Friday Free-for-All | December 27, 2024

[u/AutoModerator]

Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

[u/viera_enjoyer]

Do any of you banner-users edit or have thought about editing wikipedia articles? Has it been a fulfilling experience or a nightmare?

[u/Dongzhou3kingdoms → u/viera_enjoyer]

I know u/_dk does wiki editing because dk is the one that got me into wiki-editing. Warning, AH people are bad influences.

Disclaimer: My experience is, in western terms, a very small subject with a few key users like dk. I'm not editing say US Presidents or things involving current affairs, Hollywood superstars. My experience won't reflect everyone's

In terms of ease of use, I'm not someone with any coding experience or anything like Wikipedia's before this, so it took a bit of adjusting (start small like a spelling error or a sentence or two to add). However, they do try to make it as easy as possible. In some ways the biggest challenge is it seems more overwhelming than it is when you start so best to put one step forward in front of the other. Once you get going, you should soon get the hang of it.

I have seen wiki mods move quickly, trolls and the like kaput. Someone who, in discussions and edits, shows them unable to handle wiki can be got rid of quite quickly. The first time you create a wiki page (outside your own sandbox), it will run through a moderation process (and I get the impression some will have oversight on future ones as well till they come up to a standard as a user).

The 3k community in wiki itself is very small (though the sniffy attitude towards it from wider 3k community has stopped), the likes of FollyMox, the WayWeAllGo, Remsense, dk, Yezhanquan and others have been collaborative, encouraging, and helpful. I have had one instance (not involving any names mentioned above) of someone being over-protective of an article they helped build, but otherwise it has gone smoothly, and I have enjoyed being part of the 3k project. Larger ones (or ones where a toxic member gets into the coop) I can't speak of how well that goes.

Worth it?

So in the idealistic sense, yes. I'm adding a bit to public knowledge each time, updating well-meaning but incorrect ones, fleshing out ones that could do with more context. People use Wikipedia, so getting pages up to a good standard is giving people a better platform towards learning (and can provide sources for them to explore via citations and further reading). Also, if you remove the bad stuff, people won't cite it on places like Reddit. Of course, that is easier to say when it isn't a busy part of wiki, where I'm not encountering problems.

Now, enough about how I am the world's greatest hero.

In a “do I gain from it, for I am a greedy git” sense: Oh yes. I have no institutional education access and the like. One very good way (as well as academia.edu, JSTOR's free program and open access programs) to get good free history access is wikilibary. To gain access: be on wiki for 6 months, 500 edits overall (you don't have to get it in the six months), and then after all all you need is 10 edits in the last 30 days.

74 default resources (newspaper and historical archives, journals including medical and nature, major publishers) plus 28 you can apply for (like Perlego). So for me, it is JSTOR payable equivalent access, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, De Gruyter, Project Muse and Brill as my mainstays from it. Books, articles and so on to download and keep forever. This is a money saver (JSTOR alone is near 200 dollars/150 pounds a year saved) and, to be frank, offers a wider selection of papers than I could dream of being able to afford.

So for me, that is a very good price for my labours.