Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Uh oh -- Wikipedia is full!


I guess that last article about the Fokker C.IV (a 1920s Dutch two-seat reconnaissance aircraft) was the last one.

Wikipedia is my newest hobby. I started out by just reverting obvious vandalism that I saw, and then moved on to copy-editing the articles about horses, as a way of learning about the subject of my project at work, the Daily Racing Form. Now I watch new edits scroll by using applications which highlight probable typos (like Febuary) and vandalism (like hi i'm editing wikipedia!!!!!).

It's really fun -- I love the variety of topics I see just by correcting the spelling on them. It reminds me of when I used to proofread ebooks for Project Gutenberg. I chose books more or less at random, so ended up working on things I would not typically read in general, including westerns, romance novels, and religious books. I similarly edit whatever articles come along. Many valid edits are reverted as vandalism because of typos, and I hope that I help them get judged based on the content they add to the article rather than how tidy they leave it.

Never mind that error -- it looks like the database is back! Now I can fix those typos on the article about Alan Spaulding, a fictional character from the CBS soap opera Guiding Light.

2 comments:

Crystal said...

Guiding Light Fan Kathryn?

Kathryn Lybarger said...

Not so much. I am a fan of the Wikipedia page in that they misspelled both née and niece, so I could correct it and raise my edit count!