Because Wikipedia is a useful tool created by volunteers as an act of generosity, and by vandalizing it (which is what you did), you made them spend their energy not on making it better, but on merely restoring it to what it was before.
actually at that time you were giving me tips for how to prevent it from happening and I did those things and it still happened so I gave up. I only started attempting to edit in the first place because you were so pro-female wiki editors!
the weird thing is that while this totally sounds like a thing I would have done, I actually don’t remember doing it. so I guess there are a few tricks to getting content to stick on wikipedia, and it would be useful if we could share knowledge around that. (ps to reply to your other thing for the benefit of people following along, yes I definitely think having an account would help your edits not get reverted, it’s like sending an anon message on tumblr but with more risk of vandalism)
if lies is an active editor that might help though? and destinationtoast suggested maybe having a hangout in which we edit wp and talk about it with each other, which might be cool?
I haven’t done much editing on Wikipedia in a while, but I used to do a fair amount. I’d be happy to participate in a hangout if you do one.
There are Wikipedia pages on how to get started as an editor. Some good ones are:
The mechanics are pretty easy. It’s the other editors that make it tricky. Editing contentious articles like those for politicians is toward the challenging end of the spectrum in that regard.
It helps to use a login (which actually is better for you if you’re concerned about privacy). Sometimes it can help to involve yourself on the article’s talk page so you can hash out what sort of change you want to make and build consensus before you actually make the change.
The big thing if you want your edits to persist is to get familiar Wikipedia’s concepts of notability, verifiably, and neutral point of view. If a change is being persistently reverted it’s usually because another editor thinks it’s violating one of those.
Today I went to an Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon. They’re happening this weekend in like 70+ cities around the world. So that was fun and also tiring.
But I was working on a page for an artist I really like but who barely had any coverage on wp and turns out she’d won all these awards and stuff that weren’t even listed anywhere there. And hey, now she has an article, so yay. (Keeping her anonymous because my wp account isn’t linked to this one, which is also why I chose someone I haven’t really talked about here.)
But like. If you like an artist or an author or a show or whatever, sure it’s great to post about them and recommend them and all that. But you know what’s also super important? Writing them into history.
Yes, excellent. My concern is always that I will inadvertently make a mistake in building the page and thus effectively delegitimize the person or construct I’m aiming to support. But that’s a silly lack of confidence.
As a devoted member of the meta side of fandom, I will happily begin to integrate this into my practices. I will write about amazing women scientists who lack Wiki pages despite having made critical discoveries. I will edit out casual sexism. I will create pages for the hundreds of women writers in translation who are all but unknown. I will create pages for the webseries I love, for production companies I follow, for bands I listen to, for artists I admire…
Just yes.
I’ve found that editing Wikipedia is excellent practice (at least for me) for learning how to collaborate with people who see the world differently than I do. Also, being an editor has made me a more savvy consumer of Wikipedia content, because I know the social conventions that underlie it and contribute to its strengths and weaknesses.
