Week 10

My first Wikipedia edits

This week, I made my first ever edits to Wikipedia! As I mentioned in the previous week’s blog post (see here), I went over Wikipedia’s rules and methods for editing pages (here and here), and then made edits to the Illenium page. I also edited the Illenium discography page, as it was related. You can read more about my experience below.

Friday, March 29

We discussed Unix/Linux and gave brief updates on our projects.

Tuesday, April 2

We continued the discussion on Unix/Linux.

Contributions

I made multiple edits to the following Wikipedia pages:

I added missing information and corrected information, added/updated links to ensure correctness and reliability, removed unnecessary information and links, and made sure that both pages were consistent with one another. The “hardest” part of editing the pages (i.e. what took the longest time) was finding reliable links and resolving information conflicts (different sources had different information on a certain detail), which I did by looking through dozens of links and finding the information that was common among them.

The editing process itself was pretty straightforward, as Wikipedia does a good job at making editing beginner-friendly. I mostly used the visual mode as it was simpler to use than the source mode, but I messed around with the source mode for searching through the link details and removing unnecessary parts from them. I made sure to follow Wikipedia’s guidelines on editing pages by keeping a neutral tone of voice and picking reliable sources for my links. I also saw that other contributors made minor edits to my changes, like removing whitespaces and some redundant links, and I thanked them for that.

I found editing the pages to be a rewarding experience (although tedious at times) because I admire Illenium and enjoy his music, so fixing his Wikipedia page felt like I was giving back to him in some way. If someone is curious about Illenium, they would most likely look him up online, and go to his Wikipedia page. Since my edits help to give more information about him, that person would (hopefully) get a better understanding of who Illenium is, and maybe become a fan. Knowing this is what gave me the motivation to keep editing the pages, even when it felt like boring desk work at times.

See my Wikipedia contribution history here.

Written before or on April 5, 2019