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Wikipedia rules

By MIKE MILIARD  |  December 12, 2007

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.)

But on a site with millions of them, why are so few articles considered merely good? It’s a question, says GlassCobra, that answers itself. “There are literally millions of articles on Wikipedia. Because we struggle to get so many to even a readable quality, there’s often not enough manpower to improve an article further. Our criteria for good articles are relatively strict: it took me the better part of a day to write the one that I’ve done.” For featured articles, scrutinized by site editors for clarity, flow, structure, and sources, the strictures are even more rigorous.

At Wikipedia, the old adage holds true: write what you know. Dereck Blackburn (username: Lostwars), 27, who splits his time between Cambridge and Denver, started contributing to Wikipedia a couple years ago. “At the time I started, there were only 750,000 articles. And a lot of them were in total disarray.” So he set about to change that.

An aviation buff, Blackburn thinks the first article he wrote for the site was about the Greater Kankakee Airport in Illinois. Since then, he’s started or contributed to almost 7000 entries.

“Keep thinking about your world,” he says. “What is it in your world that you know more about than anyone else does?” And while the site has become so exhaustive that it’s getting ever harder to find topics that haven’t already been covered, Blackburn says one can always telescope in. “Wikipedia has grown to the point now that it’s okay to write about Walden Pond. And it’s okay to write about the road that goes by Walden. And it’s okay to write about a particular intersection of that road. The smallest, minute thing can be a Wikipedia entry.”

Which raises a question: does the site’s exhaustiveness risk diluting what’s really important? Sure, as was noted in a New Yorker article this past year, the site’s millionth article was about a Glaswegian train station. Such a mundane locale would certainly never have merited mention in the august Encyclopedia Britannica. But consider that, in the 24 hours after the stub was created, “the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people.” People do care about this stuff.

Yes, there’s always the risk the Joe Sixpack will log on to write an article about himself. But as soon as it’s noticed, it will be deleted. There are notability criteria for who’s deserving of an entry. (If you’re an author, for instance, “your book must have sold at least 5000 copies,” says Klein.)

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Comments
Wikipedia rules
GlassCobra ROCKS! An excellent person. What a cool article!
By Archangel on 12/12/2007 at 8:10:25
Wikipedia rules
Yes! Thank you! Finally, a well-informed article on Wikipedia! This is a rare gem - most articles on Wikipedia seem to be either snide critics using sensational language or uninvolved advocates spewing trivial apologies of Wikipedia alongside meaningless statistics, and I'm glad to see that *someone* can write about the topic well for the public.
By Nihiltres on 12/13/2007 at 1:42:25
Wikipedia rules
This was a PR "puff piece" as Jimmy Wales is fond of saying. I would say the article spent about 6% of its words on criticism and 94% on flattery. Read the article about "History of western Eurasia" (the whole thing), and tell me that this is a good resource for anyone beyond a 6th-grade education. Read the article about "electric knife" and tell me if it seems "balanced" to devote about 20% of the article to how electric knives are used to trim foam for transvestites to pad their asses. No kidding, I tried to modify that article for the better, but instead of being thanked, I was blocked. Read about what happened to Taner Akcam at the airport, then tell me that all of the "good" that Wikipedia has done actually outweighs the deprivation of a man's civil liberties. Yes, I agree, this article is a rare gem. It is indeed RARE these days to still find a journalist who so blindly follows a cult. Did I mention the former COO of the Wikimedia Foundation is a convicted felon? Did I mention that the former Treasurer was found to be in contempt of court surrounding a hearing about how he was hiding $800,000 from a rightful plaintiff? Did I mention that the Foundation is budgeting more than $500,000 for the new Executive Director's salary and staff for 2008, not to mention $180,000 for the lawyer who denies having known anything about the COO's felony background. Wikipedia has become a hyperbolic parody of what all its critics have claimed it was. We can't even make fun of it any more, because it's so laughable at face value.
By Gregory Kohs on 12/13/2007 at 11:14:33
Wikipedia rules
Gregory Kohs: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electric_knife&action=history doesn't back up your claims - none of these users was banned for removing something. Anybody who wants to learn about the real reason why Gregory Kohs was banned from Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales can read about it <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-09/MyWikiBiz">here</a>. In short, Kohs is a marketer whose company "MyWikiBiz" offered to create Wikipedia articles for companies, at prices ranging from $49 to $99. - Abuse of Wikipedia for commercial and personal promotion (COI, "conflict of interest" edits) is a big problem for Wikipedia, which could have received a bit more attention in the article. But the site is not entirely without defence, as the blocking of Kohs proved.
By HaeB on 12/15/2007 at 5:35:23
Wikipedia rules
The Bathrobe Cabal strikes again!
By LaraLove on 12/17/2007 at 11:47:12
Wikipedia rules
This is a great article. I just want to provide one correction. There is no arbitrary sales figure that a book must reach to achieve "notability" status on Wikipedia; no 5,000 benchmark. We use the word notable in a sense peculiar to Wikipedia and in keeping with what Wikipedia is--an encyclopedia and therefore a tertiary source. The general notability standard we use is not some arbitrary and subjective test, nor a judgment call such as whether we've heard of it as a vernacular interpratation of that word might lead some to believe. What we have devised is a standard that asks whether the World has taken note of the subject by publishing information about it in reliable sources. It is usually formulated as "being the subject of significant treatment in reliable sources". We have subject specific standards of notability which sometimes define other bases, give guidance on applicability of the general standard, and even provide resources for locating the necessary reliable sources. We have a book notability standard set forth at a page titled "Wikipedia:Notability (books)", of which which I was a primary contributor and the creator. See //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_%28books%29
By Fuhghettaboutit on 01/08/2008 at 9:16:43
Wikipedia rules
In response to HaeB -- I was blocked from Electric knife editing: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:ZD_Netman Also, the COI policy arose AFTER the foundation of MyWikiBiz, so it's kind of funny to blame my company for violating a Wikipedia "rule" that didn't exist at the time! Another Wikipediot!
By Gregory Kohs on 02/21/2008 at 6:42:52

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