Playing in The Sandbox

For this assignment i was asked choose from a list of articles flagged by Wikipedia as needing editing, and edit them. Sounds simple enough, until I actually got into the sandbox itself. I am not versed in the art of code writing. This was a challenge that I was not expecting, going in to the assignment. Luckily Wikipedia has a cheat sheet that gives you the codes needed to edit a Wikipedia article. I also discovered very quickly that to edit an article, it is probably wise to have a little bit of background knowledge on the subject matter. I chose the article I did for the simple reason of not really understanding the others presented before me.

I chose to edit the article titled History of Machine Translation. My edits were minor, as the article itself was well written. I simply went in looking for grammatical and spelling errors. I focused my attention on "The Early Years" section. There was plenty to edit in that section alone.

In Zittrain's essay "Lessons of Wikipedia" he discusses the pros and cons of having an editable database of knowledge. An editable encyclopedia, that anyone can choose to edit as they see fit. I can see the problem with taking on the responsibility of editing and fine tuning an article that, in theory, will be read by the world. The task looks and feels daunting. But once i jumped into the sandbox, head first, it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be.

Mind you, I was nervous about taking someone else's and work and changing it, for the better I hoped. My task was simple enough, until I got the editing page. I did not anticipate the use of code in the html editing page. I'm not sure if I understand how it works. So, instead of worrying about linking to other articles and citing work (which really was taken care of by the previous author), I decided the most important thing the article needed with proofreading.

I find it much easier to proofread and correct others peoples work than my own. It always helps to have a second pair of eyes on any type of written work. So that's what I did. I was the next set of eyes, looking for simple mistakes that get overlooked by the one writing the original article.

In not time, I was editing and correcting grammar and sentence structure. I simply gave the article a fresh lift that made it easier to read and understand. The article was well written and from what I could see, well cited. It just needed a second pair of eyes.