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.)
