I am no stranger to Wikipedia.org and have visited the site many times. As most people, I used the site as a consumer, reading article after article, finding little gold mines of information that I could verify and consider to be accurate and true. Wikipedia has always been of great service from the consumer stand point, but now it was time for me to dip my toes into the editing aspect of the site, and let me tell you it felt overwhelming at first.
I never realized how many rules and standards there were when editing a Wikipedia page, and always thought that anyone could just make an account and start editing. It took me by surprise when I found out there are training modules to help teach how to properly use Wikipedia and edit an article successfully, but understood why. I’m glad they provided these modules because I referenced them multiple times when editing the Wikipedia page I chose.
After completing the training modules, I decided to scope Wikipedia for articles I could possibly edit and add useful information to. I’m not an expert on a lot of things, but I do know a lot about skateboarding so I decided to check out some of the Skateboarding topics that Wikipedia offered. The training modules showed me how I can search a Wikiproject, such as skateboarding, and it will provide an assessment table that sorts articles by importance and amount of editing needed.
After searching that table, I decided to edit the Enjoi Skateboarding Wikipedia page since they’re from San Jose California, close to my hometown of Gilroy. I know a lot about the company already, and the page seemed like it was lacking recent information about the team; possible information that I could provide! I noticed that the page had a section titled, “2014-Present,” talking about the most recent most recent projects Enjoi has participated in, except the last time the section was updated was in 2014.
I decided to focus on that section, and wanted to add some information about a recent video series that Enjoi has been filming for the last 3-4 years titled, “Panda Patrol.” I figured this has been the most recent and consistent skateboarding content that Enjoi has released in the past 3 years, so it should probably be added to the section discussing what the team is currently doing.
As the training modules suggests, I went to Enjoi’s Wikipedia talk page to see if there had been any recent conversation about adding content to the page, and the last update was to the external links by a bot in 2017. I saw this as a good opportunity to add to the page, and left a comment about my suggestion of adding, “Panda Patrol,” to the 2014-Present section.
I waited about a week in order to see if anyone was going to comment back, letting me know if they agreed or disagreed with my suggestion, but no response. At that point, I went ahead and made the edit that I thought was necessary.
I made sure to include in-text links to other Wikipedia pages when possible, and that all of my external references get added in as a citation rather than being linked directly on the page. So far, I have not received any feedback from experienced Wikipedians, and my edit remains on the Enjoi Wikipedia page, so I’m assuming that I was successful in editing the page correctly. Since the page didn’t have an active talk page, I’ll make sure to come back when some time has passed to see if my edit is still there, and if not found out why it has been removed.
I had to reference the training modules every step along the way, like I mentioned earlier, just to make sure that I was doing everything correctly, because there is actually a lot of steps to the process. I found it overwhelming at first, and I really didn’t want to mess pages up for other people by formatting incorrectly or some sort of beginner mistake. Once I committed to editing an article, the actual formatting and writing was easier than expected, but finding verified sources was a bit harder and took a little bit of time. Of course, just like with everything in life, practice makes perfect. I now feel more confident in adding little edits to pages I’m well-versed in and slowly building the skill to one day edit a whole section, or create an entire page.
It’s not as easy as I once thought, where anyone can log in and edit an article willy nilly. It’s a strong and committed community working together to provide a place where people can get trusted information or at least be linked to a trusted source. I have a new found respect for those who are major Wikipedia editors, not only because they’ve mastered the formula of editing on Wikipedia, but that they also devote their time and effort to make sure that correct information is out there for people to read.
