I participated in a Wikipedia edit-a-thon a couple months ago. The interface isn't intuitive and it's hard to learn all the rules, so I thought that working in a group would help me. After editing a few articles, I tried my hand at making a new one. I found an author with several literature awards who didn't have a page, so I used other author pages as a model. I thought I did a fairly decent job collecting secondary sources (no original research is allowed) and included the awards as an indication of notability. Next time I checked, though, it had been flagged for deletion because it wasn't "significant". I'm not sure how people really decide that since I've definitely seen less "significant" pages, but I haven't put the time in to advocate for it.
I think the experience was valuable as I often use Wikipedia as a portal to knowledge, and I plan to dedicate more time to learning the rules, etiquette, and culture eventually. As a librarian, I think that assigning Wikipedia edits would be a valuable information literacy exercise, particularly as it becomes more socially accepted as a source of knowledge. I know that professors will use it in their classes, as the research to properly edit a page will often be as rigorous as writing an essay.
Has anyone else tried editing?
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