After getting my account approved on wikipedia to be an active editor, I immediately sought out to see how I could contribute to this online community. While looking through many of the wikipedia pages, I noticed that many of them had been categorized as having problems that needed to be revised.
My first attempting at contributing to Wikipedia was by improving upon citations that needed to be fixed or added. I searched through different types of pages on wikipedia through citation hunt and I decided to work on a page dedicated on talking about Adblock.
This page was well written but it was missing an essential citation. The citation that was missing made one of the statistics provided less credible and this prevented it from supporting the overall claim in a strong way. From here, I went onto Adblock’s site and dug around for any information related to what the original writer of this post stated. Eventually I was able to come across a page that supported the statement made and I added in a new reference to the page. Making this change meant that I had to change the source code while following specific guidelines to ensure that the footnote and link that I was adding to the page flowed well with the rest of the text.
My second attempt at contributing to the wikipedia community was when I attempted to make multiple changes to a page talking about the Central Dogma in Biology. The reason I choose this page was becuase it was marked by Wikipedia for having multiple problems and I know quite a bit in this field from my courses in Biology and Bioinformatics.
While reading through this web page I corrected over 10 grammar errors, changed the title of the first subtopic and added in a statement detailing what a reader should do if they are still confused on this topic and want to develop a more indepth understanding on the information presented.
Overall I enjoyed contributing to the Wikipedia community and feel that I now realize how much work and effort goes behind maintaining a growing platform focused on promoting intellectual growth and collaboration while at the same time maintaining credibility.
https://adblockplus.org/category/adblock-plus-ie/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBlock#AdBlock_for_Firefox
https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt/en?id=19630557&cat=f8c8204a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology#De…
2 responses to “Open Collaboration – Wikipedia Editor”
While going through many of the Wikipedia pages, I noticed that a lot of pages had formatting errors, wrong labeling and a lot of grammar errors. The information on these pages were up to par, but the grammar errors and structure of the sentences made the information seem illegitimate. This definitely was a safer option instead of directly adding content. In terms of adding citations, digging around on supporting websites turned out to be quite easy and I wouldn’t be surprised if Wikipedia already has a machine learning algorithm that helps trace back information on Wikipedia pages to potential links.
Deven, Great job digging in and trying out Wikipedia editing. You are the second person I’ve read who chose not to edit content but, rather, the grammar and formatting of an entry. Why did you decide to do this? Why not pick an entry to which you could add or edit content? Did it feel safer? Also, how did you decide that your source for the adblock citation was authoritative?