Week of Class: Editing Wikipedia

The first part of our homework for this week is to become an editor for Wikipedia and make a change to an existing article. (BTW, Wikipedia made a major change in how certain articles will be edited.)

I decided to check the Wikipedia article on knitting and did find something missing that I could add. Only one word but I was surprised it was missing. The sentence in question also had a grammatical error. I would say exactly what I changed but Wikipedia recommends against using your real name there. Saying what I changed in a blog that does use my real name would defeat the purpose of using a pseudonym.

I clicked on the edit link for that paragraph expecting to be taken to a login page but it turns out that you can edit Wikipedia without creating an account. They will however publicly log your IP address. Creating an account prevents this.

I follow a link on the Edit page to the Create an Account page. This quickly became the page I wished I could edit. First, although the page puts the things you must do to create a user name a password before the form fields, it puts the things you should consider regarding your privacy after the form. You know that some people filled that form out without scrolling to the bottom of the page first. In my opinion, the submit button for a form should come after everything the end user should read before they actually hit the button.

The second problem I ran into is that you can not check to see whether a user name is available before submitting the form. Having to retype passwords and CAPTHA text just to find out the user name you picked is already taken is annoying. If you sign up for a Windows Live account it lets you check for availability of a user name without submitting the main form. I tried one of the CAPTHA phrases but it was also taken.

My third attempt is successful. I get the Login successful page and wish I could bookmark it since it contains a list of the first few things I should learn about Wikipedia. I bookmark the individual links for the policies I should learn first.

Doing the actual edit and preview was simple enough. I checked the links at the bottom of the page before saving my changes and it was a good thing I did. They always want an edit summary and what's pre-populated in that field is not sufficient. Their definition of a minor edit is also more narrow that what I would have assumed. Adding even one word can be a major edit if you are adding content and not just making a grammatical change. However, not all changes have to be cited only ones that may be challenged and quotations. I doubt my change will be challenged but I decided to watch the page just in case.

Doing a small change was not too difficult or time consuming but I would definitely read the guidelines and policies before making a change larger than this one.