wikipedia editing was fun I kinda wanna keep doing it

I was skeptical coming into this class, but editing a Wikipedia article, even one as minor and niche as the one I chose to edit, was a rewarding experience. Who would've thought that contributing to knowledge- however small- makes a person feel good? The article that I decided to edit for our MA Programme's annual "edit-a-thon" was Weather by Jenny Offill. This novel was one of the standouts from our Postmodernism module and it was nice to engage with in some way, should I chose not to write my essay on it.

Weather is a novel of climate anxiety, written in an extremely fragmentary, funky and interesting kind of way. The style of the novel is by far the most interesting thing about it, and I was shocked to see that the Wikipedia article lacked any substantial information on this! Similarly, we discussed Offill's fascinating process of actually writing and constructing the novel. She printed out and cut up individual passages or fragments onto card stock and stuck it up in her hallway. Time then, she says. would do the bulk of the work and filter out any unnecessary passages (Sehgal). This unconventional writing process apparently did not warrant a mention in the original article. Adding in some commentary on both of these topics were my primary goals for the two hour session, but I started off a little strangely, not doing a single thing I prepped.

Here is what the top of the article looked like before I got my grubby hands on it:

Slight segue: I do think that 9am classes should be abolished. There is no need for them, and, especially as a postgrad student, I felt like I've done my time (I had one 9am class in all three years of my undergrad). I don't work well in the mornings, so while I waited for my overdose of caffeine to kick in, I decided the best use of my time would be to ease myself into the editing process. I had looked at the article the night prior and there was nothing that stood out to me as particularly egregious. Quite selfishly, the thing I always look out for in Wiki articles for fiction are character lists. In any piece of fiction, I tend to hyper-fixate on a single character for a while, really make them my personality for about a week, and character lists are a good anchor for me in that regard. I was debating adding this section in, honestly. This novel defies stereotypical characterisation, but I justified it by thinking: look, there's only a net positive to be had here and if things like this interest me then they're bound to interest other people. So, in our first writing sprint, I did just that. I added in a little character list at the tip tip top of the article and saved it as we paused for our break and mid-class discussion.

Here is what the article looked like at this point:

A fun game might be seeing if you can find all the typing errors, grammar mistakes, and unpolished phrasing. I don't do well with time constraints, especially when my eyes still have that gunk in the corner of them. I intended to come back afterwards and edit these mistakes myself- I thought this would be a safe bet given that the article had remained untouched since 2021. Yes, this is foreshadowing, but I think the actual result is a rendered slightly more interesting because of this. Onwards.

Okay, now that I was a little more awake, I intended to spend this next hour making some more of those aforementioned meaningful and interesting changes. And, that I did. Here is the before of the 'Composition and writing' section...

and here is the after of the newly titled section...

This was a nice new paragraph, I thought. Again, feel free to play a game of spot the errors, but that's symptomatic of me being tired and grouchy. And that is how the class ended. I was happy with my changes, but also very aware of the less-than-stellar use of words (you'd never believe I have a degree in English). At this point, I promptly left the class, enjoyed a nice coffee- yes, another one, don't judge- and then went home fully intending to spend a further few hours on honing the edits I'd made. But life had other plans, because apparently I was rather ill and slept for the better part of fourteen hours. Oops.

I finally got around to coming back to the article on Friday, the 9th Feb 2024, two days after the class ends. Life always has other plans, I suppose. But I was surprised to see that somebody had come along and edited some of my work before I had the chance to! Let's interrogate some of these changes. The first thing this Wikipedia-er changed was moving the character list down a section, so that now it was below the 'Composition, writing, and style' section. This person goes by 'MainlyTwelve' and decided to also cut the word 'list' from the title. I'm okay with these changes. I'm indifferent about cutting the word 'list' but I do think having the characters section at the beginning grounds the reader a little better than going straight into semi-complex stuff about the structure and form of the novel. I may go back and put it back to the beginning, but in all honestly, I don't feel too strongly either way.

I am grateful, however, that MainlyTwelve fixed some of my grammatical and syntax errors. It was nice to see a glimpse of that collaborative scholarship in action, however. One example of that is they changed 'Minecraft obsessed' to 'Minecraft-obsessed' a small, technical one I had no hope of noticing at- and I cannot stress my annoyance at this enough- 9AM. Ew.

There are some other superfluous changes that MainlyTwelve made. He changed everything I had written from present tense into past tense, even if it made no sense given the context of the sentence. I didn't change much on the Friday. I just tightened up some of the language and split the paragraph into two. I left some of the present tense in there, a little out of spite, but also just out of curiosity, to see if my co-editor will change it again.

Okay, that is all when it comes to the editing process. It was actually really enjoyable- which I wasn't expecting. It's nice having full choice with engaging with something in university. I may even change some more. Here is the link to the Wikipedia I edited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_(novel)

I'm done now, go away.

Works Cited

Sehgal, Parul. “How to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart.” New York Times, 5 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/magazine/jenny-offill-weather-book.html. Accessed 5 Feb. 2020.