Comment on YSK that editing Wikipedia is easier than it looks (and where to start)
datavoid@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
My experience editing Wikipedia:
- Made a small change
- saved it
- immediately realized I had fucked something up
- frantically figured out how to delete my edit
- never edit Wikipedia again
I’d rate the experience a solid 5/10
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
A good feature if you ever decide to edit again (on desktop, probably mobile too) is that in the source editor, there’s a
Show Previewbutton. This renders out the page as if you’d committed the change. I said in another comment that almost 2% of my edits have been reverted in some way, and many of those are self-reverts. The only reason there aren’t more immediate self-reverts isn’t because I’m making fewer mistakes; it’s because I’ve mostly replaced the “oh fuck go back” button with being able to quickly identify how I broke something (unless what I’ve done is unsalvageable).The other day during a discussion, a few editors started joking about how many mistakes we make. Cullen328 (yes, the admin mentioned in this post) said: “One of my most common edit summaries is “Fixed typo”, which usually means that I fixed my own typo.” The Bushranger, another admin, replied: "I always spot mine just after hitting ‘Publish changes’… " And finally I said: “It feels like 50% of the edits I publish have the same energy as Peter watching Gwen Stacy fall to her death in slow-motion in TASM 2.” Between the three of us is about 300,000 edits, two little icons with a mop, and over 30 years of experience editing. Not only will you fuck up at first, but you’ll continue to fuck up over and over again forever. It’s how you deal with it that counts, and you dealt with it well.