Broad and narrow
You don’t need to be an administrator like Sawczynec to contribute to Wikipedia, nor do you have to be a diehard like SJ Klein, 29, a Cantabrigian who works for the One Laptop per Child program. (Klein’s username “Sj” should not be confused with “Essjay,” a high-profile Wikipedia admin who, to the chagrin of many, was found earlier this year to have concocted an elaborate online identity as a tenured religion professor.)
“On the English Wikipedia, I’ve probably contributed to a few thousand articles,” says Klein. “I have about 15,000 edits across different spaces. I’ve made almost that many contributions to the metaWiki, which is the organizational wiki, and maybe five or six thousand edits across all the other projects, like WikiBooks and Wiktionary.” Lately, Klein has been spending as many as 100 hours a week at his day job. But when he had more free time, he says he “used to spend 20 to 30 hours a week editing Wikipedia.”
Klein sees nothing extraordinary about his commitment. “There are hundreds of dedicated editors who do this every week,” he says. “Of course, there are also hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts who spend 20-plus hours a week playing World of Warcraft, building models, or hanging out in chat rooms. Wikipedia just provides a way to work on widely read material in collaboration with others. This is the natural human desire to share what we know.”
There are umpteen smaller ways you can contribute to the site if you’re not ready to pen massive, multi-sourced treatises on the Halifax Explosion or Charles Stewart Parnell or Spaghetti Westerns. Consider, for instance, the myriad tasks on the to-do lists of the Massachusetts WikiProject. (WikiProjects are pages devoted to the management and betterment of any number of Wikipedia topics.) One could help standardize the articles on all 50 cities and 301 towns in the Bay State. Or create a Boston Neighborhood Section.
There’s also the ever-necessary role of the humble WikiGnome, a user who scurries about quietly behind the scenes, fixing typos, correcting poor grammar, and repairing broken links. Or you could fight the righteous battle, claiming membership in Wikipedia’s Counter-Vandalism Unit. (“This user screws vandals and treats them with no mercy,” reads one profile’s badge of honor.) But if you’re up for something more, there’s always the yeoman’s work of penning new articles from scratch.
Just do it well. No doubt, you’ve sometimes stumbled upon what are called “stubs” in the Wiki wilderness — prosaic, bare-bones, not-especially helpful summaries. Stubs suck. If one is to undertake authorship, one should strive for quality. Source well. Write clearly. Consult with the Wikipedia Manual of Style, an exhaustive compendium of grammatical guidelines.
If your article is of a high enough quality, it might get designated a “Good” article — “no obvious problems, gaps, excessive information” — of which there are currently only 3200. (One example being the entry on the International Space Station, which is 7000 words long and cites 37 sources.)
It might even get the rarer “Feature” designation — “Definitive. Outstanding . . . a great source for encyclopedic information” — of which there are just 1752. (See the piece on Tourette’s Syndrome, a crisp and information-packed 5200 words, with eight book-length sources and 84 online references.)
