Wiki Experiences

Scott Hardie | June 23, 2014
Have you ever contributed to Wikipedia or other online wikis, even in small ways? What was your experience like?

Samir Mehta | June 23, 2014
[hidden by request]

Erik Bates | June 23, 2014
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | June 30, 2014
My own experiences have been mildly frustrating. On the rare occasions when I have contributed to Wikipedia and to Wikia, my changes were very soon altered or removed by editors for not meeting some standard of relevance or noteworthiness that I could not find, even though what I wrote seemed well in line with similar edits. It sends mixed signals when you join a service like that and a bot posts on your profile that they're glad to have you and want your contributions, and then human editors delete your first contributions hours after you make them. Thanks for the warm welcome.

A Wikipedia editor just wrote at length about the problem of the editorial bureaucracy ossifying and becoming a threat to the future of the site.

Scott Hardie | June 14, 2015
Since writing this, I went through it again.

I posted a question that had really piqued my curiosity to one of the Stack Exchange sites. My question may have seemed off-topic at a glance, so I took care to explain my question carefully over several sentences, so that it would be clear why I was asking it in this relevant forum. It was my first time posting to Stack Exchange, a service that had given me so much help over the years while lurking, and I tried hard to get it right.

Within minutes of my question being posted, five editors gave it a cursory skim and flagged it as not relevant to the forum, putting it in an on-hold status that prevented anyone else from answering it. I asked what I'd done wrong, and none answered. One high-ranking commenter rose to my defense because he'd actually taken 30 seconds to read my entire question, but nobody answered him either. The question was automatically closed a day later. Now I see that it's been deleted completely from the site.

This is very frustrating. I feel like never posting to that site again. That's not the way to welcome newcomers. These websites who have volunteer gatekeeper-editors managing quality control for them really need to work harder at not scaring off newbies who don't understand arcane rules.