My 2024 Wikipedia editing
By Kunal MehtaI racked up 526 edits and created 8 new articles on the English Wikipedia over the past year. 2024 was a relatively quiet year for my editing (in 2023 I had 1,137 edits). I really tried to take the Marie Kondo aproach to it: I only edited if it sparked joy.
The eight article creations, plus one split, in chronological order:
- While watching Michigan win the 2023 National Championship, I saw Bill Hancock appear on TV, so I created his article. (Easy guideline: if someone appears on a nationally televised sports broadcast, they're probably notable.)
- I ressurrected the article on Project Maven, the Pentagon's project to use AI, etc. that multiple Google employees had walked out over back in 2018. I didn't write the text myself, I took it from the existing article on the Artificial intelligence arms race.
- Created Wedding of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant, because it was basically on par with British royal weddings. (And then successfully defended it from deletion.)
- Learned about Jeep ducking, which of course led to writing a Wikipedia article and obtaining an accompanying photo.
- We went to the Montauk Point Lighthouse, which has a nice museum about itself and found there was a whole room dedicated to Giorgina Reid and no article for her.
I submitted this article to be featured on the main page's "did you know" section, to which it received rave reviews from my fellow editors. - Unfortunately I learned about Jack Limpert when he died. He's credited with shaping the "city magazine" format (another missing article I researched but still haven't written yet), but really I was more impressed that he succesfully figured out Deep Throat's identity as Mark Felt back in 1974.
- There aren't very many dogs notable enough for articles, but Ben Herbstreit was one; I had known about him for a year now, but only realized he was notable after he died.
The tribute ESPN put together is one of the saddest videos you'll ever watch. - I saw a tweet claiming that China's 12345 hotline was a fantastic government service. I couldn't find any non-state media sources to back it up, but it was notable, similar to the US and Canada's 3-1-1.
- Tanking is easily one of the worst parts about professional sports, so I was pretty excited when the PWHL adopted the Gold Plan.
Article writing#
I try to write about subjects I don't already know a bunch about. Doing so helps less of my personal bias and opinions slip in and helps reinforce Wikipedia being an amateur project. I'm far more likely to do a better job at solely summarizing what sources say if that's literally all I know about a subject.
Once I've found a subject, itt usually takes me around two to three hours to write an article from scratch. Most of the time is spent searching for and reading sources and then ~30 minutes to write it all up.
This may seem counterintuitive, but I try to ensure that all the articles I create are incomplete. I don't add infoboxes, categories, WikiProject banners, etc. I'll often leave links to sources that are useful but that I didn't include on the talk page, with editorial suggestions.
I think it's important that there are always easy ways for people to get involved with editing, and leaving "basic" elements of an article out provides an easy pathway. Along the same vein, I'll proofread the article once before saving, but if I spot a minor error afterwards (like, a grammar or spelling error, not a factual mistake), I'll just leave it.
For every new article I created this year, I wrote a short Mastodon post with a link (example), which did a decent job at getting my followers to improve them :)
Administrative work#
I've primarily been helping out as an administrator at the Redirects for discussion process, which is perenially backlogged. I find it incredibly interesting because most of the subjects tend to be rather niche, with people trying to assess whether a redirect is useful for navigation or not, in addition to plenty of other factors.