The Goal
Edit one or more articles on Wikipedia.
Why?
I read a lot of Wikipedia articles, and feel like I should give back.
Sometimes I see small grammar issues or typos in an otherwise good article, and I itch to fix that sort of thing.
Completed
It turns out that editing Wikipedia is quite simple. Click the edit link or image on the page, make the change, add an (optional but recommended) short description of or reason for your edit, then save it.
Voila! You have edited Wikipedia!
There is a lot more nuance to it, and most of you know by now that I love complex layers of detail.
Wikipedia has an extensive area for editors, with style guides and other tips on editing, plus community aspects and lists of articles that have been flagged for different types of editing (expanding, referencing, copy editing, etc).
I joined the Guild of Copyeditors and unofficially participated in their recurring friendly competitions to copyedit the largest number of articles (based on word count of the article), starting with the articles that were tagged the longest time ago as needing a copy edit.
The competition gave a bit of focus to my efforts, though I usually focused on the smaller articles or articles with less copy editing required. Some of the members were doing thousands of words of copy editing each month, which was great to see.
It’s been months since all this happened, I’m only just now starting to catch up on the blog, but I still make small edits on my mobile phone sometimes. It feels good to contribute to something that benefits others.