Wikipedia Is Vital: Channeling Energy Into Micro-Edits Is a Win-Win-Win

Image credit

Classic wartime poster adapted by Tom Morris, public domain

Wikipedia is, “without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation,” wrote Josh Dzieza recently. It’s a target because of that, squarely in the sights of the “global rise of political movements that wish to control independent media.” Dzieza’s analysis of what makes it resilient and what threatens it is important reading (archived version here).

One of the threats he lays out clearly is not having enough active editors in the face of the “AI” and government stresses facing the encyclopedia. The energy coming from people who want to keep Wikipedia reliable has to wildly outweigh that of the people who want to distort it for ideological reasons.

Developing a Wikipedia editing habit isn’t just a win for Wikipedia and its readers, though. I think it’s a great way to handle the stress of the time we’re in. It’s far more gratifying – and educational – than doom scrolling. I’ve recently upped the amount of editing I do with incidental micro-editing when I’m glancing at a Wikipedia page – much like straightening up a little mess when you’re walking through a communal area in real life. I’ve written this post in the hopes that if I show how easy that is, more people will give it a try.

We still need to reduce “technical and knowledge-based barriers to entry” to Wikipedia participation (Shaw 2018). Wikipedia’s elaborate processes and rules have enabled millions of people to help build a widely accepted information leviathan – over 65 million articles across over 300 languages, with over 7 million in the biggest (English). But that complexity deters participation. What I’m calling micro-edits in this post, though, don’t require knowledge of a lot of Wikipedia rules.

Micro-edits aren’t just good in themselves: They could increase the chances you might go down a rabbit hole and do more. That happened to me with Edna Paisano’s Wikipedia page. I wrote about her here recently. I’d seen a claim about her on the internet that, as an epidemiologist, I strongly doubted. So I checked into Wikipedia to see it was there too. It was, so I fixed it – and was quickly fascinated by her life and work. In the process of sprucing up her page, I learned a lot about indigenous people in the US and the impact of history and politics on the Census.

If you start micro-editing and want to do more, there’s a lot of help out there. If you’re motivated to teach yourself, the starting point for Wikipedia’s learning resources is here. There are lots of videos online too, like this one from Molly White, and this tutorial for scientists.

For many people, the best way to drive enthusiasm, skills, and confidence is with personal contact, in person or virtually. There are organizations around the world that hold free events, and those organizations are listed here. Sign up for newsletters and/or follow on social media. You can follow the global organization, too: on Mastodon; on Bluesky; and here for the newsletter and additional social media channels. Other organizations you might be interested in will host a themed edit-a-thon – a group event where experienced Wikipedians can support you personally as needed. (Lots of those have been streamed and saved online.)

You don’t need to spend a lot of time learning to micro-edit, though. You could be a Wikipedian in just a few minutes. So let’s walk through it.

Before you start…

I think there are only two things you need to know/do before doing your first Wikipedia micro-edit. The first is to avoid doing even a micro-edit on a page where you have a conflict of interest according to Wikipedia – and it might not be what you ordinarily think of as a conflict. The policy is summed up this way: “contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships.” And it broadly includes anything that readers might see as self-promotion – so don’t add citations to your own publications, or edit any discussion of your work. Wikipedia needs editors who are firmly committed to its principles of neutrality and reliability. The content of Wikipedia pages needs our time, but not our opinions or self-interest.

The second is to set up a Wikipedia account, and always make sure you’re logged in before you edit. It’s possible to edit Wikipedia without having an account, but it’s much better to have one. It keeps track of your contributions and builds your “credit” with other Wikipedians – and building enough of a track record will mean you can edit controversial pages that are limited to people who have done a lot of editing. There are early benefits, too, like not having to keep proving you’re a human not a bot.

Critically, too, editing from an account doesn’t reveal your IP address: The combination of what’s revealed from anonymous editors’ internet location and what they edit, can make an editor identifiable. If you’re very concerned about not being identified, check out this article before you make an account. Even if you’re not particularly concerned, starting with a pseudonym that doesn’t identify you and you don’t use anywhere else is less pressure: Every edit you ever make on Wikipedia is public, and you can’t delete it. You can always choose to identify yourself later.

I walk you through doing an edit in a few minutes in the first point below. That’s all you really need to do a bit of tidying up while you’re using Wikipedia. I’ve listed two other micro-editing tasks as well – enough to get you the skills you need to copy edit pages. Finally, I introduce you to the data you can view and download about edits and pageviews. (You can navigate back to this contents list after each section.)

Contents

• Simple micro-edits: Fixing typos, grammar, other little errors, or missing info – just a few minutes to your first edit, and well under a minute once you’re experienced.

• Linking text to another Wikipedia page.

• Adding a journal or book citation.

• Keeping track: Some Wikipedia analytics.

Simple micro-edits: Fixing typos etc

Step 1. Make sure you’re logged into your Wikipedia account:

This is especially important if you don’t edit often. Checking or logging in is at the top right corner of the page. (See “Before you start…” above for why having an account and being logged in matters.)

Step 2. Find a simple edit to do, like fixing a typo:

Make sure the page you aim to edit isn’t one you shouldn’t touch – see my brief explanation of Wikipedia’s perspective on conflict of interest above in “Before you start…”

If you don’t already have something to micro-edit, here are some pages with very low-pressure tasks:

• For starting with a typo, here are some pages with lists where full stops are inconsistently added at the end of items – at least, they were at the time of writing. Ideally, just add a full stop or two as a learning exercise, so it’s still useful for other readers:
  – List of miscellaneous fictional animals;
  – List of fictional games;
  – List of reptilian humanoids.

• If you would like to practice with adding content, there’s a Wikipedia page listing fictional scientists and engineers, like Indiana Jones: click here. Each of them is supposed to have a brief description of what kind of scientist they are, but quite a few don’t. Pick one of those and Google them.

Step 3. Click into editor mode for the page:

I’m assuming you have just registered an account. If so, you can skip over the next paragraph!

[Note for people with old user accounts: My explanations are for visual editor mode. If you set up an account before the visual editor was introduced, it’s probably not the default mode you will see. If your setup doesn’t match my explanation, then you need to go to your account preferences, via the drop down arrow at the top right. Then click on “editing,” and check the box for “Enable the visual editor.” Then, when you get to the edit mode step below, there will be a pencil symbol with a drop down arrow on the right at the top of your screen. That allows you to choose between visual and wikitext (source code) editing.]

There’s a toolbar across the top of the article, beginning with “Article” and “Talk” on the left. On the right, there’s “Read,” “Edit,” “View history”…. Click on “Edit.” Alternatively, click on “[edit]” next to the heading of the section you want to edit.

Once you click edit, edit mode will load up.

Step 4. Edit:

This works like a word processor. Scroll to what you want to edit, and type. You can preview what you’ve done in the next step.

Step 5. Check and publish your edit:

When you’ve done an edit, you can check a preview of your edit by pressing the blue “Publish changes” sign – don’t worry, it’s just the first step and won’t go live.

A dialog box will pop up, with several components. First up, there is a space to describe what you’ve done. Add a few words, like “Fixed typo,” or “Added profession.” (This will be public in the history of the page – if you want to see what that will look like, click here to see an example – whatever you type into that description space will appear in italics for your edit.)

Next, if your edit is just fixing a typo, check the “This is a minor edit” box.

I’m assuming you don’t want to “Watch the page,” but if you do, check that box. (Watching a page means means you’ll get an email the next time someone edits it.)

When you’re done, press “Review your changes.” This will show you a preview of what your edit will look like if it’s published. If you want to go back and change something when you see the preview, close the dialog box by clicking the little X on the top left corner. Then you can fix your edit, and start the check/publish step again.

Once you’re happy with your edit and your description of what you did, press the blue “Publish changes” sign and your edit will go live.

Congratulations! You’re a Wikipedian.

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Linking text to another Wikipedia page

Links between pages are important for Wikipedia, making it possible to keep text reasonably concise, while also providing paths for people to go down to increase their knowledge about a topic. Every page on Wikipedia should be linked to, and from, at least one other page, so it’s part of the interconnected knowledge tree. Links connecting Wikipedia pages are called wikilinks.

There are a couple of main reasons for adding a wikilink. One is if you think a person interested in the page you’re looking at is likely to be interested to be interested in another one, too. The other reason is to lead people to a detailed explanation of something that’s important to the topic.

You shouldn’t have to go to a link to understand a Wikipedia page – keep in mind that people can be reading Wikipedia offline or from a printout. However, that said, it’s really common to see a sentence or page that’s just not explained well enough for a non-expert in the topic. When you see that, you might not have the time or expertise to fully solve the problem. Adding a wikilink could be better than leaving it that way.

You can read more about good wikilink practice here in Wikipedia’s Manual of Style.

You can add a link to the first mention of a term on a Wikipedia page, or add a sentence that says something like “See [topic] for more information.” But don’t add links to headings or bold text. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1. Make sure you’re logged into your Wikipedia account.

Step 2. Click into editor mode for the page:

The detailed explanation for this is only in the first section above.

Step 3. Add the link:

Go to the term or phrase you want to link, and highlight it as you do with adding a hyperlink to a document or website. You now have two options to start, both of which lead you to the same steps. One is to click on the hyperlink icon (two chained links) in the toolbar across the top of the screen. The other is to use use keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+K on PC or ⌘ Command+K on a Mac.

A dialog box will appear giving two options: The first is adding a link to Wikipedia, and the second is for external linking. The link to Wikipedia section searches for pages that match what you highlighted. If the first option is the one you want, click on the blue “Done” sign, and the link is added. Or you can click on any of the options, and that page will be added as a link.

As soon as you’ve added a link, a dialog box of options will be displayed, but you don’t have to do anything more. You can dismiss the dialog box if it’s in your way, by clicking somewhere else on the page. In the dialog box, there are three options for further actions:

1. The red strike-through hyperlink icon undoes the link you just added.
2. The “Edit” button takes you back to the options if you want to link to a different page than the one you selected.
3. “Change text” lets you change the word or phrase in the original text that you’re linking from – for example, if the page uses different wording than the page you are linking to, and you want them to be identical.

If you don’t know the page it shows you and you’re not sure it’s exactly what you mean, open another browser window and go to that page to check.

What about when there is no Wikipedia page at all about a key concept? You may have noticed that Wikipedia pages sometimes have red links. That’s a sign to Wikipedians that a page is needed. If you’re very sure that the page you’re looking for doesn’t exist under an alternative form of wording, you can add a red link. The dialog box should show a question mark, with the words you want to link showing in red, saying the page doesn’t exist: Choose that option. (Adding a red link for a person’s name is more complicated: See here.)

Step 4. Check and publish your edit:

This is the same process as step 5 in the first section above. For the description, I write, “Added wikilink.”

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Adding a journal or book citation

I’ve been specific about this type of citation, because as long as these are independent publications, it’s pretty safe to assume these will be reliable sources according to Wikipedia’s criteria. It’s not that simple when it comes to other sources, like websites and news outlets. There’s a good introduction on reliable sources in Molly White’s this 30-minute video, and Wikipedia’s guidelines are here.

These are some of the cases where all I do to a page is add a citation:

• When I come across one of those [citation needed] tags that are so common on Wikipedia.
• To include a key reference I’ve read that hasn’t already been included in the Wikipedia page. Even if I don’t have time to mine all the relevant information in the source, at least it’s a breadcrumb now for the next person who spends time editing that page or its counterpart in a different language Wikipedia. If I read a good obituary or article about someone, for example, and the person isn’t extremely famous, I check if they have a Wikipedia page, and if the source I’ve seen is on it.
• When I read a sentence or claim that is not directly sourced, and I think it should be: I would rather take a few more minutes and add a citation, than add a [citation needed] tag.

That last category has sent me down some rabbit holes that have taught me a lot. Sometimes, it turns out the claim was wrong. This happened recently for me on a Palestinian scientist’s page: It said he came from Egypt. When I stuck the Arabic version of his page into Google translate, though, I saw he was born in the Rafah refugee camp. (Because I don’t speak Arabic and the translation wasn’t good enough, I googled his name and Rafah, and found a reliable English-language source for his place of birth.) And it was how I came to dig so much into Edna Paisano’s life, working on her Wikipedia page and writing this post.

Wikipedia has a particularly excellent system for adding a citation – and it’s particularly easy if the citation has a specific formal identifier.

Step 1 for citing a new source. Copy the formal identifier or grab the URL:

A formal identifier will save you time, and increase the accuracy of the citation, because there are several types that can add a fully-formatted citation automatically:

• DOI: Digital objective identifiers are used by journals and some other kinds of publications. The full identifier will be a string of numbers and perhaps some letters, that starts with a prefix like this: 10.1234/
• PubMed ID: Here’s an article record in PubMed. The ID is listed below the title and authors, after “PMID:” – and you can see the DOI right after that. You only want to copy the numbers of the PMID – those numbers are also included in the URL.
• ISBN: The International Standard Book Number is an ID for an edition of a book. It has 13 numbers.

Step 2. Make sure you’re logged into your Wikipedia account.

Step 3. Click into editor mode for the page:

The detailed explanation for this is only in the first section above.

Step 4. Insert the citation:

If you are dealing with a [citation needed] tag, click on the tag to trigger the citation dialog box.

Otherwise, put your cursor in the exact spot you want the citation to appear. Then click on “Cite” in the toolbar across the top of the screen – it has a quotation mark icon along with the word “Cite.”

The citation dialog box has three options: Automatic, Manual, Re-use.

It’s important not to confuse readers by creating a new citation every time a source is used. So unless you are sure yours hasn’t already been used, go to “Re-use” first and search the existing references. If the citation is already there, click on it and it will automatically be inserted into the spot you have indicated. (You can ignore the pop-up that appears after that, unless you need to correct an error in the citation or complete extra fields.)

If the citation is not already there, go to “Automatic.” Enter the formal identifier or URL, and click on “Create.” When the citation is generated, it will have a blue “Insert” sign: Click on “Insert.”

If your source doesn’t have an identifier or a URL, you will need to go to the “Manual” option, and fill in enough individual fields to create a reference. (There’s more information on how to cite sources on Wikipedia here.)

Step 5. Check and publish your edit:

This is the same process as step 5 in the first section above. For the description, I write, “Added source.” (If you are dealing with a [citation needed] tag as above, your citation will simply replace the tag.)

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Keeping track: Some Wikipedia analytics

If you find data motivating, useful, or just plain interesting, Wikipedia has you covered! I’ll touch on three things that might interest you: Your own editing history, pageview data, and the Wikidata project.

Your editing data: When you’re logged into your account and you’re on a Wikipedia page, there’s a little person icon at the top right, with a drop down menu for your account. One of the options is “Contributions.” This is a chronological string of all your edits. You can see mine here, as an example.

To see analytics of your contributions, you need to go through a step or two. Wikimedia has a service called XTools, with the tagline “Feeding your data hunger.” The first option there is “Edit counter.” You can enter your Wikipedia user name there, and it will generate the available data for your account. (You can do it for any user.)

Another option for seeing this data is if you set up a User Page for yourself. If a Wikipedian has a User Page, every time their user name shows, it will be a blue link leading to that User Page. When it’s red, it means the person has no User Page. A User Page displays links for Contributions and Edit counts for that Wikipedian. Here’s my User page: I set it up when I started because I worked at the US NIH, and I wanted to make my potential conflicts of interest very clear.

A User Page is not a blog or personal Wikipedia page, though you can include a bit of information about yourself that you think is relevant. If you want to set one up for yourself, click the red link on your name and get started. (More about User Pages here.)

Pageview data: When you’re on a Wikipedia page, there’s a link “View history” on the toolbar across the top of the page – just to the right of “Edit.” When you click on it, you get to another toolbar, which includes “Pageviews.” This brings you into another Wikimedia analytics service, Pageviews Analysis, which shows you visitor data for that specific page – you can clear it and add another page (or up to 10 pages to get combined visitor data).

You can go directly to Pageviews Analysis by clicking here. If you want to generate data for more than 10 pages, dig into Massviews (on the toolbar). An important note: You can choose which language version of Wikipedia you want data for via the drop down menu in the top right corner.

There are several options to explore in Pageviews Analysis. For example, Userviews generates pageview data on the pages a user has created (that is, started from scratch). To see what that looks like, here’s the permalink to pageviews for “all time” of the pages I’ve created on English Wikipedia.

Wikidata: I’m ending this post with a data rabbit hole to dive into – a subject that goes far beyond micro-editing, and beyond Wikipedia! Wikidata is another Wikimedia project. It’s a machine-readable sister project* to Wikipedia etc that we can all edit. I wrote a post about Wikidata here in 2023, and the tiny contributions I make there.

* To see a list of all Wikipedia sister projects, scroll down the main page of Wikipedia. To see the main page in any other language version, click Wikipedia.org: If the language you want isn’t one of the big ones displayed around the Wikipedia logo, there’s a drop down menu for all Wikipedias under “Read Wikipedia in your language.”

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Thank you to everybody who has contributed to Wikipedia 💐

Absolutely Maybe posts tagged Wikipedia are here.

You can keep up with my work at my newsletter, Living With Evidence. I’m active on Mastodon, @hildabast@mastodon.online, and on Bluesky. My Wikipedia username is also hildabast.

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The image at the head of this post is by Tom Morris, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain). It’s an adaptation of the classic Rosie the Riveter poster used by the War Production Co-ordinating Committee. The original “We can do it!” poster was created by J. Howard Miller, who was employed by Westinghouse.