As you’ve been learning, Wikipedia is a volunteer community with no central structure. Articles with a high number of skilled volunteer editors will tend to be stronger than articles with fewer and/or less-skilled volunteer editors. Talk pages provide excellent insight into the way Wikipedians work together (or at cross purposes) on an article. The Wiki Education training, “Sandboxes, talk pages, and watchlists,” offers an excellent overview of the way talk pages operate.
Who Contributes to Talk Pages?
Pick an article about something that interests you and look at the talk page. You might find it useful to read through several different articles and talk pages to find one that has an active and interesting talk page. Once you’ve settled on the best article, select three editors who have participated in the talk page and add links to their userpages to your doc. Once you’ve found three, read through their contributions to the talk page, peruse their user pages, and, in your doc, do your best to describe what motivates their involvement in improving the article. Once you’ve done this in your doc, please share whatever you’re comfortable sharing beneath your name in our doc.
What is Typically Discussed on Talk Pages?
Talk pages work best when editors work from a shared understanding of Wikipedia’s policies to make improvements. This occasionally means they alert or remind each other of policies (with varying degrees of politeness!). The Wiki Education training, “Evaluating articles and sources,” is an excellent resource as you become familiar with the typical elements that need improvement.
How Do You Fit In?
If you decide that you’d like to make suggestions on the talk page for the article you reviewed, I encourage you to do it! The Wiki Education training, “How to Edit: Wikicode vs Visual Editor,” will be extremely helpful as you make your first edits to a talk page. Note that everything on Wikipedia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This means that publishing anything on Wikipedia (even on a talk page or in a sandbox) automatically makes your work 1) public and 2) openly licensed. This means that anyone can see your work and anyone can reproduce it (even profit from it!) as long as they explain that it came from Wikipedia.
How Do You Fit In on Other Platforms?
As you are surely well aware, many platforms make it possible for users to comment on what others have published. Wikipedia confines this back and forth to the talk page, but social media sites make comment areas very prominent. If you choose to create a blog post for our course website on OpenLab, you will have the option to allow comments or to turn them off. If you decide to use the public version of Hypothesis, you will be in a position to comment on sites that don’t even have a designated comment area (your public comments will only be seen by other Hypothesis users and will be visible in the public stream). Even when using a pseudonym, a user’s comments are linked to other comments that user has made and can offer insight into what is motivating their commentary. When you’re ready, I encourage you to join the conversation! And to take care in conveying respect with your contributions.
