What we’re about
If you are in Manchester, or can visit, come and learn about wikipedia, how it might useful to your, and how and why to edit it. The meetup is just starting out, but there will be at least one editor with three years of interest and experience!
Wikipedia is often sold in terms of providing access to knowledge and it certainly does that, but this motivation is perhaps too general for most people, so let me list a few.
- Concerned that the information on the wikipedia is wrong? Learn to improve it by updating information with the best source, so that it is as correct as a good literature review can make it.
- Have a particular issue that is important to you? Create articles and add material about it so that it is as easy as possible for people to find out about it.
- Trying to advocate things but people aren't interested. In exchange for collaboratively creating an article with anyone interested, sticking to sources, and ensuring your article is balanced you can get massive reach and have people trust your work.
- Interested in learning about something, adding information to wikipedia can be a great way to motivate yourself, produce something useful with your learning, and drive yourself to form an understanding of the literature.
- Thinking of writing something in the future? Wikipedia is good practice for scholarly writing because you end up interacting with a lot of scholarly literature and sourcing and citation practices, and can see how interesting people do similar work. Wikipedia is filled with people who are motivated (if busy people) including scientists, medical doctors, lawyers and academics.
