Last summer I opened up a Wikipedia account and made my first Wiki edits, to the Pneumatic Tube Wikipedia page.
I am becoming more and more interested in how knowledge is generated in open formats, with increasing frustration of the limited nature of knowledge translation in much of academia. I was also thinking about who and what is written about on the Wikipedia pages, highlighted for example in the Women in Red Project, to write more female histories. And finally, with no travel destinations possible, I was itching to try something new, to learn how to do something I hadn't done before.
So I learned how to navigate the site and added what I found interesting and missing from it - movies, some details of where tubes are currently used, works of literature - and waited. Because that is the think about Wikipedia, it is moderated so closely that not much goes up without some consideration, either by a bot or an editor. I understood a bit about this from an article I wrote with Sally Wyatt and Susan Kelly on the Wikipedia page on schizophrenia, called "Controversy goes online: Schizophrenia genetics on Wikipedia" but it was the first time I was having a go as an editor.
It wasn't long before I saw in the Talk pages (that amazing tab behind any entry, that is definitely worth diving into!), that an editor had taken down most of my edits (redundancy, referring to previous discussions, and stating lack of citation/literature). I am so happy that some stayed however, and that there is some evidence of my contribution, to this collaborative project, on writing about this technology. So I am not deterred, now just need to come back with more references!
