[WikiEN-l] How Wikipedia works

Tue May 25 13:26:42 UTC 2004

(To Stephen H. Wildstrom, BusinessWeek "Technology and You" columnist)

Your description of how Wikipedia is edited gives a seriously incorrect 
impression. Users do not "suggest" corrections, they simply _make_ 
them. There is no "editorial group," or rather the editorial group is 
everybody, and new articles and corrections do not undergo any _prior_ 
approval process.

You say, "If you find an error, you are welcome to suggest a correction." 
Wrong; if you find an error, we encourage you to "be bold" and simply 
correct it yourself. You do not even need to create an account to do this. 
The link on every page that says "edit this page" means exactly what it says. 
It's _possible_ to suggest a correction, which is what the "discuss this 
page" link is for, and _advisable_ if you're not sure or the topic is highly 
controversial, but it is not necessary. If you see something wrong in 
Wikipedia, just fix it.

You say that "An editorial group decides which corrections and contributions 
merit posting." This is doubly wrong. First, this suggests that things need 
to be approved _prior_ to posting. They don't. Anyone can create a new page 
or correct any existing page at any time. Anything that happens, happens 
after the fact.

Second, there's no "editorial group." Or, the editorial group is everyone, 
including anons (those who haven't created usernames, a two-minute 
process). There _is_ a special category of users called sysops that have the 
ability to delete a page, making it actually disappear from the encyclopedia. 
But this is a fairly subtle distinction, since _any_ user can replace a page 
with totally new content, or blank it (remove all its content), or convert it 
into a "redirect."

There are, indeed, checks and balances, but they don't work the way you seem 
to think they do. For example, I have a special interest in Jack London, so I 
have the Jack London page on my "watchlist." I don't own the page, I'm not 
consider the author, I have no special responsibility--but I watch it. Any 
time someone edits that page, it appears on my watchlist. If you were to add 
a sentence to the page saying "Jack London was also the author of 'Lassie 
Come-Home,'" I would probably spot it and remove it within a day or two.  You 
could, of course, put it back. Then I would probably remove it again and 
message you saying "No, it's a great book but it was written by Eric Knight, 
not Jack London. We could use an article on Eric Knight, by the way." And 
that would probably be the end of it.

Many people watch the lists of recent changes and new pages. People create 
silly pages all the time. If someone were to create a page on "Stevie 
Wildstrom" saying "Stevie rocks! He is just totally cooooooool," it would be 
spotted by a sysop and deleted, probably within hours. 

On the other hand, suppose you created a page saying "Steven H. Wildstrom is 
unquestionably the world's foremost authority on technology, whose 
Technology and You column, has, since 1994, delighted billions of readers 
every week. Widely considered a likely Nobel Prize nominee, Wildstrom 
is the most prominent alumnus ever to graduate from the University of 
Michigan. He lives in Victorian garden suburb of Kensington, Maryland, known 
as the 'antique shop capital of the world.' He is a member of the local 
arrangements committee for the International Math Olympiad." 

A page like this, probably within hours, would be listed in Votes for 
Deletion as a "vanity page," and _anyone interested_ would take part in a 
discussion about whether the article had a suitably neutral point of view, 
and whether you were really notable enough to warrant inclusion in an 
encyclopedia. After five days of discussion, a sysop--any sysop--would 
eyeball and judge whether or not there was a consensus to delete the page. 

It is quite interesting how it works (and it does work). All is not sweetness 
and light, and there are mechanisms for banning problem users, protecting 
pages to stop edit wars and so forth, but probably 99.9% of all Wikipedia 
articles are created and written by users simply... writing them.

It's been observed that errors on a page that nobody reads aren't serious, 
because nobody reads the page; while errors on a page that many people read 
aren't serious, because if many people read the page someone will spot the 
error and fix it quickly.

I hope you and your readers will contribute to Wikipedia. 