As with most things, it's fun to have fun but you have to know how. With Wikipedia one way of making it entertaining is by using the 'Random Article' link on the Main Menu bar located to the left of the page. The link selects an article at random from Wikipedia's 7,539,822 pages, as of the 8th of February if you are on the English site, and offers it up.
For general reading selecting random articles is not very useful. Probably because 50% of Wikipedia articles are stubs (very short articles with only a few hundred words or less) and further 30% are rated as start class (slightly longer). But it's quite a nice way to select an article for editing.
Unsurprisingly most, or almost all, of the pages that are returned will be on a subject that you have no deep knowledge of or, in some cases, that you weren't even faintly aware existed. But that is part of the appeal of this strategy. Generally, then, this limits you to copy-editing for grammar/layout/etc., wikilinking and referencing as activities.
Copy-editing is often the least required of the three as Wikipedia editors generally have above average levels of English and there are many bots that run over Wikipedia correcting simple grammar and spelling mistakes. Often when I change a sentence to make it more readable it could quite easily argued that, to another editors view, it was more readable before I made the edit. But that is Wikipedia.
Adding wikilinks is a more frequent task. As the editors who have written the article are well versed in the subject matter of the article, what they see as simple and obvious terms that do not require a link may, in fact, to your untutored eye (ie that of the general reader) actually benefit from one. One fact to bear in mind is that the English Wikipedia is read by a large number of people from different countries and backgrounds so the cultural commonality between readers is not as high as you might imagine. Also the main content of the page may have been written some time ago and pages to which links were not available then may now be present on Wikipedia.
Most time is spent on references, which is not a bad thing given the premium that Wikipedia is placing on having referenced statements. There are quite a few different tasks to be accomplished; checking that the references given are "live"; that they support the text that they refer to; adding missing references or a note that one is needed; and editing references by expanding the information present, often as suggested by the template. (A template is a short piece of code that acts like a form, fill in the blank spaces and it will output a piece of text for Wikipedia - example later.) It is this last task that is often the bulk of the work that a page requires.
Taken overall this is a job for a wikignome.
But, as experience is the best teacher, let's work an example.
Today the page presented by the Random Article link is "Enoch Arden" a poem by Tennyson. Quite a long way off my beat.
My usual initial actions are to read though the article then check the talk page, to see if there are any outstanding issues noted with the article and to avoid stepping into the middle of any ongoing edit wars, and finally view the page edit history, just to get an overview of how actively it is edited and who the dramatis personae are. In this case there is nothing on the Talk Page and the Edit History shows the article was started in 2005 and has had infrequent major edits since then, with the last on the day I looked at it.
Starting with the opening paragraph, grammar first,
Enoch Arden is a narrative poem published in 1864 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, during his tenure as England's poet laureate. The story on which it was based was provided to Tennyson by Thomas Woolner. The poem lent its name to a principle in law that after being missing a certain number of years (typically seven), a person could be declared dead for the purposes of remarriage and inheritance.[1]
Well, this is more than is usually required. Briefly, it is a bit odd that the date of publication is given a more prominent position than the fact that Tennyson wrote it; there is an odd tense shift between 'is a narrative poem' and 'The poem lent its name' surely both should be present tense, especially if Enoch Arden laws are still in force; not sure why the comma is used in the middle of the last sentence; may is more accurate than could here, I think; for clarification added that remarriage and inheritance not for the person being declared dead but for their relatives.
Enoch Arden is a narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1864 during his tenure as England's poet laureate. The story on which it was based was provided to Tennyson by Thomas Woolner. The poem lends its name to a principle in law that after being missing for a certain number of years (typically seven) a person may be declared dead for purposes of remarriage and inheritance of their survivors.[1]
Generally the number of grammar edits I make to a page is zero, so this is a bit out of the ordinary.
Next are links and facts. 'England's poet laureate' seems a bit clunky, firstly the link is to poet laureate in general and secondly the poet laureate referred to is the Crowns' not England's so really it should be the 'United Kingdoms' poet laureate.' I think I will swap to British poet laureate and adjust the wikilink. The disambiguation page gives a link to an article on Enoch Arden law so that can be added.
Enoch Arden is a narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1864 during his tenure as British poet laureate. The story on which it was based was provided to Tennyson by Thomas Woolner. The poem lends its name to a principle in law that after being missing for a certain number of years (typically seven) a person may be declared dead for purposes of remarriage and inheritance of their survivors.[1]
Finally the referencing of the section, which is instructive for what is missing rather than for what is present. For some reason throughout the whole article there is no reference to the original publication of the poem, so this will need to be rooted out. Also there is no source provided for the statement that the story was provided by Thomas Woolner. Lastly the single reference uses a Cite web template that is mostly incomplete.
Starting with a reference for the first edition, a combination of searches using Google Books, WorldCat, The Open Library and The Internet Archive turned up a free to read copy of the first edition in about ten minutes. The next stage is to make a Cite book template that references to it. Nothing complicated here as all the required information is on the title page of the book.
Next is the missing reference for the source of the story. As locating this piece of information would take a degree of subject matter knowledge I'm not able to muster I can't provide this. But I can mark it as needing to be sourced and hope that someone else will do so. In this case a Citation needed template may be added. It looks untidy, but perhaps that is the point in that it is a prod to other editors. I should date it, but a bot will be along presently to add a date to it.
Finally the cite web reference is just a matter of fleshing out the citation terms, again all to be found front and present on the linked webpage. With the final text being,
Enoch Arden is a narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1864 during his tenure as British poet laureate.[1] The story on which it was based was provided to Tennyson by Thomas Woolner.[citation needed] The poem lends its name to a principle in law that after being missing for a certain number of years (typically seven) a person may be declared dead for purposes of remarriage and inheritance of their survivors.[2]
from this,
Enoch Arden is a narrative poem published in 1864 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, during his tenure as England's poet laureate. The story on which it was based was provided to Tennyson by Thomas Woolner. The poem lent its name to a principle in law that after being missing a certain number of years (typically seven), a person could be declared dead for the purposes of remarriage and inheritance.[1]
and the references going from,
to,
- Tennyson, Alfred (1864). Enoch Arden, etc. London: Edward Moxon & Co. pp. 1–51.
- "Enoch Arden doctrine". Legal Information Institute. Cornell Law School. October 2022. Retrieved 7 February 2023.
Obviously there is more content in the article, but for one session that is enough. Hopefully the article is in a slightly better state than before. The results are relatively minimal but if you want more out then you have to put more in.
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