Blog de Puree

In another effort to join the Internet fray and experience more of the crowd sourcing side of things, I’ve joined Wikipedia and started editing articles.

For anyone not familiar with the site, here’s a brief description from Wikipedia’s “About” page:

“Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. With rare exceptions, its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by clicking the edit this page link.”

I must to admit, there is a bit of a learning curve. The site has some particular nuances when it comes etiquette and editing requirements, and I’m fairly sure that I still don’t have it all down. But one has to start somewhere.

The first page I worked on was the page about the start-up Web site where I work, Helium. I’ve added some extra facts and details to the two sentences that already existed on the page to give the entire entry some notability to legitimize it and prevent the page from being deleted. I also tried to keep my addition purely objective and factual. Being an editor myself, I can’t stand when people send me press releases and extremely one-sided submissions hoping that will stand for a regular article.

The small irony here is that the Helium entry is—at the time of this post—slotted for deletion, despite the fact that it is a crowd sourcing site similar to Wikipedia. Both sites rely on input from the community at large. Each Wikipedia page is built from the input of possibly hundreds of individuals, whereas Helium users write whole articles and then rate other articles on the value and editorial quality.

It’s an interesting feeling knowing that I’ve added to a knowledge base that will be accessed by humans around the world. It’s empowering and humbling at the same time. Empowering because knowledge that I have will be shared globally, and humbling because anyone can come to the site and edit what I have shared.