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Comment by slazaro | Hacker News Reader

> including, unfortunately, on Wikipedia last I checked

I'm gonna be that guy: did you try editing it to make it more accurate?

To be fair, last time I tried to make an edit on Wikipedia, it resulted in a huge argument that spanned literally several days, at the end of which I gave up. Note that this was a tiny edit, changing the word order in a sentence or something like that on a rather niche topic.

I haven't bothered trying to edit anything since then.

While I appreciate your frustration, people are constantly trying to help (to be optimistic about their intent) by "changing the word order". The result is often a changed and inaccurate meaning.

For all our sake, I hope you choose to make appropriate edits where you see they are needed. Don't be deterred by that one experience.

It's extremely hard to get an edit in Wikipedia to stick if you only have primary sources; with a recent, reliable secondary source you often can get it to stick though. If you have a citation in an undergraduate (or even better high school) level neurology textbook then go ahead and make the effort, otherwise don't bother.

It's not worth the effort to edit wikipedia.

sure it is, and it's thanks to people not like you that we have such a beautiful repository of information.

I routinely make changes to wikipedia, once you have a decent reputation and have demonstrated competency in an area it's a very fluid process. Obviously if I tried changing one of the contention pages (political, religious etc) that would be a different matter, but for the areas that I am knowledgeable, CS and art history, changes are accepted and stick.

>once you have a decent reputation and have demonstrated competency in an area it's a very fluid process.

Right, so once you have dedicated many hours of your life, editing becomes easier. I imagine that's why most consider it "not worth the effort." If I can't get a good edit with supporting evidence to stick without first spending a large amount of time in the system, I'll probably pass.

That's not the encyclopedia that anyone can edit though.

And while you might have had a good experience plenty of people get embroiled in kafkesque bureaucratic policy stuff after attempting to make small uncontroversial edits to uncontroversial articles.

They'll change some spelling and punctuation without being logged in. Someone using rollback or twinkle will rapidly revert, and leave a vandalism warning on the IP page. The IP editor will remove that warning, revert the edit, and say something like "what? This isn't vandalism, read what I changed". At that point a bunch of people descend and there is little hope of getting the edits to stick. Someone will suggest creating an account to look more legit (even though most useful edits are made by anon accounts). The IP will create an account and log in to continue the discussion. Even though their name passes the strict software-enforced requirements they might find someone taking them to one of the noticeboards for usernames (the fact that WP has more than one admin area for usernames, on top of software enforced policy, is an elegant example of how out of control bureaucracy is.). Assuming they get through this someone back at the talk page will accuse them of sock-puppeting and will template their page.

Someone will slap up a welcome template. So the new users sends them a message asking for help. The other user will maybe say "I can't actually help you; i don't really know that much about policy; I'm just doing this on my way to get admin rights". Or they will agree to help, at which point the new user is accused of forum shopping.

I'd love to see some decent research on the experience of new editors at WP. I know several people who attempted to make good quality edits to uncontroversial articles who had a horrible experience. WP is, for some people, thoroughly toxic.

Eh. Someone might reject my code change, so it's not worth the effort to contribute to open source. A peer review might reject my publication, so it's not worth the effort to write up a paper on the experiment.

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