As I was working on my last blog post, I had pulled up the Wikipedia page for Mark Lee. I used it to double check a few things while editing the ChatGPT output for accuracy. While I was there, I noticed that the section talking about his song “Golden Hour” both implied that the entire song was about a bad review from chef Gordon Ramsay and didn’t actually include the actual criticism in full context.
I remember when the actual tweet happened, so unless Chef Ramsay deleted it or his account (which many people are doing currently, so it was a real fear) I figured it should still be there. Luckily, I was able to find it with a quick search on Google so I now have my reference material.
Next, I had to think of how I was going to word the edit. The original text made it seem like this tweet was what the whole song was about and that’s not true. Adding the word “partially” seemed appropriate. I then changed the words “bad review” to “criticism” since Ramsay never actually ate the eggs and only made a tongue-in-cheek reply to a photo of them. I also chose to link his Wikipedia page because he has one. Finally, I had to consider how to word what it was said in. Back when it was posted in 2018, it was called a tweet. Since Elon Musk removed all references to the previous branding and I’ve barely been on the site in the past year or so, I didn’t know if new wording was created. I ultimately decided to use “social media post” in order to avoid branding that could change at a later time.
I posted my final wording to the Talk page formatted with the new reference links. I wasn’t expecting any sort of interaction since mine was the first post there, but that doesn’t mean posting there wasn’t useful. This is where I noticed I had problems with the citation format. It had asked for the title of the webpage in the citation form, but the title includes a URL in it and this caused an error. I made the decision to remove it since it was just formatting for the tweet he quoted.
Once the edit I was making was to my liking, I published it. There were multiple confirmation screens showing how it would look and comparing the previous version to my edit. This gave ample opportunity to make any last minute changes or fix something that previously went unnoticed. I was so nervous during that process that I forgot to take screenshots. The “View history” section does let you see what all was updated each time, so I was able to see exactly how my published edit affected the article.
I don’t know if I would say that this process changed my view of Wikipedia or how it works at all. I was already aware that Wikipedia is user edited. I did like that it had those checks at the end of the process. There were also a lot of help links for nearly everything you would need to make editing easy for people who don’t know much about formatting webpages but want to contribute their knowledge. In the end, I feel kind of happy I was able to contribute to the Wikipedia page of someone I admire.