[tokenadult]

Contributing to Wikipedia as a non-editor

Do you mean "contributing to Wikipedia as someone without a user account"? I just started doing Wikipedia edits, having first set up a Wikipedia account, when I declared a vacation from Facebook. I like to contribute good content to the Interwebs. On Facebook, I was mostly contributing links to articles about Facebook privacy issues. While I was taking a break from Facebook, another HN participant linked to a Wikipedia article in an HN thread, and I saw an edit I could do there that would change the close-enough-for-government work word into the exactly correct word. So I made the edit. Later I made a more substantive edit and added a recent reference to a more visited and more controversial article--on a subject much discussed here on HN. Over time, I will check how well my edits are accepted. Someday I'll try posting a whole new article, when I have a sense of what is missing and have reference materials at hand. I'll evaluate my experience by how other Wikipedians respond to my edits.

[elblanco]

No, with an account. I happen to know a bit about a few, completely unrelated areas (the area I live in, foods from a certain country, digital music composition, a couple martial arts, computer sciency stuff, etc.) that I wanted to make substantial contributions to fill those portions of wikipedia out. About 2 and a half years ago, I signed up and made an account and started dutifully filling out information, adding new articles, editing some old ones. Normal stuff.

I probably did a few hundred edits and contributed 30 or so new articles. As far as I know, not one of those things survived the first month.

I haven't even bothered after that experience. Citing the submission guidelines led to nothing.

The cabal of super-user types there that seem to want to fix wikipedia on the current status quo (unless they themselves edit something) made wikipedia at the time unbearable as a new contributer. It wasn't like there were even requests for changes or new edits (things that wouldn't have been a problem since I was new and learning the ropes) -- just deletions. Sometimes within minutes.

It wasn't even that somebody had come along and cleaned up my submissions, or provided some editing work, just....gone.

After that wonderful experience I decided to spend those few hundred hours someplace else.