I'm a long time lurker, with a recently created account. This would have made more sense as a poll. Can any admin change this Ask HN into a poll with the following data points - everyday (daily contributer), once a week, once a month, few times, never
Now I mostly write short (~2-10 paragraphs) articles on subjects that don't have articles. I usually start from a good source, like an encyclopedia of scientists, or a book on 18th-century Scandinavian art, and look at what it covers that Wikipedia doesn't yet. Then I pick one of those things, look on Google Books/Scholar for additional sources (it's ideal to have at least 2 sources for an article), and write a short summary of what I've found on the subject.
A different kind of editing, which I do mostly as a kind of "don't have to think too much" unwinding that I find enjoyable somehow, is various stuff from a long list of filing/curation/sorting tasks that always need to be done. For example, take something from the category listing the thousands of articles that could/should have lat/long coordinates added but don't yet [1], and see if I can find its coordinates (on OpenStreetMap, on official websites, etc.).
Another useful low-key thing to do is to pick some articles that you know something about or have an interest in, but which are less popular (not hugely popular articles like [[Barack Obama]] that already have many editors), and add them to your Watchlist. If you then check the Watchlist periodically for edits to those articles, you can be part of the distributed tiny communities curating the more obscure parts of Wikipedia. This can be sometimes just be noticing when someone makes a questionable edit (whether spam or otherwise). But it can also be positive attention, e.g. if another editor asks a question on the Talk page proposing a change to an article or questioning part of it or asking if something they added is ok, you'll see that on your Watchlist and might have something to weigh in with, which makes the parts of the encyclopedia you're paying attention to feel like less of a ghost town (it can be frustrating when you comment on a less-popular article and literally nobody answers for months... the opposite of the problem you get in really contentious parts of the encyclopedia).
A final really easy thing to do, and probably Wikipedia's most famous cultural export, is to add {{citation needed}} if you run across a sentence making a claim that seems like it really should be backed up, but doesn't seem to be cited anywhere in the vicinity. Even better to find a source and add <ref>Source</ref>, but tagging as citation-needed is still helpful. This is not only for claims that you think are dubious or wrong, since even likely correct claims should have a reference where readers can verify.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_missing_geoco...
I really didn't feel like fighting the reverts, and I suppose I probably won't edit any more pages. It really seems like a contributor-hostile environment.
I submitted an article about one of the most important writers of my country, and it was deleted because it is apparently irrelevant. Years later someone submitted a stub, and it remains like that until today.
I fixed a dead link on the Kalman Filters page, and the change was promptly reverted because apparently linking to youtube is not allowed. So now only I have the correct link. Oh, well.
I contributed to the discussion regarding the statistics for rape in the US (the "1 in 6" figure doesn't hold), but the discussion went nowhere, as expected.
The only thing I've actually managed to fix was a reference to "Les Miserables" taking place during the French Revolution (it doesn't) and the occasional typo, but nothing really important.
For math and computer science topics there doesn't seem to be any of the edit warring or toxicity you hear so much about in other areas. Given HN's audience I would recommend starting out by adopting the page of your favorite algorithm.
I think you have to be extremely intrinsically motivated or community minded (both good things, of course!) to contribute significantly there because the only reward seems to be happy about a job well done.
Thankfully, in computational biology articles PR flacks and wiki-lawyers are at a minimum. The extent of my experience with the former extends to over-enthusiastic academics promoting their particular software. I recommend it to students, not only as a way to get some use out of old term papers, but also as a way to sharpen one's writing skills. Because it's an important vehicle for outreach there's the potential for recognition as well.[2]
I'd have to say that one of the highlights of my editing career has been receiving an email from the descendant of an article's subject thanking me for telling their story.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Estevezj
[2]: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
User page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dllu
I've started a few articles on niche topics and created many pictures/animations.
As for the diagram of the teletherapy capsule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Teletherapy_Capsule_3.svg), I wrote out the SVG file by hand in a text editor. Extreme boredom sometimes makes one do that kind of thing.
I do the same thing for articles outside my areas of knowledge if the error is particularly galling and unambiguously incorrect.
Because I use wikipedia quite a lot, I'd say I leave an edit about twice a month.
Having said that, much, much more often I encounter a minor error that I don't have the time to investigate. In this kind of case I think "boy, I bet the source doesn't actually back that up", but it doesn't seem important enough to break my workflow to look into.
Then the trolls came, pov pushers and various ideologues who thought that the best way to push their view on wikipedia was to make "the other sides" editors be as miserable as possible. People that don't really care about history or facts or even being right as long as their side wins.
So every edit or addition became stuck in discussions on talk pages or the mailing list. Lots of slurs about editors being anti-semites, racism etc.. Not only from trolls but also from admins. Thing is, when you want to write stuff you're at a distinct disadvantage versus those who likes to delete it. It can take you days to research a single paragraph while people who don't like you just have to spend a few minutes coming up with a reason why it's off-topic for the article, biased or something else. Then the ones with the most political clout in the Wikipedia establishment wins.
You also can't start a fresh on Wikipedia. If you edited about Israel (or Palestine for that matter) and upset some people, they will follow you around and try to find reasons why your edits suck even in totally different topic areas.
It's incredibly frustrating experience and huge amount of work. So you'll ask yourself what's the point? Unless you're a fanatic the answer is "absolutely no fucking point" so you let the extremists have their way and spend your time with more fullfilling hobbies!
I've been on committees in academia to co-write overviews of subjects in which there is some contentious debate, even in the computer-science sense of political rather than real-world politics, and they have not all been straightforward or enjoyable experiences. If 10 people have very different views of a subject, where several of them hold the views strongly, and we are collaboratively supposed to write a neutral overview of a topic, it takes a lot of work and negotiation to reach any kind of agreement.
I suspect if you were to select 10 experts in the I/P conflict from across the ideological spectrum, and put them in a room for a week, asking them to replace a few of these Wikipedia articles with better ones, you would not get anything better, if anything at all. You might get some fistfights!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gwern / http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume / http://www.gwern.net/tags/Wikipedia
I had a watchlist of pages I cared about and everything. I gave up as my personal life became more interesting.
I also had a knack of finding movies in the Public Domain and getting good image captures for their photos. Photos of Charlie Barnett and Count Basie are two examples that still exist. The photo of Paulette Goddard (which I'm the most proud of) did not survive on the English language wikipedia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/PauletteG...)
Now, if I edit something, it's a typo, or something stupid (akin to "George Washington had X-ray vision.")
Recently I stumbled onto an article with a [citation needed] after watching a video that (I suppose) would have been the perfect citation for it (I mean a mustached retired high school teacher, speaking about the old times, that's the best source you can get!).
Hell broke loose, the doc for video citation is intractable, so I wanted to put the link on the talk page for someone with knowledge to do it, but youtube is banned in text. So my wikipedia career in on hold until my motivation crosses a certain threshold. It's not beginner friendly, and i don't really care about their editing procedure (it's mostly based on the scientific one which is bogus too).
If someone cares, it's on White Lead talk page.
I avoid controversial topic stuff because I just don't have the time or energy to argue the toss about whether something should be in the wiki or about the content of a wiki article.
Now I occasionally edit very minor articles if I look at them, but never anything that gets more than an edit a month, as such changes will be swallowed up and spit out fairly quickly, in my experience.
My most significant wiki-creation is my Peltier element diagram (which explains how to read Peltier element IDs.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peltier_IDs_explained.svg
In terms of edits and content, I'm with the others, I'm reluctant to get involved due to all of the moderation and politics involved. I find many of them can be very arrogant especially when you point out that they are wrong.
People want their stupid links on the site and they're plastered everywhere. In the future, the first thing you'll read about Leonardo da Vinci is that he came in 8th place in your Time Magazine Gold Special Genius Award with a link to the Time Magazine website. Of course in the fine print you'll find out that the award was decided by readers' votes.
You'll see this trend when you look at British people on wikipedia like Tim Berners Lee who was ranked number 1 in greatest living geniuses in 2007 by of course a british paper. A few years ago, this was mentioned in the first paragraph of the wikipedia article.
The future of wikipedia is the largest pile of spam on the internet.
