Editing Wikipedia With My Parents
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished (just kidding, mom)
I took the week between Christmas and New Years off to spend time with family. The inevitable “what do you actually do?” question came up and so I decided to show vs. tell my parents what I did by having them edit Wikipedia.
My parents had just seen in the newspaper that the renowned Rabbi David M. Posner had just passed away and after crosschecking, discovered that he did not have a Wikipedia page. I thought that this would be a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with my parents on crafting this page. (Spoiler alert: it would have been much easier to teach them how to fix a typo or restructure an existing sentence).
Obstacle 1: Signing Up
Before jumping into the article, I wanted my parents to sign up for accounts so that they could easily find and track their work. So, I told them to go to Wikipedia to get started. After looking at the portal page, our initial convo went something like:
Mom: Wikipedia.org?
Me: Yes
Mom: Oh, there are a lot of Wikipedias.
Me: Yes, and each one is unique — not a translation!
Mom: Wow.
The conversation that followed involved us discussing why there is not one Wikipedia to rule them all and how the nuanced differences in the articles on the same topic from different Wikipedias is both a problem and a feature of the encyclopedia.
Account Creation
To my surprise, account creation was a touch challenging. I didn’t consider this, but filling out a CAPTCHA code can be an obstacle for vision impaired people. The words were fuzzy, and the refresh and alternative action buttons were tiny. It took some back and forth but we got through it after I heavily guided them.
Email Confirmation
After submitting all their credentials, my parents checked their email and got a confirmation request. They clicked on a URL which confirmed their account. Instead of clicking the super friendly on-boarding link (see below), my parents quickly went back to searching for Rabbi Posner.
The search results again indicated that the page did not exist. We followed the link to “ask for it to be created”. From that page, they were directed to another page for first-time editors. After first scanning that article and gaining a general understanding of things to do and not to do, we were directed to another page for drafting our first article. If I’m going to be honest, there was a lot of scanning going on here because my parents felt they were with an “expert” (that would be me, and no I’m not).
Obstacle 2: Playing in the Sandbox
Before we got to the friendly article creation wizard, my parents initially decided to jump into the Sandbox (Editors note: the only reasoning behind this is that I think, them being new grandparents are more familiar with sandboxes than wizards). Unsurprisingly, this was very daunting to all of us, so we went back to get to know the wizard. We went through a step by step guide to create our first article.
We made up a name for the draft and titled it “Test” because we thought that we would be able to change it later. When we progressed we learned that you can’t use that as a name because it has been used so often that it has been restricted by administrators. So we opted for actually using the rabbi’s name as a page title.
Once we got through to the instructions page, we found ourselves staring at this screen:
As you can imagine, we then spent an hour or so trying to find a few facts about the rabbi. We found the New York Times obituary and pulled out a few facts about him. We hunted for three different citations, thinking that would prove his notability. We wrote all the facts down on a legal pad and then braved the blank page.
Obstacle 4: Drafting a New Article
We realized we didn’t know how to start off the article. We didn’t know the way the article would have to be written, what sections to include or even how to format the words. So, we decided to search on another browser tab for another person to copy their Wikipedia page approach.
Ever the Star Trek fan, my mom went to actor Leonard Nimoy’s page. This was helpful to some degree and showed us that we should include his name, birth, and death dates. However, we felt that we needed to look up another rabbi to see the kinds of things that were written about them. After this research, we were off and running.
Visual Editor — the game changer!
We wrote a few sentences based on the facts that we found in the New York Times and then got completely flustered when we had to format it.
“This looks like we are typing in a Star Trek computer terminal,” my mom said about the user interface. She was referencing the fictional LCARS operating system. Although being compared to Star Trek technology intended to look futuristic would seem like a flattering comment, my mom was saying this because it looked like a throwback to the early age of computing. I quickly realized that we were in Wikitext mode (by default) and that we needed to switch out of it to VisualEditor mode.
This changed everything. I should have put my parents in this mode from the beginning (after all, it is THE PRODUCT I work on, professionally). They were familiar with tools such as Google Docs or MS Word, so writing and formatting in this space felt natural. We typed everything up and then prepared to submit — or so I thought.
Obstacle 5: Submitting a New Article Draft
Submitting was a natural next step for me, but not for my mom. My mom wanted to save the draft and come back to it later. We didn’t see a way to do this so I encouraged my parents to clean up what they had because it was a good start and then we can continue to edit it in our spare time. So, we submitted the draft by publishing the article. The terminology around the buttons was a bit off because saving, publishing etc in no way implied that this was a draft for submission.
We immediately got taken to a screen asking for a summary of the edits that we made. We weren’t sure how to officially summarize our work but we ultimately came up with “Started article for Rabbi David M. Posner and added links and citations.”
We submitted the draft. We received a message saying that it could take some time for the article to be reviewed because a lot of articles get submitted every day.
Obstacle 6: Our submission was declined!
After about a month of waiting our submission was declined. We got a message and then went to the page and saw a disturbingly red message. We couldn’t figure out what we did wrong. The reason listed in the message was “notability.” I panicked because I really wasn’t sure what to do at this point.
I messaged my colleague who has made something like eighty-nine thousand edits on Wikipedia. She looked over the entry and encouraged us to continue to improve the entry and resubmit. She quickly found another New York Times article and messaged “The blurb at the start could be used, as it’d prove that the Gray Lady thought he was worth one more mention.” A bit heavy-hearted, I went back to the page with the red message and started to edit. I also connected the article to the temple page on Wikipedia.
Me: How do I know if it’s good enough to submit?
Colleague: You don’t know. But if you’ve added the sources you’ve currently found, then this is as good a time as any other.
I resubmitted the draft and in the meantime, my colleague helped us to get an “adverse ruling.” I felt optimistic and told my parents about the whole ordeal. I explained that we had to prove his notability and they got to work researching so that we could continue to improve the article.
Insult to injury
The adverse ruling got denied and to and salt to my wounds, the reason they wrote was:
If he is DM Posner on Google Scholar, I don’t think he passes WP:PROF. A quick google search shows coverage limited to a) obits and b) press releases. So at this point I concur with the deletion of the draft. If there is more substantial coverage, the article’s creator should find it and add it to this not particularly impressive stub.
“Not particularly impressive stub” — those were fighting words! I’m kidding, but it has motivated me to keep trying to make it better. It’s frustrating because what I REALLY want to do is save a draft, have someone look at it and then resubmit. In the meantime, I’m going to draft in another tool, like Google Docs with my parents so that we can collaborate on this more.
I’m being spammed by my parents
My parents are also motivated to continue to improve the article. Every day I receive many emails with links and different articles from them.
To be continued
I don’t know if we will ever get this article up to snuff for Wikipedia, but I know that if I ever have to teach someone how to use Wikipedia again, I will just have them edit an already existing article. Additionally, I learned that although I pretend to be a thick-skinned New Yorker, I’m actually kind of offended that my reviewer just talked mild trash about my stub article instead of offering me real guidance.
Taking off my “daughter” hat and putting on my “Wikimedia Foundation designer hat”, I see that there are a lot of opportunities here. There’s an opportunity for improving on-boarding, a chance to leverage that “aha!” moment provided by VisualEditor and a potential moment to enhance user learning around failure, trial, and error. I also was reminded by my colleague that this experience is specific to enwiki (English Wikipedia).
I feel defeated but not so hopeless that I won’t keep pushing on this. Plus, this has now become a family affair. I can’t show face at my parents’ dinner table if I don’t try to iterate on the article.
