I’ll be honest, I was super nervous about starting this project. Mostly because the idea of changing something on an online resource that potentially millions of people would see is kind of terrifying, but also because my impostor syndrome was coming in loud and clear at the thought of actually being smart enough to provide knowledge to others.
I quickly decided that I needed to focus my attention on something I feel I know a lot about, and that was hockey. Hockey is comfortable and I think I’m able to explain it pretty well and teach complex details of it fairly easily. I decided to see if there was any new information I could add, and decided to see if anyone had added some of the new NHL rules for the upcoming 2019-2020 season. To my delight, no one had yet added these details to the Wikipedia page about ice hockey penalties, and I decided this is where I was going to focus my attention.
My Editing Process
I started by going into the talk section of the page and noticed there’s a whole community and plan for updating hockey pages on Wikipedia.
This was a really exciting revelation because that meant that 1. I might actually get a response to my comments in talk and 2. I would hopefully get feedback about my changes quickly.
I started by posting my comment about what I wanted to change in the talk sections for the post itself and in the “Project Ice Hockey” talk as well.
I heard back pretty quickly and was given the go ahead to edit the page. Below are the edits I made to the page (my edits are highlighted in yellow), and my notes about what I changed.
My edits went in and then I waited to see if anyone changed or didn’t approve them. After a few days I went back in and my edits were still there and no one had changed or removed them! So my edits were a success and it was actually a really cool feeling!
My Overall Experience
When I started this I was honestly pretty skeptical about the whole thing and didn’t really understand what I could do and assumed I wouldn’t be able to really contribute. I am very grateful for this project now as I feel like not only am I able to contribute, but I also feel like it’s really important to keep these pages updated and accurate.
Overall, I had a really interesting and fun experience. I was super nervous about editing at first, but I’m really glad I did it. I also think I will continue to edit pages as I ended up seeing a lot of other pages that need to be updated. I really enjoyed that all the hockey pages had a central location and a project dedicated to updating them. There were also “assignments” posted pretty frequently, and I think I will spend some time working on those too.
