I’ve been excited to present this assignment. It took a long time for me to land on a topic that I wanted to write about. I spent hours looking through the categories page, stubs page, and the WikiProject directory. I reassigned myself different pages a handful of times.
I’ve been focusing my blog posts about image in the music industry, so it was fitting to write about music festival I stumbled upon called: Electric Love.
The first thing I noticed was that the article was fairly sparse in information. The entire page consisted of a lead section, an information box, and a picture of the festival inside of the information box.
Furthermore, there was no rating on the importance scale or quality scale – I realized this presented an opportunity to make significant additions and perhaps affect it’s importance and quality!
The lead section is a good summary and describes the event well, which is sufficient according to our training material, so I didn’t feel a need to change anything there. It did include a few named headliners, so I decided to create a section expanding on these artists.
Before I get into my edits, I wanted to shed some light on the talk page, which I found to be a bit off-putting. Because the name “Electric Love” isn’t just a music festival, it also shares the name with:
- a song by an artist named Børns
- an album by a British electronica group called Dirty Vegas
- a VHS released in 1987 by a band called The Cult
So as you can imagine, this can become a pretty tricky situation. The only information on the talk page was by the RMCD bot, which I presume to stand for “Requested Moves Current Discussions” based on it’s user page.
Here, stated by the bot back in 2016 was a notification of discussion on the Electric Love (Børns song) – a proposal to make the song page the official “Electric Love” on Wikipedia and change the festival page to something along the lines of “Electric Love Festival”.
I was conflicted… do add to the talk page of the festival? Or add to the page of the song? Best solution here is to follow the link to the song’s talk page, which to my relief already sorted out this page name situation back in 2016.
Ultimately it was decided to oppose the changing of names since none of the Electric Love’s are the primary topic over one another. This is why I felt correct in continuing to make edits to the festival talk page rather than the song page.
One thing I found interesting about the proposal in the talk page was someone who had made a claim and retracted it, then corrected themselves:
This seemed to be a turning point int he discussion and the fact that this Wikipedia editor was bold enough to admit they were wrong stood out to me as an editor who truly had the validity of the page in mind rather than just wanting to be right. As we learned in this Wired article, editors can be quite malicious when they choose. However, this Talk page was sorted out in a very polite and informational manner throughout the entire discussion.
Before adding my edits, I contributed to the talk page a proposal of the edits I wanted to add.
I included my references below the proposal. Each year of headliners was found on a different page, so I wanted to be very specific when citing so I didn’t run into any problems. The page I found the information is called “Festicket”, which is not a scholarly article or a book, but it is a proclaimed official partner of Electric Love, so I felt it was a credible source.
I took to my sandbox to draft the changes I wanted to make. I fiddled with a few different layouts and landed on a list-view:
Note that the lower section of the 2018 and 2019 listings are cut off – my screen was too small to take a screenshot of the entire list.
I was very meticulous to cite each artist in the page I found the information on. I double checked spelling, as some of the names are foreign to me.
I waited for a while to hear anything back on the talk page, but there was no push back to my proposal, so it was time to move it to the official Electric Love Wikipedia page. I transferred the information, but in addition, I also included links to the Wikipedia pages of all the artists I could find. This is the edit summary I created:
And the finished product (well… a snippet at least):
I am extremely satisfied with the way it turned out. None of my changes were taken down or reverted back. I didn’t have high expectations for myself in this project – after reading about the woman who uses Wikipedia editing as a way to say “F*** You” to trolls, I felt my changes would be insignificant in comparison. However, I felt extremely accomplished in the end!
I would like to have been able to add a photo, but I never found anything fitting. That is the only thing I would have done differently if I chose a different article to edit.
Will I edit more Wikipedia articles in the future? Absolutely! It doesn’t seem like such a daunting task after finally doing it one time. And if I ever have the opportunity to spread researched and true information to others on the internet, I now understand how rewarding it can be.
