Wikepedia

[Ajda Kljun]

Hello, SEELANGers!
First of all, I have to say that I'm quite nervous to write this reply. 
I've been a user of Wikipedia for several years and an administrator on 
my native Slovene Wikipedia, but my knowledge of English is not as good 
as I would like it to be (I'm forever blaming the school system :)). I 
hope I'll manage to get my point across anyway.
As a longtime Wikipedia user and editor, I feel the need to address a 
couple of your concerns about Wikipedia. Josh Wilson said '/...if you 
don't like Wikipedia, you may join Wikipedia and change it./' You don't 
need to sign up if you want to edit articles - in my opinion, this makes 
Wikipedia even more accessible to the less computer savvy. In other 
words, editing Wikipedia is really simple and does not take much time.
Then, Andrey Shcherbenok said '/As to the idea of changing something in 
Wikipedia myself, it is not at all that simple. I tried editing "Great 
Patriotic War" entry. My changes reflected on the screen on the day I 
made them; however, the next day the entry looked exactly as it did 
before I edited it. I do not know how it works -- whether there is some 
Big Brother secretly monitoring the site, or just an individual who 
likes the entry as it is and re-edits it every time someone makes 
changes.../' I've searched through the recent edits of the article and I 
found Andrey's edits. They were reverted by a user who has been banned 
from Wikipedia because of vandalism and has created a new account to 
continue editing Wikipedia. They have yet to close the case about this 
user, but I think that once they ban any such users, they go through all 
of their edits, so Andrey's changes would probably be restored quite 
soon. As soon as I finish writing this reply, I will return Andrey's 
changes by myself.
What can I say to defend Wikipedia in such cases? Reverting 'good' edits 
is a form of vandalism that is way more dangerous than writing 'Bush 
smells like poo' all over an article - simply because it is much more 
difficult to discover. What Andrey or any other user in this situation 
should have done is this: reply in the article's talk page where other 
users who edit this article will soon find out which of the editors was 
the vandal. When the problematic user commits vandalism again, the 
admins ban him from the site quite quickly. So there's definitely no Big 
Brother on Wikipedia, although there are some overprotective users. But 
as I said, most problems can be resolved just by discussing your 
concerns on the article's talk page. Also, referencing your statements 
is a big plus if you want to make a drastic change to an article.
I agree that there's a lot of undiscovered vandalism going on on 
Wikipedia, but you must understand that it's an enormously big website 
and that it's very hard to discover every single case of vandalism going 
on. That's why editors must protest if they feel that their edits were 
victims of vandalism. I also agree that Wikipedia's mechanism is very 
complex, and that new users can be quite confused about it.
So here is my proposal: if anyone of you encounters any problems on 
Wikipedia or just doesn't know where to start, don't hesitate to drop me 
a line! I'm quite an experienced user and I'll do everything to help you 
because Wikipedia desperately needs some expert editors. Write to me 
either at this address or on my user page on Wikipedia: User:Missmarple. 
Looking forward to many collaborations,

Ajda Kljun.

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