Week 6: Contributing to Wikipedia
Finding pages on Wikipedia that needed change was trickier than I thought it would be. First of all, I didn’t want to just fix broken links - that feels boring and like busy work. However, changing the content of a page requires specific knowledge and more insight than the original writers. I reached 1950 rating USCF in chess, spent years playing classical/fingerstyle guitar, completed a dozen computer science projects, and yet, none of the articles related to these topics needed work. They were concise and well-written. Eventually, I landed on a calisthenics page. Calisthenics is just a fancy word for bodyweight training. The page I found listed common exercises, like squats, pushups, crunches, and pullups, but ignored many of the more advanced skills that people, including myself, train for. This includes front levers, back levers, iron crosses, planches, one-arm pullups, and handstand pushups. I felt that displaying only the most basic exercises mischaracterized the goals of the practice, so I added an advanced skills section and described the exercises. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to edit existing Wikipedia content.