Wiki-wild: My first wiki editathon
I went to my first wikipedia edit-a-thon hosted by The LatinX Project at NYU’s Bobst Library. Many thanks to the organizers at NYU Libraries, the Latinx Project, and Wikimedia NYC. And for the amazing and concise training materials by Art + Feminism (who btw had their own wiki edit-a-thon today at the New Museum).
As we might be aware of, Wikipedia is a free (and open) encyclopedia on the web. Using a script originally written in Perl(UseModWiki), it now uses a combination of PHP and MySQL and other languages depending on its function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Technical#What_kind_of_markup_language_does_Wikipedia_use?).
An important feature to note is that Wikipedia uses a simple markup language (wikitext) for edits. While it might seem similar to HTML (HyperText Markup Language), wikiText is used for security and “simplicity”. Although I would say there is a definite learning curve when trying to use wikiText, but luckily there is documentation on how to format using WikiPedia’s markup language.
Navigating the page
Anyone can access pages, but only account users can edit pages so you must be logged in first to make any changes.
Step 1: Login https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Login
Step 2: Open an article
Literally you can search and open any article. You’ll have access to the Read / Edit / View History features that you would not normally have when just viewing the page as a regular user.
Editing the page
Step 3: Choose your editor
Similarly in our coding world, we have different types of editors that we use to edit our code. In Wikipedia, you have two choices: (1) Visual Editing — our comfortable GUI, or (2) Source Editing — which not going to lie, can look confusing BUT remember there is documentation on how to use this markup language.
Step 4: Know your toolbar
For Visual Editing mode, If you’ve used Google Docs, you’ll recognize a lot of the icons
- Undo
- Redo
- Format of lettering: Paragraph, Heading, etc
- Font: Bold, Italic, etc
- Hyperlink!
- Cite: this makes linking up the research and sources you found way easier
- Bullets
- Insert: Media (photos), template, table, etc
- Accents and symbols
Step 5: Know the basic rules of editing
Before you edit, as you familiarize yourself with the Wikipedia, note that there are no hard, established rules on Wikipedia. It’s very powerful to be able to edit, especially because depending on how often people access and update pages, incorrect information can go unchecked for a long time. There are simply policies and guidelines written by its community of editors that are constantly being revised, but which you’re expected to adhere to. It’s important to read the Five Pillars and the Core content policies
Without repeating the word by word the information already stated in those pages, what’s important to take away is that you must remain neutral when editing (a task that is always hard and needs to be checked). If unsure, you can always add your suggestions to the Talk page to get the input of the community.
Make sure your edits are verifiable. Where’d you get them? Where did you read it? Where are you citing it? For it to be verifiable, it must be attributed to a reliable, published source
And no original research. This is linked to its verifiability. Your research can be valid if published in a journal, thesis, or peer reviewed outlet. But you got to publish it first so get to it!
Happy editing!
