Feral Parrots and Other Birds

So I did my wikipedia edits this morning. I think finding an article that I had the skills (and inclination) to edit actually took more time than the edits themselves. What saved me was this page, which is a (somewhat outdated) list of some of the worst articles on the website. Some were so far gone that I didn't even know how to begin to help them.

Eventually I settled on this article, which is about the novella "The Birds". A lot of the formatting was messed up, some sources were not cited, and the synopsis was almost unreadable. I fixed the formatting (easier than it looks!), cited at least one of the sources already referenced (I felt so smart when I figured out how to cite, too), and completely rewrote the synopsis (which took almost two hours). At the end, I felt like I'd really accomplished something, even though the article is still far from perfect.

I took a break from all that thinking, then returned and edited this article, Feral Parrots. "Feral whats?" you ask. Don't laugh at me. Most of the problems with this article were also related to formatting, as well as tone. The entire article was very opinionated and informal. I tried to fix as much as I could, but without cited sources, I couldn't completely fix the work of the original writer. The most I could do was add {{citation needed}} all over the place.

I came back tonight to see if anyone had reacted to my changes. They didn't. Heck, I'm willing to bet money that nobody even looked at the articles at in the last nine hours. I don't know how I feel. Relieved that no one has freaked out and flamed me, but also a little let down that no one has acknowledged that I spent hours revising articles about a bunch of stupid birds. I'll keep looking, though, and update if anything changes. I doubt it will. It's not like I edited articles anyone cares about, like Oprah or John McCain or Sailor Moon.

I would never be a Wikipedia editor. I already have enough essays to write for class.

Trackback