Emile Jones — Wikipedia Project Analysis
Editing Wikipedia was an exercise in removing myself from the situation entirely, which was entirely not with my undergrad prepared me to do. It was a super interesting experience, and is something that I think has really made me far better as a journalist in general. Wikipedia forcing me to be neutral on all aspects and forcing me to not just have my information right, but also put it in my own words, really forced me to learn the nitty gritty of the topic, and put me in a position where I could now just rattle off the information and make it fit the context of wherever I needed it to fit.
I really like how Wikipedia is set up in terms of needing multiple reliable published sources for any kind of information, but it’s true that there is a knowledge gap where some information only does exist in the first person, first-hand accounts of an event or a kind of knowledge, and until a peer-reviewed study comes out analyzing those firsthand accounts in something like a contact analysis, that information really can’t be added to Wikipedia and so I think there is definitely something lost there. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, which does mean that all it needs to include is facts. This brings up the question, is there a difference between the truth individuals experience, and the truth of the world (in that, if two people experience things the same way, it becomes a kind of crowd-sourced truth, and so a universal fact that could be included on Wikipedia). I think if there was going to be a Wikipedia clone that contained nonpublished sources, like oral traditions and histories, it would look a lot like YouTube, and honestly because of the way that YouTube exists, Wikipedia and YouTube work really well in tandoori as an encyclopedia of verified secondhand information juxtapose wearing YouTube’s first hand, point-of-view style storytelling.
One of my favorite things about Wikipedia is that it doesn’t matter who puts what information there, because the information we put on Wikipedia does not come from us. The information we put on Wikipedia comes from other people who are reputable sources of reputable and evidence-based information, so as long as your information is good, anyone can edit Wikipedia, and so anyone can contribute to the general knowledge of the world that you can find on Wikipedia.
Part of this assignment that I found is the hardest boy is figuring out what to actually edit in terms of the boundaries of this assignment and my passions for what I felt strongly about and what I felt I knew I could go find information about. It’s really easy to get really angry when you think that something isn’t right, I just wanna correct it, but having the data to back up your thoughts is the thing that allows you to actually correct and edit Wikipedia itself.
It was so easy within the process of all of this to think that ‘I’ve found an excellent source and that I have everything together and I think I have the exact moment where I’m going to edit it and then to find out that this is actually something that agrees with the article I have to scrap all my work. I had to reset my view of what I was trying to edit three separate times; first, because my scope was too big, second, because I focused too small and I finished what immediately, and then third, the sources I find weren’t actually relating to true crime podcasts in general, and instead were more focused on true crime sensationalism and would do better in the top of the article, which I was not comfortable with attempting to edit so close to the end of the project as it was too big of an undertaking for me to feel that I could actually do well with it.
There is definitely a learning curve with actually editing Wikipedia, especially with the talk page formatting. Even all the way at the end of the project, I had the formatting style guide open so that I could read and reference it to actually get the source formatting right, and I think that if I was going to continue editing Wikipedia it would probably take me about a month more of working on it before I was actually fully fluent and could do the source editing off hand. Another issue I had immediately was that the sandboxes did not make a lot of sense and so my article draft is actually written in the sandbox for crime podcasts, not true crime, and I don’t have myself ‘unassigned’ to crime podcasts because it would delete my crime podcasts sandbox, where all my work actually is. I did quite a bit of work in the crime podcast sandbox before I realized that I was in the wrong sandbox, and so I ended up leaving it there so that Professor Hobbs can see my edits and my edit history and the way my edits changed over time.
When we look at Wikipedia volunteer editing, it really does hold true that two heads are better than one, but in this case 850 million heads are better than one company trying to put out an encyclopedia every couple years to reflect the changing knowledge of the world. Especially with all of the issues that are happening right now and culture shifts and the danger of living, nobody has the time to actually sit down and write something on their own. However, we have the ability to all just change one little thing, and because we have that, we can all make a lot more forward progress than if we were all trying to do this alone. When the resolution Biden passed earlier this year about making publicly grant funded research available to everyone, no payroll at all, actually goes into play mid 2026, I think we’re going to see a lot more of this kind of editing of Wikipedia, because there will be literally just more data available to the public view and available for public use and honestly? I can’t wait.
