Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/Contributing by reading and leaving feedback

Let's zoom in a bit to Wikipedia: I mentioned that today we're not talking about writing articles on Wikipedia, and we're not. But I want to convince you that even *on Wikipedia*, there are other ways to contribute besides writing articles. And that's what we'll cover in the remaining minutes.

Wikipedia itself, not just all of Wikimedia, but Wikipedia, the encyclopedia, is also full of little microclimates and niches and task forces that you can get involved with if you find that you don't want to create full articles or that's just not your idea of a fun afternoon. So what can you do, beside writing articles?

First, you can *read* Wikipedia! You can read an article on Wikipedia and *give feedback*. That is actually extremely useful for the people who *do* write articles or improve articles. So if there's a topic you're interested in or knowledgeable in, you can find an article that you haven't read, read it, and then think if there's any way to improve it: if there's something that is missing or, conversely, is too detailed and you get lost in too much detail; maybe it's unclear; maybe it needs an illustration or a diagram; maybe it's too abstract; maybe it's out of date, right? Maybe you're reading it and everything it says is correct, but it hasn't been updated since, say, 2015, and this person or this topic has changed since 2015. And someone needs to add or update the text, right? Even if you're not the person who can fix it, even if you're not the person who wants to edit the article and add the data, you can still help by providing the feedback that this change is necessary.

Your having put in the attention of reading the article and coming to the conclusion that some improvement is needed is itself useful because the people who have edited this article before probably have it on their watchlist, which is a way of monitoring activity on the wiki, for those who may not know. And then they will notice that someone left a comment on the talk page of this article and they will go and read the comment.

And if your comment says "hey, it's an interesting article, but the third paragraph is really confusing.", they would be able to rewrite the third paragraph. Or if your comment says "I like the article, but it's a little abstract and actually a diagram would really help understand... whatever this is... this physical process or this geological phenomenon... and maybe they can create that diagram. And by the way, if they can't create the diagram, they can go to the Graphic Lab, remember, and ask someone else: "hey, I need a diagram for this article", and get help there.

So literally *telling* people how a certain article could be improved, as a reader, is excellent. And by the way, don't think that you can't leave feedback unless you are an academic expert about the subject. In fact, Wikipedia is supposed to be written to a high school level of education, meaning the reader is supposed to be able to understand any article on Wikipedia with more or less a high school education, whatever that means in different countries. So it's not supposed to be written at the level of an academic professor. So if an article on some topic isn't clear to you, that's valuable to know, and someone might do something about it.

Okay, so that's one way that you can help within Wikipedia, literally by clicking the talk page. For those of you who have never seen what I mean, we can go to English Wikipedia, click some particular article. I don't know this lady, for example, and every article on Wikipedia, on any Wikipedia, has a talk page right here, right under the title. If you've never noticed it, that says Talk. If you click on Talk, you get to another wiki page, that isn't the article, where people discuss the contents of this article.

In this case, there's not a lot of discussion here, but I could just add a new paragraph here and say something like, say, "the second paragraph is unclear." Let's say I was reading this and found the second paragraph contradictory, or confusing, or whatever it is. Obviously this is just an example, so I'm not going to click Add here, but it's as simple as that, right? Literally just going to the talk page, writing freely. Just express yourself. Whatever you you have in mind. "This needs an illustration.", "This is full of spelling mistakes.", "This is not up to date." And just leave that feedback. By the way, it may not be *immediately* acted on. Remember, we're all volunteers. It depends on people noticing and having the time and the inclination. But you have *increased the chances* that this will be corrected sooner rather than later.