A Newfound Respect for Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a functioning encyclopedia that allows people to gather information from different sources and share it with one another. It’s a community comprised of writers, editors and administrators that all have equal parts; it may not be equal power but they are all necessary components for the Wikipedia community to exist. Jonathan Zittrain explains in Lessons of Wikipedia that “order may remain when people see themselves as part of a social system, a group of people- more than utter strangers but less than utter friends- with some overlap in outlook and goals (129).  Wikipedia is a social system; the common goal is to create a workspace or even a sharing space for people to rely information to each other.

Before I looked at the Wikipedia “help” page on editing and the ”editing” tab on the tutorial page, I had always imagined that Wikipedia was just a free for all and that anyone could edit something just because they wanted to. I realized now that there was a process that Wikipedia uses to try to make the editing process go a little more smoothly. After editing a page there is a place for an “Edit Summary” so the person is able to explain why they did it. The edit summary gives the person that first wrote the article or the entry that is being editing a reason why so they aren’t left in the dark wondering why it wasn’t good enough to begin with. That just explains again how much of a community based encyclopedia Wikipedia is. 

I made a very simple fix to the Bulgarians in Albania article. I just changed some sentence structure to make that part of the article a little more clear to the audience. The following sentences show how simple my changes were. I didn’t even add any words.

Original sentence: Daniel Mоscopolites at the end of the eighteenth century, a Vlach-speaking native priest of Moscopole, compiled a quadrilingual lexicon of Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian and Albanian, with the purpose of helping them to learn Greek.

Edited sentence: At the end of the eighteenth century,Daniel Mоscopolites , a Vlach-speaking native priest of Moscopole, compiled a quadrilingual lexicon of Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian and Albanian, with the purpose of helping them to learn Greek.

When I first realized that people changed things on Wikipedia I thought it only involved changing the information that was available to the reader. I never thought that changing sentence structure would be a reasonable change. Because I previously didn’t understand that Wikipedia had administrators and editors looking out for botched information that people added, I had always assumed it was an unreasonable source to use for papers and projects. Carra Leah Hood explains in Editing out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy, that Wikipedia’s “encyclopedia’s usefulness follows directly from its popularity and from the seriousness with which those who administer the site oversee and vet individual entries and provide guidance.” Because Wikipedia is so popular and it is always being revised and new information is always being added/editing, it is a good source to look at because it isn’t static. Administrators keeping tabs on people and editors are making the proper corrections.

As little as it was, and as silly as it seems, I gained a sense of respect for the Wikipedia community after making my first edit and looking into how to make a edit on Wikipedia. I feel as if it is a well managed encyclopedia that is always growing; there may be times when some faulty information is being added to pages but that is generally address quite quickly by editors and administrators since they can see when the pages have been edited and then they can go check them.